Symbioverse

Date: 16 July 2024
Time: 5pm
Obsidian Tags: #practicenote
Place: Grasmere, Lake District

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Audio: An original composition, “Was it for this?”, featuring piano, orchestra and synthesisers.

Studio Notes:

An ongoing studio practice block. Musical and visual experiments made in response to notes and observations from Grasmere stay in June and July 2024.

Today I sit again with Book 1 of the 1799 Prelude. It is an expansion of a text written by Wordsworth in 1798, originally composed in the bitter winter in Gothenburg, surrounded by cold, discomforts.

—Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov’d
To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flow’d along my dreams? For this, didst Thou,
O Derwent! travelling over the green Plains
Near my ‘sweet Birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous Stream
Make ceaseless music through the night and day
Which with its steady cadence, tempering
Our human waywardness, compos’d my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me,
Among the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.
When, having left his Mountains, to the Towers
Of Cockermouth that beauteous River came,
Behind my Father’s House he pass’d, close by,
Along the margin of our Terrace Walk.
He was a Playmate whom we dearly lov’d.
Oh! many a time have I, a five years’ Child,
A naked Boy, in one delightful Rill,
A little Mill-race sever’d from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day,
Bask’d in the sun, and plunged, and bask’d again
Alternate all a summer’s day, or cours’d
Over the sandy fields, leaping through groves
Of yellow grunsel, or when crag and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
Were bronz’d with a deep radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian Plains, and from my Mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked Savage, in the thunder shower.

I edit yesterday’s mix. And move on to the next. I also listen back, sharpen my ears.

I think today about time’s nature, materiality and shape…. and also, the perspectives which give us the illusion of choice, intervention, agency. Could earlier memories in Wordsworth’s life, look different (colour, shape, tone, speed)?

Things to play with:

• time signatures
• key

gestures, graphics, and use of space and sound.

RECAP:

Emerging Research Themes / Aims:

Offering a novel – potentially transmedial – experience of the ‘Spots of Time’ from the Prelude, through demonstrations of the materiality of Wordsworthian Time.
Revealing “new voicings” of the situated archive of the Wordsworth Trust.
Producing the project as as a case study of anarchiving in design, useful for digital humanists, archivists and practitioners

• event scores
• graphic scores
• performance & curation

Generating data through graphic notation.

Creating room for a transcontextual multivariate – a warm scoring system which integrates the following factors, as a way to demonstrate how…”Notations go beyond the visible to engage the invisible”. This includes:

The phenomenological effects of:
light, shadow, transparency, sound smell, heat / cold, program, event, social space, gesture

The unfolding of time:
interval, tempo, duration, acceleration, timbre

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Critical Reflections