Liquidation as Quotation: Adventures in Folk Music and Deconstructive Compositional Technique

Successfully integrating abstract issues of inspiration and creative motivation with concrete musical technique is essential for any composer. Referencing my points of musical inspiration, folk music in particular, necessitates a recompositional technique which allows these materials to be developed and explored more flexibly than through arrangement or simple quotation alone. Arnold Schoenberg’s concept of motivic liquidation provided me with a starting point to achieve this. Exploring this idea in new contexts and with reimagined interpretations allows me to ‘recompose’ the ideas which inspire me just as much as the process of recomposing the music itself.

Speaker

Dr Tim Johnston

Composer and early career researcher making music which crosses stylistic boundaries between Anglo–Welsh folk music, popular music, and contemporary Classical repertoire. He studied his PhD at Cardiff University, under the supervision of Dr Robert Fokkens and Dr Carlo Cenciarelli, and is now based at the University of Salford where he teaches composition and arranging.

Respondent

Professor Alan Williams

Composer and writer on contemporary music and culture, and Professor of Collaborative Composition at the University of Salford. He studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester and at the Liszt Academy, Budapest. His music has been performed by world leading ensembles such as the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Singers, the Philharmonia, MDR Radio Choir, and Psappha, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, MDR (Germany), NEC (Brazil) and Bartók Rádió (Hungary). In 2016 he created a score for Val McDermid’s adaptation of The Kraken Wakens, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016, and in 2017 he wrote the ‘world’s first Northern opera’ with poet Ian McMillan. In 2023 he created Healing Tales, a collaborative composition with NHS workers in Bolton telling the story of their experience of the COVID pandemic, and this led him to develop the Listening Composer method of collaborative composition.