How does a creative project begin? What are the steps that will lead from an idea to its realisation? There are as many answers to this question as there are works of art, be they musical compositions, poems, staged productions, or digital media.
In the case of Augmented Vocality, our practice-based research methodology provides a framework for the creative process. However, at each stage, there are questions to which there are many possible answers. In a cross-disciplinary research project such as ours, the product of one phase becomes the starting point for the next; every decision contains the seeds of the project’s final outcomes. Each research question leads to choices that could direct our work along one of many possible paths, and no two paths lead to the same destination. Consequently, it is impossible to begin a research project such as Augmented Vocality without having a sense, however vague and unformed, of the quality and character of the ultimate end point – musical compositions for voices, ensemble, and live electronics.
In the face of numerous creative, technical, literary and linguistic decisions, it might have been tempting to explore many different possibilities without committing to any. Thankfully, our project plan prevented such a cycle of procrastinatory indecision. Initial choices were steered by the overarching aims of the project: to reengage with the orality of early medieval literature, culminating in the composition of contemporary musical works for singers, ensemble and live electronics. Since the project does not intend to recreate early medieval music in any way, questions of historical performance practice could be set aside. However, a question – perhaps the most important question of the entire project – still remained: how to choose the Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse texts that would form the basis of the project?
The idea of choosing a small selection of Early Irish and Old Norse texts raises yet more questions. In all languages, continual processes of change and development are reflected in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary; such changes also apply to the languages of Augmented Vocality. The Early Irish texts that we will be studying belong to Classical Old Irish (c.800–900) and Middle Irish (around 900–1200). The earliest old Norse texts are generally of a similar age to the Middle Irish material. Although most of the surviving literature was copied into manuscripts decades or even centuries after the texts were first written, linguistic and other types of analysis enables scholars to reach a broad consensus regarding the age of many texts. For anyone unfamiliar with the literature of these two languages, the antiquity of the texts might imply a fragmentary hotchpotch of prose and poetry, preserved in only a handful of crumbling manuscripts. In fact, both languages comprise a prodigious quantity of material, encompassing an encyclopaedic range of themes and styles. How could Augmented Vocality hope to capture even a snapshot of such vast bodies of literature?
During our preliminary discussions, the project’s two language and literature specialists, Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Brittany Schorn, from the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, drew attention to a number of possible literary themes and genres. We soon decided that we would concentrate on poetry rather than prose. For a composer, poetry’s distinctive sonic qualities are rich in musical possibilities. In a poem, we can hear patterns of rhyme, alliteration and stress regardless of whether we understand the meaning of words and phrases. The issue of sound points to one of Augmented Vocality’s fundamental research questions: how construe the orality often imagined by medieval literature ? It is easy to read Old Irish and Old Norse poems silently, either in translation or in their original languages. Such readings, while necessary in many contexts, do not provide any indication of the performative aspect of this material. In realising our project, the choice of texts would be crucial in determining every step of our research.
Choosing a selection of poems from such vast, stylistically varied bodies of literature raised yet more questions. There were simply too many different poetic metres, styles and themes to compile a fully representative collection of Old Irish and Old Norse poetry. During initial project meetings, a key question concerned the criteria that would be used to compile Augmented Vocality’s source texts. Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse literary traditions are not entirely contemporaneous with each other, and are centred on different geographical locations. One approach would have been to collate Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse texts that offer a window on to the way in which the two cultures viewed each other. Examples include Old Norse poems about battles in Ireland, and a short Old Irish stanza about a Viking raid. A different strategy would have been to focus on metre, highlighting the contrasting sonic patterns of rhyme, stress and alliteration that result from different poetic forms. Increasingly, our discussions coalesced around thematic connections. Examples included poetry about place, found in both the Irish tradition of dindshenchas (place-name narrative) and Old Norse skaldic poetry; dramatic verse; religious poems; poetry about the natural and supernatural worlds; poems about past events, whether historical or fantastical; panegyrics; elegies; love poems – to list but some of the many categories and subcategories found in Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse poetry. Yet again, the sheer quantity and variety of Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse poetry presented a conundrum: how to choose from so many fascinating, intriguing and inspiring poems?
When creating a shortlist of Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse poems for Augmented Vocality, I was simultaneously helped and hindered by my existing knowledge (from my undergraduate studies) of many of these texts. In order to make choices based on our research questions, it felt as though I needed to take a step back, to view the linguistic corpora more dispassionately. To this end, I was helped by returning to one of the project’s core research questions: is it possible to reclaim the aural nature of a medieval text in a contemporary music performance context, not by recreating an imagined idea of medieval performance, but by providing a new setting for Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse literary traditions to be heard? Rather than focusing on thematic or stylistic connections between the texts, what would happen if I were to begin by imagining the final compositions for voices, ensemble and live electronics? I was reminded of advice given by the composer Sally Beamish: ‘if you get stuck while writing a piece, write the programme note. And if you’re really stuck, write the review’.[1] For the artist – whatever their discipline – it is tempting to begin a creative project by focusing solely on the minutiae of small-scale decisions, thereby losing sight of the shape and form of the overall piece. Envisioning the end point, even when the intermediary steps have not yet been planned, can facilitate the creative decisions that must be made in order to realise the work. Needless to say, the choice of texts in Augmented Vocality is by no means a small-scale part of the project. Nonetheless, in practice-based research, having the confidence to relinquish predetermined criteria can often facilitate creative, unexpected connections, leading to new outcomes. The idea of allowing the relationship between creative practice and research to ‘play itself out unbeknownst to its practitioner’ was a liberating starting point.[2]
As soon as I allowed myself to imagine musical sounds, without reference to predetermined thematic or textual criteria, the choice of texts became much clearer. I was instinctively drawn to poems in which there was a clear, performative ‘voice’ – poems which, in various ways, opened a door to the speakers’ emotions, thoughts, feelings, or observations. In compiling a shortlist of poems, three main categories emerged: lament; poems about creativity or thought; and poems of prophecy or incitement. Of all of these categories, elegiac poems, invariably written in the first person, perhaps convey the strongest impression of the speaker’s thoughts and emotions. In contrast, the second category – poems about creativity or thought – provide a window on to the ways in which poets conceptualised creativity, suggesting striking parallels with the contemporary creative processes at play in Augmented Vocality. The final category – poems of prophecy or incitement – is perhaps the most implicitly performative of the three, since the poems are addressed to a specific person or group, often at a dramatic moment within a longer prose narrative.
In parallel to collating Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse poems, I broadened my investigations into the ways in which other composers have responded to ancient texts. Illuminating examples included François-Bernard Mâche’s approach to texts in Gaulish and Ancient Greek, and Stef Conner’s compositions based on Sumerian, Babylonian, and Old English poetry. Focusing on the possible sounds of Old and Middle Irish and Old Norse words and phonemes pointed to further audio analysis. By taking a minute fragment of sound and analysing its waveform, it’s possible to extract pitches and timbres which can be developed into much longer musical ideas. Such ideas are not particularly new; techniques like these formed the basis of the ‘spectral’ approach to composition, which was largely centred on Paris from the 1970s onwards. Nonetheless, all these ideas and approaches fed into the development of Augmented Vocality, suggesting new research pathways which have yet to be explored.
Having compiled a list of Old Irish and Old Norse texts, the path is clear for the next stage of Augmented Vocality: recording the texts with Irish and Icelandic actors. These recordings will provide the source material for all subsequent project activities, including the creation of databases of words and sounds, new live electronics development, and musical compositions. However, the interdisciplinary nature of the project means that the different phases are closely interconnected. Although the poems have been chosen, the activities of reading, analysing, hearing and interpreting them will continue, to a greater or lesser extent, through every subsequent stage of our work. Indeed, the interconnectedness of every phase is integral to the project’s practice-based methodology. The process of responding to a research question invariably leads to new questions in other areas of the project. This does not mean that practice-based outcomes (such as musical compositions) are an adjunct to more quantifiable processes (such as the development of new live electronics processing), but rather that the outcomes of practice-based research are necessarily emergent and open-ended. Inevitably, the project’s musical compositions will raise further research questions which are as yet unknown. However, we can be certain that whatever paths our future research might take, all routes ultimately stem from Augmented Vocality’s source texts.
[1] Andrew Palmer, Encounters with British Composers (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015), p.36.
[2] Anthony Gritten, ‘Determination and Negotiation in Artistic Practice as Research in Music’, in Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, ed. by Mine Doğantan-Dack (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 73–90 (p. 89).