Description
Glass Coloured (2023) is a concert work for 3D-printed Renaissance cornett and live electronic processing. Composed by Benjamin Tassie in collaboration with the cornettist Jamie Savan, the piece explores the cornett’s unique tuning possibilities in relation to the latest in live electronic, spectral processing techniques.Historically, the cornett was highly valued for its intonation. Praised for its ability to play “in every sort of key [tuono], just as the voice”, cornettists were judged “by their ability to play semitones and in transposition when necessary”. This ability to navigate different keys in unequal temperaments (and at different pitches) affords the cornett a great many microtones. Tassie and Savan’s research for Glass Coloured explored this facet of the instrument, asking: what new compositional and performance vocabularies might arise from creative engagement with the cornett’s historical performance practice, and how might such new vocabularies relate to contemporary practices including live electronic processing and microtonal aesthetics.
Extending the cornett’s historical practice of ‘forked fingerings’ (used to produce different pitches for enharmonic notes), research developed a microtonal musical language on the instrument. Each of Glass Coloured’s three movements explores a different facet of this extended-tuning: spectral, Just Intonation, and – in ‘Part Three’ – an ambiguous tuning inhabiting the differences between the instrument’s enharmonic pitches. In each movement, live electronic processing makes use of the latest spectral processing capabilities in Ableton Live 11 (using real-time Fast Fourier Transform processes). All sounds are produced live; no ‘tape part’ or synchronisation is required. The piece aims, in this way, at a hybridisation of the cornett and laptop in which the historical and contemporary are brought together, at times synthesised and at others in dialogue.
This lecture recital will share the practice-research that led to Glass Coloured – from Savan’s work on the 3D-printed cornett for which the work is written, to the development of the work’s extended enharmonic tuning system and Tassie’s compositional and electronic processes – as well as a complete performance of the work.
| Period | 4 Apr 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia |