‘Barcodes’

2017

Conducted by Ryan Bancfroft

Performed by Nieuw Ensemble

Animation by Laura Spark

Partly in response to the brief of the original call ('finding ways to connect with an audience and searching for new ways to package ideas and deliver them'), I developed a piece of music designed to be played with an animated graphic score (to be projected behind the ensemble during the performance). The purpose of this score is to heighten the experience for the audience rather than be something that the musicians could play from. I believe that reading a score whilst listening to a piece can greatly improve the enjoyability and comprehension of the music, which leads me to think that people who can't read notation are at somewhat of a disadvantage when listening to some classical and contemporary music. Addressing this I looked for a way to incorporate the graphic score idea into the concept of the piece itself, to give the piece a strong visual element that hopefully heightens certain musical features subconsciously whilst lending something to the meaning of the piece as well.

Through the collaboration process, Laura and I came up with an idea for the animated segments: a person who, over the course of the composition, turns into a 'code' and then back into a person. This is an abstract reference to modern forms of communication: how people's thoughts and ideas are fed into machines which are then regurgitated into various digital forms; the resulting output invariably changed, simplified or distorted in the process. The piece begins with a simple melody which is broken down through more traditional composition techniques before being rebuilt again through electronic production techniques in the third act. The style of the music was influenced, in part, by old film music, electronic dance music and pianola music.