Performers under the influence: The Film Sextet

The main concept behind my composition The Film Sextet (2004) is the use of film as an extra-musical art form through which to derive ideas on the temporal and sequential manipulation o f form and structural perception. The film editing process is thus seen as a sequencing of events in time, and the layering of visual and temporal activity as a technique of creating an evolving density of sensory events.

The research behind the Film Sextet shares a similar approach with that of Louis Malle’s practice, in his film L’ascenseur pour l’echafaux (1957), where he exposed the improviser Miles Davis to an intense ‘constellation’ of moving images, generating a ‘constellation’ of musical material to be redistributed throughout the cinematic structure. Another source of interest was Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang D’un Poéte (1930) in which he bypasses narrative convention by the use of dislocated music/sound and disorientates spatial perception by the geometrical ‘flexure’ of set design, camera angle and editing effects. In The Film Sextet the intention is to transfer this concept of sensory illusion to the sphere of musical performance by devising mechanisms which guide the performers though a synthesis of traditional, mobile and audio notation, reflexive choice-making and external input/direction.

The Film Sextet expands on the notion of duality by creating three strands of duet interaction. The structure comprises of a combination of events fixed in time and events generated by a chain of information derived by the unfolding of film structures in the form of soundtracks played in the performers’ headphones. The element of indeterminacy is expressed through a complex and unpredictable interfusion of real-time choice-making and extra-musical structures. The element of duality appears in the subjective interpreting process through the rules of choice-making but is also manifest in the composed instrumental parts.