-News Page-

Contemporary and Classical performance

Jevon Antoni-Jay

Our telephone number has changed!!!

+44 (0) 786 78 70 426

Shadow Rounds

Charnel House, Bishops Square, Spitalfields, London. Nr Patisserie Valerie

An orchestration of voices from 2,000 years of a London neighborhood

Original Concept and Electronic Score: Kerry Andrews

Daily Performances

Shadow Rounds is made from two sections;
19 text/sound pieces, and
19 evening mixes

The text/sound pieces play in repeated groups of four or five at 9am, 12pm and 3pm each day.

The same pieces repeat throughout the day, but alternate with a second group on the second day for the following week, when the third and fourth groups of pieces begin to alternate. (For example the first two week pattern is as follows: pieces 1-5 cycle through day 1, pieces 6-10 on day 2; these patterns continue until day 8 when pieces 11-15 play, and then pieces 16-19 play on day 9.) The cycle begins again, in a different pattern, after 14 days.

The evening mixes play at nightfall, twice each evening. Each mix repeats for 14 days and changes with the new cycle of text pieces.

The times of the evening mixes are as follows:

Daily Times

time	date
7:00	2007 September 21 - 30
6:30	October 1 - 12
6:00	October 14 - 27
4:30	October 28 - November 13
4:00	November 14 - January 13
4:30	2008 January 14- January 31
5:00	February 1 - 16
5:30	February 17 - March 4
6:00	March 5-22
6:30	March 23-29
7:30	March 30- April 9
8:00	April 10-27
8:30	April 28- May 15
9:00	May 16- June 20

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the readers of the texts used as the basis of this work:

· Jevon Antoni-Jay (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne)

· Deborah Broderick Edwards (Latin, Collins, Severs)

· Shamim Azad (Seven Seas)

· Paul Burnell (Spitalfields Mathematical Society, Culpeper)

· Dr Haike Beruriah Wiegand (Rodinsky, Stencl)

· Stephen Watts (Sebald, Stencl)

· Caroline de Lannoy (Tourval)

· Martin Denyer (Mayhew)

· Rosamund Allen (Anglo Saxon)

· Nicholas Havely* (Chaucer)

· Kevin Trainor (email, Doyle)

· Charlotte O'Leary (email, Doyle, Celtic)

· Lee Wroth (Rodinsky, Celtic)

Shadow Rounds was curated by Dickson Russell Art Management and commissioned by Spitalfields Development Group, as part of their public artworks sited at Spitalfields 2007-08. The project was supported by an Arts Council England grant.

Introduction

The rhythm of the imagining community resembles a very slow dance…… But how can a symphony be created from the buzz of voices? … how can we progress from the murmur of the crowd to a chorus? … this requires time: …everything occurs within the obscure, invisible folds of the collective itself: the melodic line, the emotional tonality, the hidden intervals, the correspondences, the continuity that it weaves within the hearts of the individuals who compose it.

Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence

Exploring the voice of Spitalfields, Shadow Rounds, located on the glass wall of the Charnel House, is an audio portrait based on language transformations over the past 2,000 years. Tracing specific texts and vocalizations from the vicinity the work maps the way the local place and language has been enriched by a steady influx of differing vocal rhythms and structures, and reflects on the connection between voice and content.

Layers of language over the centuries seep through to the contemporary fabric, adding to a collective intelligence, so the work aims to develop a notion of non-linear time rather than a simple progression of singular historical events. The source texts include: Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Elizabethan English, French, Yiddish, Bengali, and contemporary English.

Transforming the glass wall into a resonating field of voices and sounds, Shadow Rounds uses the latest innovations in piezo technology, pioneered by FeONIC plc. The window plane becomes a sounding object attracting and yet distancing the visitor, reflecting the nature of language itself.

The Charnel House glass wall is also integral to the installation in another, more direct way. Local residents have long feared the City moving across the ‘glass wall’ divide which originally saw the area outside Bishopsgate as a ‘Liberty’ – beyond the jurisdiction of the city – a place to practice free thought, trade and beliefs. The voice of Spitalfields speaks of multiplicity through time. As the city encroaches on this land there is necessarily assimilation or loss, or both.

Shadow Rounds takes place at different times of the day transforming the sound (as a form of mixes) over the weeks of the nine month performance period. Digitally transformed details of vocal sounds establish percussive and melodic material and these sounds are related back to their originating texts, creating a set of aural traits, or sound worlds. These individual sound worlds are, in turn, brought together at nightfall into a larger mix. (See the Introduction to Texts for further details.)

Shadow Rounds is conceived as a meditative work. The piece creates a time capsule within the Charnel House observational space slowing down the visitor’s gaze and deepening his/her engagement with the archaeological remains and its relationship to the surrounding locale. The work is an investigation into an audio-archeology and explores music’s possible origin in speech and vocal gesture, and, more specifically, where it is located in our everyday lives beyond the confines of song and instrument.

Charnel House

Site photographs

Top and center left photographs reproduced by kind permission of John Sturrock

Charnel house sites

Panoramas of the excavations

MoLAS brief review of the excavation © Copyright 2007 Kerry J Andrews

The texts:

Vocal music

Also there is the repetitive nature of the music that allows for the unfolding in time of a recursive spatial arrangement of tones whose parallel can be found in the world of architecture, where structural integrity requires the modular deployment of building materials to create a building’s framework …

Call the mixes and songs generated by the assembly process… the social construction of memory.

Paul D Miller (DJ Spooky)

Shadow Rounds traces the sound and rhythms of texts from the Spitalfields area, bringing them together as a collective voice. This voice refers to the form and content – of speech, writing and meaning; examining speech, word and expressed thought as music.

The work looks at this rich piece of London ground focusing on Spitalfields but also including related texts from Aldgate, Whitechapel, the City and Bishopsgate.

The texts were chosen to reflect a wide variety of experiences and thoughts, but the Charnel House site is the guiding spirit both in its immediate location and in its psychological tenor. The sounds that have been produced for the installation take into account the existing noise of this outdoor site, but the overall feel of the piece is contemplative, through simplicity and repetition.

The texts are from:

1. Across Seven Seas - Shamim Azad
2. The House of Fame - Geoffrey Chaucer
3. Trial transcript of Jane Collins - the Old Bailey Online
4. Introduction to The English Physitian - Nicholas Culpeper
5. Sermon 25 - John Donne
6. Trial transcript of John Doyle
7. Latin temple inscription
8. The Tragical History of Dr Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
9. entry from The Receptacle - Spitalfields Mathematical Society
10. They Shall Walk in Silk Attire - Henry Mayhew
11. unsolicited email
12. English/Hebrew dictionary entries - David Rodinsky
13. Austerlitz - W G Sebald
14. 18 Folgate Street, The Story of a House in Spitalfields - Dennis Severs
15. The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare
16. Whitechapel Idyll - Avram Stencl
17. Last will and testament - Jean Loiseaux de Tourval
18. two Anglo Saxon riddles - 47 and 69 from the Exeter Book
19. Celtic words

Each text is treated as a separate entity and a short sound piece is created within and around it. These pieces, in small groups of four or five, repeat each day from 9am to nightfall.

The sound worlds created from the texts are fragments towards a collective piece, each becoming part of a larger work at the end of the day, where all the texts are concurrent but orchestrated in a mix. (See performance times.)

There are 19 mixes over the 9 month performance period. The mixes are based on the following subjects, moving across content and material:

1. silence
2. time
3. the body
4. textual/sound structure
5. identity
6. matter
7. death
8. diaspora
9. meter/rhythm
10. movement
11. elements
12. truth/lies
13. memory
14. place
15. organization/belief/knowledge
16. fragmentation
17. languages
18. theatre
19. variations

Text transformations / sound elements

The individual texts are treated in several different ways.

1. sound supporting text content
2. writing style, structure
3. rhythms from text/reading
4. vocal sounds
5. fragmentation of text, sound

1. Azad – vocal rhythms C
2. Severs – vocal sounds, contemporary short sentence lengths B
3. Donne – punctuations, sentence structure, multiple subsections B
4. Rodinsky – text rhythms and vocal shapes, translation C
5. Sebald – content, continuity of expressed thought A
6. Collins – emotional content underlying formal trial transcript A
7. Tourval – melodic vocal sounds D
8. Latin – vocal rhythms C
9. Shakespeare – meter against vocal, iambic pentameter C
10. Marlowe – meter against vocal, iambic pentameter C E
11. Culpeper – sentence structure, multiple subsections B
12. Mathematical Society – formal/informal, contrast A
13. Chaucer – vocal sounds, meter D
14. Anglo Saxon – textual structure, alliteration, caesura D B
15. Mayhew – content, direct emotion A
16. Doyle – content A
17. Celtic – sound fragments D E
18. Patrick – text fragmentation, multiple voices E
19. Stencl – vocal rhythms, translation C

The transformations are simple characterizations of the texts. These relate across texts as well as internally within each specific text/sound space. The following methods were applied to the sounds, which were made up from

1. percussion recordings based on the rhythms, structures or meanings of the texts, or
2. the sounds of the readings/vocalizations of the texts.

The few lines chosen from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus deliberately play on the element of time. This central idea is reflected in the words and the iambic pentameter rhythmical form. I used a rigid, simple, 10 syllable, 5 stressed beat rhythm throughout, contrasting the voice against the structure. The text is built up using the ScaFra technique of the slow addition and subsequent subtraction of material.

The Shakespeare follows the Marlowe text in looking at the line’s relationships to iambic pentametrical rhythms. In this case I tried to reflect and play on the more supple manipulations of line and the flow of ideas, as well as the speed changes between shared character lines (stichomythia) and individual character lines. Also, the shift into and out of the space of the ‘play’ itself is an important part of this text characterization.

The Anglo Saxon looks at the poetic forms of stress, caesura and alliteration.

The Donne, Culpeper and Severs treatments use sounds to mark the sentence lengths and punctuations. Each of these texts differs widely in their overall sentence length, structure and use of sub clauses.

The Donne makes use of four bell-like sounds to denote commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops. The Culpeper uses the next vocalized sound after each of those punctuations.

Azad, Rodinsky, Latin, and Stencl sound treatments are all based on the vocalizations through rhythmic and melodic means.

Some of the texts were too emotionally charged to analyze in terms of technique or form so they were treated to a parallel sound. The Collins has a continuous hard edged sound to contrast with the detached formality of the trial record and to underline the real tenor of the narrative. The Mayhew and Doyle texts are treated in a similar way.

The Sebald and Mathematical Society texts were also treated with parallel sounds, though they have a different reasoning. The Sebald text sound reflects the beautiful continuity of line that the writer used – creating an incantatory feel. The descriptive and methodical Mathematical text is contrasted with a sound that tries to convey an unruly elemental reality separate from the words.

The Tourval, Chaucer and Celtic texts also deal with the vocal sounds. The Tourval follows the melodic line of the voice. The Chaucer foregrounds the pauses and breaths as well as the rhythm of the line lengths. The Celtic looks at word sounds and fragmentation.

The email text (Patrick) is simultaneously read by three voices, playing with the humour inherent in the random cutup words used, and reflecting a multiplicity of ‘individual’ voices. This text is used as a question about our understanding of contemporary place.

Layers, loops and folds

Shadow Rounds is based on four main groups of texts:

1. Diaspora: translation, fiction, poem, email
2. Matter: sermon, testament, trial proceedings, social report
3. Meter: poetry and plays
4. Enigmata: inscription, riddles, fragments

The groups act as the basic stratification and form for the building blocks of the piece. They allow a non linear layout of the historical periods across the sounding field for the mixes. The diagram above shows how each sound element (text) is allocated a specific space on the window plane. This layout is only used when all the individual text pieces come together in the mix – the last piece of the day.

Watch out for more performances by

Jevon Antoni-Jay

or

Feral-iD