A ground-breaking concert funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) taking place in George Square Theatre, Edinburgh on Friday May 27th from 7pm, will transport the audience on a journey back through time to the prehistoric past through the use of film, sound and dance.
Palaeophonics is a live multimedia public performance exploring ways humans have created and been inspired by sound and music since early human origins. It brings together eight new works by composers, film-makers and archaeologists from across the world at the first concert of its kind.
The initiative, Palæophonics: Music, Archaeology and the politics of representation, aims to promote new innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative work in a manner accessible to a wider public audience.
The concert in Edinburgh, includes world premieres of new film and live performance inspired by sites and places in Scotland, including Skara Brae on Orkney (by Aaron Watson & John Was), and Fingal’s Cave in the Inner Hebrides (by Paul Keene, Farès Moussa, MaïtéDelafin).
In addition new works from further afield will also be performed, including film on the 'sound stages' of Valcamonica rock-art site in Alpine Italy (directed by British-Austrian film-maker Fredrick Baker); the 3D animated sound-field model and composition "Stonehenge Ritual Sound" (by Rupert Till, Andrew Taylor and ErtuUnver); unnamed composition for solo flute (by Mexican composer Mauricio Rodriguez, created by Mexican soloist WilfridoTarrazas); the Balkan inspired piece “Apxai” (by JovanaBackovic and Adrian Lever), and film of the sounds Canadian wind-farms and prehistoric bullroarers (by David Knight, Christopher Peterson and Kevin Hogg).
Co-director and anthropologist, Farès Moussa said about the concert: 'Music has a well known capacity to evoke the past: archaeologists have sought to reconstruct past instruments and sounds and composers have been directly inspired by the past. However, since there are few surviving musical artifacts and no manuscripts, the work of the researchers involved in this concert will hopefully go some way to recover something of these other 'primordial' realities in an imaginative way which is accessible to all.'
Palæophonics is generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Beyond Text’ research programme and the University of Edinburgh Campaign. It was conceived by Producer and Director Farès Moussa and Director Paul Keene, both based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Corisande Fenwick, based at Stanford University in California, United States, is Assistant Director.
ENDS
Notes to Editors
For further information, please contact:
Contact / Info:
F.K.Moussa@sms.ed.ac.uk / p.f.keene@sms.ed.ac.uk / cfenwick@stanford.edu T:(0)7720 590 635
Media contact - Jake Gilmore – + 44 (0) 1793 41 6021, j.gilmore@ahrc.ac.uk
http://palaeophonics.co.uk/
Palæophonics explores the ways humans have created and used sound and music since our earliest origins. New collaborative works by composers, musicians, artists and archaeologists from across Europe and the Americas will come together at the first concert of its kind on Friday 27 May 2011. Palæophonics is generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Beyond Text research programme and the University of Edinburgh Campaign.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Each year the AHRC provides approximately £100 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes hundreds of research awards ranging from individual fellowships to major collaborative projects as well as over 1,100 studentship awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.
The Beyond Text research programme aims to support a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners drawn from Higher Education, museums, galleries, libraries, business, policy, media, technology and the law to explore the ways in which communication is articulated, transmitted, received and controlled. It also aims to enhance the connections between those who make and preserve works, and those who study them. Beyond Text centres on five thematic, interdisciplinary areas: Making and Unmaking; Performance, Improvisation and Embodied Knowledge; Technology, Innovation and Tradition; mediations; Transmission and Memory. These themes provide a framework to investigate the formation and transformations of performances, sounds, images, and objects in a wide field of social, historical and geographical contexts, tracing their reception, assimilation and adaptation across temporal and cultural boundaries. The programme has a budget of £5.5 million over 5 years and runs from 2007 to 2012. www.beyondtext.ac.uk