Sara McGuinness (UWL) & Jimmy Martinez (Independent Musician)
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Composing Cuban Son With CEMIs
Cuban music is at the foundation of many great musical styles. In keeping with much of the world, Cuba had limited and late access to electronic instruments. This was exacerbated by the USA trade embargo, which continues to severely limit access to technology. As a result, Cuban musicians came late to the use of synthesizers and then access certainly did not include high-end equipment as featured in this collection. While contemporary Cuban genres including funk, rock, jazz fusion, songo, timba integrate use of synths, there is limited example of use of synthesizers in older Cuban styles.
Sara McGuinness and Jimmy Martinez are an established song writing team, in the field of Cuban music, principally son. The music we compose is written primarily for live performance with a Cuban band, comprising acoustic instruments including percussion, bass, piano, vocals and horns. Our compositional style starts from groove combined with a montuno – a short-repeated chord progression with call and response vocals. Building on this, we construct the remainder of the song. We want to investigate how a composition would sound if we built it up using synthesizers rather than the traditional format. We propose to compose two tracks using the synth collection, with contrasting approaches to composition. In one we will use synthesizers to compose from the beginning. While we may add acoustic instruments to complete the composition, the foundations will be synth-based. The second track will be composed using a combination of acoustic instruments and synthesizers. This will be closer to our usual approach to composition but will allow us to explore the sonic possibilities of incorporating synths into Cuban son.
Our primary motivation is to challenge ourselves as composers. We will reflect on how the incorporation of synthesizers changes the way that we compose and critically reflect on the results.
Leah Kardos (Kingston University)
The emancipating power of sampling and sequencing technologies in the work of Kate Bush during the early-to-mid 1980s.
The leap in sonic and musical daring from the piano-led pop of ‘Wow’ and ’Symphony in Blue’ (Lionheart, 1978) to the shattered shards of ‘Babooshka’ and the ammunition-click percussion of ‘Army Dreamers’ (Never for Ever, 1980) were the result of Kate Bush’s conscious manoeuvring from one side of the recording studio’s glass divide to the other. In addition to seizing control of her own productions, Bush embraced cutting edge commercial electronic musical instruments (CEMIs) of the era that transformed her working methods, compositional idiolect and sonic aesthetic in the early-to-mid 1980s. Sampling and sequencing technologies, in particular the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, E-mu Emulator II, and the LinnDrum, not only made writing, demoing and arranging tasks more accessible and autonomous, they opened up fresh, expressive dimensions and granted the artist unprecedented access to aesthetic control of her outputs.
Tracking and analysing imaginative uses of these technologies across a run of Kate Bush albums between 1980–85 (Never for Ever (1980), The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds Of Love (1985)), provides a case study in how these CEMIs not only afford new creative possibilities for self-producing songwriters, but offer new levels of access to arrangement realisation, novel sound design, sonic world building, and the expansion of the studio’s role in the songwiting process to be a space for both open-ended experimentation and meticulous control. The journey of these gradual shifts in process, perspective and autonomy culminate in Bush building her own home studio in 1984. The emancipating power of CEMIs in the narrative of Kate Bush’s career during this period are multi-dimensional, with lasting impact not only on the artist’s subsequent career trajectory, but in pop music culture ever since.
Liane Silva (UWL)
World-building through world synthesis: Authenticity and Authentication in the synthesised score of Blade Runner
Different film scores can produce alterations in a film’s narrative and its interpretations, and in particular, the use ofdifferent instrumentations can produce different results. This research focuses on Composition and Songwriting, more specifically, on the use of Commercial Electronic Music Instruments (CEMI’s) in music composition for film.
The films ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981), ‘Thief’ (1981), and ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) mark the first few scores with synthesisers as the main featured instruments, but they do so in different ways. One useful way to better understand how CEMI’s such as these can be used in film music, is to adapt Allan Moore’s concept of Authenticity to this context, which is thesecond stage of this research. After a brief overview of these films and their scores, I will explain how Authenticity and Authentication can be useful tools to analyse and compose film music, and focus on Ridley Scott’s
‘Blade Runner Final Cut’ (1982/2007). By looking more deeply into a particular example from this film, I aim to understand how the soundtrack of ‘Blade Runner’ authenticates the film’s narrative and worldbuilding, with particular contrast with the other two films. More specifically, I look into how Vangelis’ score employssynthesised instrumentation in different contexts, how it combines it with occasional use of acousticinstrumentation, and how this practice influences (and sometimes even changes) the film’s narrative. Additionally, through practical demonstration, I propose new approaches to composition in these contexts.
Ultimately, the goal of this research is to start a conversation surrounding the different uses of CEMI’s in film music composition, how these can authenticate (or not) different elements, and how composers can harness this to produce different narrative results.