Emma Daman Thomas – O|||O|| (CoDI Experimental 2021, Tŷ Cerdd)

Performers:
Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Siwan Rhys

Composer's note:
In this piece I sought to find pattern and meaning in the absence of something I could recognise. As I can’t read music I found all the written music in the archive equally impenetrable and I was particularly drawn to Robert ap Huw's medieval notation. I enjoyed the fact that this particular notation was as cryptic to most observers as it was to me. The tablature is written as a series of circles and lines / zeros and ones and their precise meaning is much studied and interpreted but still remains ambiguous. I drew a simple graphic score, writing out Robert Ap Huw's 24 measures of string music onto paper in a triangular harp like shape.

I invited the musicians to interpret the patterns in the simplest way they could. For me this was by replicating them as a series of ‘o’ and ‘i’ vocal sounds, which were looped and layered live. Some of the ‘o’ and ‘i’ were represented by absence and presence. One thing that struck me when I visited the archives was the absence of people of colour. Although I knew in advance that the Welsh Music Collection was not comprehensive I still half-expected to find some dusty reference to a little known composer somewhere, or some indication of multicultural musical influences over the centuries. I collected any reference snatches alluding to Indians, Africans, Roma, whatever I could find, and spoke these words in the presence - absence patterns of the Robert Ap Huw notation. In this way the personal connection I was searching for materialised in glimpses, neither visible nor completely hidden, incomplete and unintelligible to the outsider.

Score: https://bb448c84-47bf-4f69-9983-58899aa33111.filesusr.com/ugd/48cc6e_857bf5205d974b82a921fd4cc3431db8.pdf

Part of Tŷ Cerdd's #CoDa2021 sharing of work created during their Composer Development Initiatives (CoDI) during 2021.
https://www.tycerdd.org/coda-2021