2010 - 2013
Disjointed.mp4 from Catherine Laws on Vimeo.
The initial phase of the work will take place using the facilities at the Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik, Graz, to address the principal research question: the ways in which the physical movements of musical performers are (and are not) related to the production of instrumental sound and to the expression of musical meaning. The work takes as its starting point the taxonomy of musical gesture proposed by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (2010), but is concerned in part with the overlap and confusion of these categorisations in the embodied experience of music-making. The results of the research will be tested and enriched in a series of experiments that take physical (rather than sonic) gesture as the starting point for composition, but with an understanding of the specific correlations and divergences between gestural and sound content. We will examine composition as choreography, but a choreography in which the intimate relation between the physical and the sonic is embedded. The project explores the role of embodied actions, interactions and intentions in dialogical exchange, the impact of experimental practices on the body, and the interaction between bodily movement, artistic experience and artistic expression.
The outcomes from this project will include the composition and performances of a piece devised through the research process, and an article examining aspects of the process in specific relation to the ORCiM research questions identified above.
