Close to the Edge Conference

Faculty of Arts and Media and Head of Performing Arts

Friday 14th of May 2010

9.00 am-5pm, Kingsway Buildings

Close to the Edge Conference
Bridges between contemporary music and popular music

Since the second half of the 20th century, there has been an increasing chasm between “Art Music” and “Popular Music”. The conference will seek to explore and establish bridges of comparison between contemporary musics.

The composer Professor Leigh Landy, Director of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University, will open the event with a Keynote speech: “The distance between contemporary music and pop music might be less than you think when it comes to organising sounds”.Then the composers Dr Dale Perkins (Leeds College of Music) will analyze different compositional techniques and Dr Robert Wilsmore (York St John University) will present “The Ancient Art of Remixing: Intertextuality and the use of existing music in new work from 12th Century Organum to Modern Pop”. Professor David Pattie (University of Chester) will explore the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds establishing a connection between the concepts of melody and noise in popular music.

The conference will finish with a concert including pieces composed by Professor Leigh Landy, Dr Dale Perkins, Dr Robert Wilsmore and Professor Darren Sproston (University of Chester).

Tickets: £20 (£10 concessions, refreshments included)

For inscriptions and accommodation contact:

Luz Torres 0816010@chester.ac.uk

0044(0)7772944492.University of Chester, Kingsway Buildings, Newton, Chester CH2 2LB

Leigh Landy

The distance between contemporary music and pop music might be less than you think when it comes to organising sounds

In the latter half of the 20th century with few exceptions a substantial gap existed between innovative forms of contemporary art music and mainstream popular music both in terms of content and popularity. Naturally there were cases in which elements were fused such as in the music of Michael Nyman and Philip Glass, but, as said, that was exception, not the rule. Much contemporary music was fairly marginal in terms of interest (and still is); only the most experimental forms of popular music suffered the same fate. Parallel to these developments new forms of music making evolved focusing on the sound, not the note. This keynote paper will attempt to demonstrate that such forms of music exist in their own ‘space’, one that is open to people with backgrounds in both popular as well as art music. Sound examples will be presented to illustrate how sound-based music is not only contemporary and innovative but much of it is also open to all and bridges the gap between the two formerly separate worlds.

Dale Perkins

What are likely to be perceived as popular music techniques and processes I openly embrace within my project Voice Without Words and my composition Axe (the first work of a new project with the Umbrella title Taking Down Trees). I do not believe there is a separation between art-based music and popular music in my own practice. However, many forms of popular music have clear spaces for consumption (night club; ipod; MTV etc.) that are different from the traditional concert and recital spaces generally associated with acousmatic music and its diffusion. A question I wish to address is: how should the composer explore more formal communal spaces where music can be diffused and spatialised according to speaker placement and acoustics, in addition to domestic playback systems?

My paper will therefore examine a personal compositional aesthetic which is used to create sound-based music that includes ‘grooves’ and ‘hook lines’ along with spatialisation techniques that arguably make ‘art-based music’ more accessible.

David Pattie

‘A Beautiful, Evil Thing: The Music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’

In a 2003 obituary for Johnny Cash, Nick Cave credited the singer with giving him the idea that music could be a ‘beautiful, evil thing. (Guardian, Sept 13th 2003)’. It seems logical to suggest that this description has been chosen because it fits the Cave persona neatly: it is also, though, a very useful description of the dominant strands in Cave’s and the Bad Seeds’ musical development. Put simply, the musical forms employed by Cave and his band alternate between melody and noise, both across the span of Cave’s career (from the band’s first album, From Her to Eternity, through the archetypal songwriter’s confessional The Boatman’s Call to the R&B/rock of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!) and within individual albums and tracks. For example, ‘Far from Me’ on The Boatman’s Call juxtaposes its well-crafted melodic line against instrumentation that includes a harshly recorded violin, played by Warren Ellis: in the band’s output in the 80s and early 90s, Blixa Bargeld’s determinedly unconventional guitar playing runs against, and frequently undermines, the melodic framework of the rest of the music (a good example of this are the reconfigurings of classic tracks on Kicking Against the Pricks).

In this chapter I will argue that Cave’s and the Bad Seeds’ music displays a simultaneous investment in, and distance from, ‘classic songwriting’ (as Cave himself described it in a 1993 interview). In the typology established in Allan Moore’s ‘Authenticity as Authentication’ (Popular Music, Vol 21 no 2: 2002), I will argue that the dialectic that plays out between melody and noise within the music is itself part of a larger dialectic, between first-person authenticity (defined by Moore as the mark of an artist’s investment in the work) and third-person authenticity (defined by Moore as fidelity to previously existing musical forms and structures). Cave and his band, in other words, both espouse previously existing musical forms (blues, gospel, confessional songwriting) which are themselves usually regarded as bearers of authenticity, while at the same time employing musical (and lyrical) strategies which subvert those forms (thus converting these forms into exemplars of first-person authenticity, as defined above).