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LABYRINTHS, LIMINALITY AND EKPHRASIS: THE GRAPHICAL IMPETUS IN THE MUSIC OF KENNETH HESKETH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2020

Thomas Metcalf
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Abstract

This article is an introduction to the graphical impetus in the music of Kenneth Hesketh (b. 1968), from around 2012 to the present day, including his recent work, Viae (2020). Through examination of Hesketh's graphical control of a number of musical parameters, the article will demonstrate that the idea of a ‘musical ekphrasis’ can be extended through the incorporation of spatial aspects in determinate music to result in what the author deems a graphical ekphrasis. Whilst in no way exhaustive in its exploration of Hesketh's multi-parametric approach to composition, the article provides an analysis of selected compositional methodologies relating to both composition design and audience communication, situating them alongside other contemporary musical examples and trends.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 75 , Issue 295 , January 2021 , pp. 45 - 71
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 Bruhn, Siglind, Musical Ekphrasis (Hillside NY: Pendragon Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

2 Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis, p. 51.

3 Hesketh, Kenneth and Potter, Caroline, ‘Unreliable Machines: An Interview with Kenneth Hesketh’, Musical Times, 149, no. 1905 (2008), p. 18Google Scholar.

4 Hesketh and Potter, ‘Unreliable Machines’, p. 20.

5 Kenneth Hesketh and Caroline Potter, ‘5 Questions to Kenneth Hesketh (composer) on his 50th Birthday’, I Care If You Listen, July 2018, www.icareifyoulisten.com/2018/07/5-questions-kenneth-hesketh-composer-50th-birthday/. Italics mine.

6 Kenneth Hesketh, ‘Forms Entangled, Shapes Collided’, RCM Research Online, 2012, accessible at: http://researchonline.rcm.ac.uk/205/.

7 Martyn Harry, programme note, String Quartet No. 3, Borderline (2019).

8 Also known as the Hailstone conjecture: choose any number, n; if n is odd, multiply by 3 and add 1; if even, divide by two.

9 Kenneth Hesketh and Christian Morris, ‘Kenneth Hesketh at 50 Interview’, Composition:Today, 11 July 2018, www.compositiontoday.com/interviews/kenneth_hesketh.asp.

10 Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal, 24/4 (2000), p. 13.

11 For more on the combination of 12-tone composition and data sonification, see Thomas Metcalf, ‘Graphical Data Sets as Compositional Structure: Sonification of Colour Graphs in “RGB” for clarinet and piano’, Leonardo, forthcoming.

12 Johnson, Julian, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 135Google Scholar.

13 For more on the contextual and poetic in Birtwistle's process, see Hall, Michael, ‘The Sanctity of Context: Birtwistle's Recent Music’, Musical Times, 129, no. 1739 (1988), pp. 14–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 K. Hesketh, programme note, In Ictu Oculi (London: Cecilian Music, 2017).

15 Stephanie Mason and Michael Saffle have expanded on Przemyslaw Prusinkiewic's work on the possibilities of applying L-systems to musical composition in ‘L–Systems, Melodies and Musical Structure’, Leonardo Music Journal, 4 (1994), pp. 31–8.

16 Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘A New Refutation of Time’, in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964)Google Scholar.

17 Johnson, Out of Time, p. 140.