Projects

Player Piano

Researchers

Player Piano is an interdisciplinary performance created as part of the research project ‘Performance, Subjectivity and Experimentation’, led by Catherine Laws, at the University of York and the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent. The performance is a collaboration between Catherine (as the performer), composers Edward Jessen, Annea Lockwood, Roger Marsh and Paul Whitty, theatre maker Teresa Brayshaw and film maker Wendy Kirkup, with Hannah Butterfield as an additional performer.

The project explores the complex make-up of the performing self: the apparently individual self as a site of multiple, distributed subjectivity.

The performance playfully explores different the performer’s creative personae, the relationship to the piano and its history, and the embodied sense of self at the instrument.

A woman arrives with a piano.
She plays. Plays this piano. Plays with it.
Plays versions of herself through it
But she also has company. Other voices.
Composers; teachers; the ghosts of other pianists.
Memories of other pianos: big shiny grands and clapped out old uprights.
Others hers, with younger hands, looser shoulders, a lighter, more flexible body.

Trailer

Touch and Go (full video)

Other projects

Off Grid: The Magic of Microtones

This project brings together ongoing research into the use of microtones from compositional, performance and analytical perspectives.
Words and Music

This project brings together writings and compositions which interrogate the issue of combining words with music. An ongoing series of articles by Roger Marsh, William Brooks and others, addresses the many ways in which composers go beyond conventional word setting routes, exploring significant instances of writers crossing into musical territories and composers composing with words. Articles are linked to related compositions, presented as recordings and videos, with commentaries on collaborative and creative processes.
Edgelands

Roam the Barbican foyers using headphones to experience this free audio journey, which reframes the sounds and sights of the iconic arts centre.
Representing Rehearsal

This research project, led by Catherine Laws (Senior Lecturer in Music), Jon Hook (Lecturer in Interactive Media) and Tom Cornford (Lecturer in Theatre) has been funded by the University of York’s Research Priming Fund.
Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Ensemble Performance

The Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Ensemble Performance network comprises three projects, exploring aspects of how musicians communicate in groups:

Movement and sonic gestures in ensemble performance
Achieving excellence in ensemble singing
Teaching and learning of ensemble communication
From Score to Sound

Engaging audiences with new music

The Score to Sound project aims to implement and evaluate an approach for engaging the public in twentieth and twenty-first-century British music, and is funded by the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund.