Alex Tay: ‘Cautionary tales from Professor GoodTrip on Composition / Illusion / Research’ A CMRC seminar
Event details
Illusions are deceptions of the bodily senses which confound perceptions of reality. Such phenomena enticed me to spend 6 years researching and composing with them at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with supervisors Professor Julian Anderson CBE and Professor Malcolm Singer.
The resultant composition portfolio that I produced is far from the first existing collection of illusionistic pieces. A psychedelic boom of compositions from Reich, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Risset and Amacher – they being influenced both by the op art of Escher and Riley and their psycho-acoustician contemporaries Shepard, Bregman, McAdams and Deutsch – sprung from the 60s and 70s. Yet, there were gaps in the literature about how one might musically narrativize the illusions in time and so in the research process I consulted literature by Steinmeyer and Leddington about performance magic, a practice built on the theatricalization of illusion.
In this talk, I’ll compare two pieces from my doctorate portfolio: Ghoulish Airs, an orchestral piece written for the LSO Panufnik scheme, and Jab for solo piano, performed and recorded by Ben Smith. In doing so, I’ll talk about how I felt aided and hindered by illusion as a research framework; how I conformed to and strained against my research.
Online joining details
Meeting ID: 974 1147 1887
Passcode: 030134
About the speaker
Alex Tay
Alex is a London-based composer who from 2016 - 2022, while guided by Professor Julian Anderson CBE and Malcolm Singer, composed illusory deceptions which confound perceptions of musical speed, pitch continuity and sound ontology as part of his doctoral research at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Previous teachers, collaborating artists and commissioners have included Colin Matthews, Christian Mason, François Xavier-Roth, the London Symphony Orchestra (as part of the 2018 - 19 Panufnik Scheme), Brett Dean, Jack Sheen and the LPO (as part of the 2021 - 22 LPO Young Composers’ Scheme); Robin Holloway, Richard Causton, Jeremy Thurlow (Kings and Churchill College Cambridge); Judith Weir and the Heath Quartet (Dartington); Hugh Brunt and the Britten Sinfonia (2015 Cambridge University Composition Workshop from which Alex won 3 commissions); the Park Lane Group, Gerry Cornelius, Patrick Bailey, Ben Smith and Raymond Brien. Alex is currently working on commissions from NYCGB and Wigmore Hall (due to be premiered in 2025).