Event overview
Join us to experience a performed installation on this unique instrument of musical glasses by PhD student Lee Newcombe.
Empherion is the debut work for the ‘diapason’; a unique instrument featuring musical glasses tuned to a 53-tone just intonation hyperchromatic scale arranged across four manuals for multiple performers to simultaneously sound.
Designed as a performed installation, Empherion exists as an entity enclosed within the confines of its own spatiotemporal environment.
The processual harmonic relations revolve for eternity with all 53 pitches fulfilling the same intervallic functions as each other.
An Apollonian and Dionysian duality is in play.
The clarity and logic of the compositional process unfolds alongside the disorder and frenzy of hyperdense clusters of pitch.
The glasses sonically combine to produce beating patterns as pitches alternately interfere constructively and destructively.
Perceived boundaries of consonance and dissonance become blurred through the perpetual motion of pitch metamorphosis.
There is no beginning or ending to proceedings.
The pitch process maintains a seamless continuum that is always at its own centre of performative material.
The residues of the past and anticipations of the future become apparent in the here and now.
Empherion is presented as a medium to develop alternative notions of temporality, enrich given modes of perception, and in this way intensify what it might mean to be contemporaneous to one’s present.
It offers a space to linger and contemplate, pushing against our modern chronological time, dwelling outside of the intoxicating visions of acceleration and temporal fragmentation.
You (the spectator) can use your own bodily movements as an experimental medium of experience.
Please feel welcome to get up close to the instrument and create your own personal interactions and journeys with the sonic flux. We will hope to live-stream this as well for those that can't make it in due to the rail strike.
Listen to Empherion here: https://leescottnewcombe.bandcamp.com/releases
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Jun 2022 | 3:30pm - 5:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
