Something to Hold on to 2

Just over thirty years ago, I gave a published talk ‘The Something to Hold on to Factor in Timbral Music’ (SHF, 1994) which has been evolving ever since. Given my focus as musicologist and as composer on making innovative music accessible to a broader public beyond specialists, SHF offers means to identify aspects of shared experience that can help new listeners navigate their way through electroacoustic works as well as access tools for composers. Given the combination of issues raised in the EMS25 call alongside the foci of my recent talks and composition series, it seems timely to create a sequel to this key text of mine in which the intention is to add various social and cultural aspects to the SHF that a) can make electroacoustic music accessible and, perhaps more poignantly, b) make this music more relevant in today’s world.

This assumes that electroacoustic music is communicable in a general sense. It also implies that a work can be about something, thus enabling an intention/reception loop as the basis of potential shared experience. 

The talk will return to the original SHF reintroducing it along with publications of others who further developed it. Following this, it investigates and illustrates areas including ecology, place and (inter)cultural material related to compositional approaches to discover how all of these can support both access and social relevance.

As someone interested in sample-based composition, I have experienced using musical samples that are (inter)culturally rooted or taken from our daily lives enabling the creation of works that are both aesthetic and socially engaging. This approach will illustrate the talk’s aim of optimising intention with reception as well as the accessibility of today’s and tomorrow’s electroacoustic works offering both specialists and nonspecialists with some more things to hold on to.