in tones: organ/cassette/synthesizer (2009)

in tones: organ/cassette/synthesizer image

in tones: organ/cassette/synthesizer marked the first such event organised by Richard Glover and Adam Jansch, intended as a platform to present sonic works whose presentations straddled the domain of concert piece and sound installation.

The event was held in the University of Huddersfield’s Phipps Hall, a flexible space featuring non-parallel wall alignment and a two manual organ donated to the department by Michael Phipps. The layout chosen relied on a minimum of seating, much of it being supplanted by individual foam mats laid on the floor, encouraging the audience to lie down and relax. The delineation between the audience and performance spaces was left ambiguous, as was the format of the works presented.

in tones

Written by Richard Glover and Adam Jansch

The sonic material for in tones was provided by Phipps Hall's organ, where its output was mixed with delay-time modulated versions of itself projected from speakers on the opposite side of the hall, thereby setting up a sonic space of source and almost-source. The organ part was performed by Elizabeth Hayward.

16 photographs

Conceived by Adam Jansch

Originally conceived with the venerable compact cassette format in mind 16 photographs uses the inherent characteristics of two-sided tape media to produce an open work with a severely restricted field of possibilities in any given configuration. The only rules are that playback must be from the originally recorded media, and those must be synchronised together from their beginnings.

This presentation of 16 photographs was played over four Bose L1 model-II speakers, and the four tapes were recorded by Adam Jansch, Claire M Singer, John Lely and Tom Mudd.

Afterimage

Written by Richard Glover

Afterimage stems from two points: Edmund Husserl's notion of Abschattungen (shadings) through which all physical objects are presented to us from our memory, and musicologist Lisa Colton's discovery of a seventeenth century English keyboard tablature employing dots and dashes to signify note duration.

In Afterimage, players are required to create their own scores using a limited number of pitches and two choices of duration: short and long. For in tones: organ/cassette/synthesizer it was performed on a Roland System 100M modular synthesizer, played by Jack Coleman, Ben Isaacs, Scott McLaughlin and Nick Williams, with Joseph Kurdirka also present on his Technosaurus Microcon II synthesizer.