Translations participation

Time commitment

Please note that to take part in this event you must be able to make all of the following dates:

Tuesday 10th March 18:30-21:30

Friday 13th March (online) 19:00-21:00

Tuesday 17th March 18:30-21:30

Friday 20th March (concert day, Scottish Music Centre) 18:30-21:30

While there may be some potential for flexibility on this, and we might be able to work with late arrival to the sessions, we ideally need to know about this in advance so that we can plan accordingly.

The project

All of music is translation. Translating ideas into images, images into sounds, and sounds into a form of understanding, connection, or emotional response.

For this set of workshops we will be collaborating in creating a musical response to two works:

Verbaaaatim Renga is an ongoing chain of text scores following a process devised by members of Sonic Bothy, an all-abilities music organisation here in Scotland. This piece shifts from one performance to the next through live captioners, whose captions describing one performance will form a score for the next performance, creating a piece which changes across performances but maintains a continuity with itself. It is an incredible example of an all-abilities practice spawning new creative processes.

This is paired with a selection of pieces from the collection Dendroforms by Florence and Reuben Maunders. This graphic score utilises found imagery from trees along with occasional fragments of musical notation to suggest musical shapes and developing ideas.

You will need

• A musical instrument (this does not have to be a western classical instrument, and an ability to read music notation is not a requirement). A piano and a keyboard will be available for piano players.
• A pencil and rubber
• An open mind to some very unusual and creative music practice!
• If you have a music stand please bring it with you, but we will manage without

Session breakdown

In the first session, we will explore both of these pieces and develop a series of approaches to the variety of graphics within Dendroforms, and meet with Eluned, our captioner for Verbaaaatin Renga. In the second, we will continue exploring approaches to Dendroforms, and cementing the specific approaches we will take in our performance, and do some improvisation around our text score for Verbaaaatim Renga and consider how we want to balance improvisation with limitations and fixed structure. In the third session we will rehearse our final programme before the concert.

The venue is wheelchair accessible. There will not be a sign language interpreter.

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