Richy Carey is a composer who bases his practice between mediums, in film music, installation, publications and collaboration. Here, he talks about the concept behind his upcoming event, The Shape of Words to Come which takes place on 11 August at St. Cecilia’ Hall in Edinburgh:
I started thinking about The Shape of Words to Come just after finishing the last sound film I made, Phonic Imagery. I think there is something fundamentally lacking about the way we talk about video work, which is manifest in how we describe the action of engaging with it. We will always say we watch film, rarely would anyone say we listen to film, but we are actually doing something more than both. This ontological relationship between the object and ourselves is negotiated in some way by the language we use to mediate it. So how should we talk about it?
Phonic Imagery by Richy Carey
Parallel conversations are a good place to start. In The Shape of Words to Come, Lauren Printy Currie, Tom Varley, Tom Walker and I address certain aspects of our current audiovisual vernacular that relate to both sonic and visual compositional intention. Wittgensteinian language games, colour etymologies and eco-musicological issues have all played their part in the conversation, but shape has been the central point of investigation. Shape is one of the primary value judgements used in dealing with both visual and aural aesthetics, but audiovisual work is invariably presented in rectangles, even though the sound is recognised as an unframeable force. As an audiovisual composer, I invited the other artists, in whose work I’d seen parallels to my own, to respond to the idea of shape as a musical function through filmed images. I then edited and constructed these images into my soundfilm compositional process; a method of making music whereby the visual is woven into the work as a musical timbre from the outset.
Finding a space to perform these soundfilms presented problems. A cinema space would focus the audience on the visual material and detract from the visual as a musical function in much the same way as a gallery space would. As such, a concert space was needed that underlined the musicality of the works and engaged the performative aspect of the visual.
After a few conversations I came across St. Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh, the oldest music hall in Scotland and, as an oval space, demands that the screen stands apart from the wall on the stage, presenting it as one uncomfortable shape within another.
St. Cecilia’s Hall – image courtesy of the ECA
St. Cecilia’s also added a historical weight to the soundfilm process’ place within visual-music history. In the film world, this history has a fairly firm date of conception within the absolute film movement, in particular the first performance of Lichtspiel: Opus I by Walther Ruttmann in Munich, 1921. This early abstract cinema work was created as visual music, as painted shapes interacted through musical form; counterpoint, harmony, rhythms. Originally performed with a commissioned score by Max Butting, Ruttmann himself played cello in the performance.
I created a new score to the film work, using the original Butting score as a guide, as it has Ruttmann’s own hand drawn markings of synchrony drawn on it. The German Goethe Institute, who own the rights to Ruttmann’s work, kindly gave me both the film and the score to research and became partners in supporting the concert performance. I have written a completely new score to the film work, using five instruments as Butting did, only this time for iPhone, analogue synth models, guitars, cello and percussion, with each instrument representing a different time within the disparate visual music history.
In showing both these works in the same concert, I aim to show film as a musical agency and in doing so question both the role and potential of video as musical composition.
For more from Richy Carey see his showcase. For more details about the shape of words to come see Richy’s website.
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