Yesterday I spoke at the music technology forum. This was not my honours presentation, but was 'just for fun'. My topics included the milkcrate project and Duet for Two Desk Lamps (more information on this piece can be found in this earlier post).
I am unsure of how well it went. On one hand, I was feeling sick, I seemed to add many spaces and umms and ahs to my vocabulary, and I think that I spoke too little and played too much video. On the other hand, I think I handled most questions quite well and I received some positive feedback from people in the audience. I perceived less interest in Music for Two Desk Lamps than anticipated- maybe because I did not speak on the subject for very long at all. Maybe I should have shown the Max/MSP patch in action?
Stephen Whittington's 'loaded' question of whether I consider myself the composer of all of the musical material yielded from the milkcrate project is simple to answer. I am absolutely not the writer of all of the music, simply because I thought of the rules. To think otherwise would be overly arrogant, in my opinion.
To clarify: when milkcrate was competing in and consequently won the Advanced Ensemble section in the Young Composers Award in 2004, I entered the idea of milkcrate as a systematic way of writing music, and the first session of milkcrate (titled 200407041207) as an example of the results. The credits listed myself as the organiser of the project, and all the participants in that session as the composers. The people involved were Michael Linscott (painter), David Gustafsson (currently studying to be a lawyer), Hayley Miller (completing a masters in music therapy), Lauren Sutter (doing postgraduate studies in visual art history) and myself.
The question that did kind of stump me was what my inspiration for the milkcrate project was. My answer, to explore the limits of compositional limits, did n0t seem to satisfy the audience. But there is no other inspiration. In retrospect, perhaps my attending of a (then) classically-focused music school (Brighton Secodary) provoked such a reaction. I do not know for sure. And it doesn't matter anyway.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I think you did pretty well Seb. You shouldn't be so critical of yourself. I mean you were honest and clear with what you said, and expressed all you needed to.
I read this this recently and it makes some good points about public speaking. You may or may not find it useful, but it did put public speaking in perspective for me.
Howdy Seb
I liked your talk and your vision - it was immensely appealing! And your delivery was (as I blogged) charming. Fear not.
I asked you about your inspiration btw. Years ago, when I was learning singing, my teacher explained singing technique to me like this - "all art needs resistance. Singing is no different." And your talk reminded me of this.
im not afraid. not meaning to come across so either.
Post a Comment