Dr Gemma McGregor (University of Aberdeen)
My music is formed of imitative sounds and textural layers that build a collage style structure. This form allows for the inclusion of disparate material to encourage the listener to hear the music in a new context. I use images from other media including photography, paintings, sagas, traditional music, dialect speech, historical sites, and environmental sounds. At times, the music allows tonal sounds to be re-encountered in a contemporary setting. I have created two works based on paintings by Samuel Peplow and Sylvia Wishart, and have collaborated with poets, sculptors, painters, scientists, and film makers. Through working in partnership, I have found that my composition has a richer perspective and references shapes, patterns, ideas and sounds from the other disciplines. Researching the material for the piece in partnership with the other artist results in a dispersed narrative. The elements of the work form a rhizome of interconnected elements that are non-linear. As philosophers Deleuze and Guattari stated in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things’ (1980). My aim is to create works where the listener must ‘join the dots’ and will react with an immediacy that leaves the conditioned response behind. I will describe two of my works – The Fabian Strategy – an electroacoustic installation created with sculptor, Craig Ellis, and Beside the Ocean of Time, an installation and video created with sculptor Anne Bevan, and film maker Mark Jenkins, that was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition, 2024.