Author Archives: Tullis Rennie

BSc Students visit Tate Modern

Students taking the BSc in Music, Sound and Technology recently met at London’s Tate Modern gallery to experience Christain Marclay’s film The Clock.  Marclay’s work connects with many topics that were discussed in the Music, Sound and Technology module throughout the term, including musical and audio-visual techniques of sampling, cut-up, splice and montage, as well as wider issues relating to authorship. and the use of environmental or found sound as compositional materials.

Current student Fabian has written evocatively about his experience of the trip.

We woke up that last Friday of our first term, excited and exhausted. It had been a long term of lectures, labs and assignments – but today was the day. We had only one more class, then the famous Christmas Cabaret – an all-department event filled with music, dancing, and a little too many bottles of wine.
The morning was raining and cold yet none of that mattered because we were going to the Tate, one of the better modern art museums in London. Our lecturer, Tullis Rennie, brought the perfect storm. The last day of term, Christmas cabaret, and a field trip instead of class – it felt like being in primary again.

The reason we went to the Tate was due to their showing of The Clock, a 24-hour film by Christian Marclay. The film is a collection of shots of clocks arranged in real time, i.e. it is 10:24 in the morning so you see a clock in the film at 10:24. Thousands of shots from films arranged in perfect timing to the real world, so that every minute there’s at least one instant of the time. It could be a simple bedside clock, or someone can ask for the time and a character replies. You can see slices of popular films as well as random shots from films you would’ve never seen before. This collage is nothing short of a masterpiece, with the most impressive part being the cohesiveness of the shots in combination. Audio flows from one to the other, and the tracks make contextual sense – it’s not just random shots thrown around. It’s a precisely edited and arranged piece of art.

We sat in the Tate theatre for around an hour in the morning, seeing the 10:15-11:15 am section of the film. I would recommend anyone that wants to see this piece to see it at any time they are able to. In the morning the film will be riddled with shots of people going to work, and at night with people stumbling home from a pub; yet every minute is an interesting peak into the way that civilization moves around in our 24 hour time frame.
I only hope that we can have more field trips to further our outside experience into the arts. Go! Watch it – experience it.

 

Walls on Walls create new installation for Music Department

Over the past few months students and staff in and around the Music Department, along with concert-going visitors, have been taking the opportunity participate in creating a new audio-visual artwork for the Performance Space foyer.

The piece was facilitated by Walls On Walls – visual artist Laurie Nouchka with  composer and Lecturer in Music Tullis Rennie. Their work forms part of Dr Rennie’s practice-based research into participative process and distributed authorship in sound and visual arts practice.

 

The new artwork explores the past history, current profile and possible futures of the department, taking inspiration from the architecture of the building and activity happening within it.

Students from 1st year undergraduate through to Masters and PhD took part in creating the content for this work. The group focused on themes relating to in-between, liminal and hidden spaces of the department.

Students recorded audio in specific spaces, including making electro-magnetic recordings, sounds walks and spoken interviews. Visually, the design emerged by drawing these spaces and responding to the audio through mark-making and audio-visual representations, both literal (sonograms) and more abstract, individual responses.

 

The project offers a chance to learn professional skills in publicly-engaged arts practice. The project also connected more formally with some 2nd year composition modules, MA Interdisciplinarity and the SPARC Listening Group.

We invite you to a sharing of the piece on the Wednesday 30th May 2018 at 6pm in the Performance Foyer space.

Laurie Nouchka, Visiting Artist

https://www.wallsonwalls.co.uk

City Music students visit Fabric

Students taking a new module in Electronic Dance Music had a privileged visit to Clerkenwell clubbing institution Fabric recently. They were met and shown around the building by the club manager, artistic programmer, marketing manager and chief sound engineer, who all gave unique perspectives on what it takes to run a large, iconic club in London for the last 18 years.

 

Students were able to set foot inside the famous Room 1 DJ booth, experience the unique ‘bodysonic’ sub-bass transducer dance floor, as well as hear the same music played back (at full volume!) on different systems… all to themselves!

  

 

A huge thanks to Judy, Kirsti, Luke and Pierre for taking their time to host us.

Tullis Rennie releases new record ‘Muscle Memory’

Muscle Memory is a new record by composer Tullis Rennie, featuring two recently composed sound pieces made in collaboration with Matthew Bourne and Graham South.

The new release was recently described by The Wire Magazine as “a piece of meta art; an album about listening to music”.

The record is part autobiographic docu-music, part jazz-inspired dreamscape. It is available as a limited numbered vinyl only release from November 2017.

Each recording begins on the sofa in the house of a collaborator. Tullis joins Matthew in his idyllic Yorkshire hilltop live-in studio, and  Graham in his Manchester red-brick front room. From ‘listening-in’ to chat in these domestic spaces, we then float into abstract realms of electronic textures and improvised musical conversations between each pair.

The release was recently celebrated with a series of intimate listening parties held in living rooms in London, Hasting, Brighton and Manchester.

Dr Simon Waters, in a Contemporary Music Review article discussing the work, writing:

“Muscle Memory begins to answer questions about how one work can comment on and analyse or critique another through its own agency as music. It also demonstrates how a work can marshal autobiography and ethnography to illuminate the human capacity to manipulate and be manipulated by musical activity. It explicitly engages multiple modes of listening and points of view: documentary ‘field’ recordist; participant observer; soundscape composer; ‘amateur’ musicologist and music lover; DJ and remix artist; spectromorphological composer—and allows the listener to explore different modes of listening through these multiple and nested points of view such that this becomes the primary formal concern. The listening home (the point of view) is contingent and transitory as we move through the scant twelve and a half minutes of the piece, so the listener is constantly becoming re-involved with, and made conscious of, the act of listening”

Waters, S. (2015) ‘Tullis Rennie’s Muscle Memory : Listening to the Act of Listening’ Contemporary Music Review 34(1), pp.22–32.

 

City students perform at London venue IKLECTIK

City University Experimental Ensemble (CUEE) – an 18-piece student ensemble directed by Tullis Rennie –  recently performed a public concert of freely improvised music at central London venue IKLECTIK. The programme included works of graphic notation, animated scores and brand new pieces composed especially for the ensemble.

CUEE at IKLECTIK Ryan Ross Smith

CUEE play Ryan Ross Smith’s animated score ‘Study no. 40.3 [pulseven]’

Composer and baritone saxophonist Cath Roberts featured as a guest artist , while MA composer Leon Lewington premiered his new work aMass.

CUEE at IKLECTIK Cath Roberts

Cath Roberts introduces ‘March of the Egos’, written for CUEE

Anna Vaughan and Jamie Turner – two final-year undergraduate members of the group – wrote about their experiences of playing at one of London’s most respected venues for improvised music.

Anna: “I am a a third year student who played the electric violin in CUEE. One of the best gigs in my uni experience was on April 5th when CUEE got to play at IKLECTIK right in the heart of London. We played pieces that had been written specifically for the ensemble which was such an incredible feeling. Having a London composer work with us gave it an immense professional presence. The outcome of the gig was an incredible feeling. A general public audience who came to enjoy young artists perform new experimental music gave it such an incredible atmosphere. Like I said before, one of the best gigs I’ve played at thanks to the effort that has been put into this ensemble.”

Jamie:  “I was ecstatic after CUEE’s IKLEKTIK gig, it’s the furtherest the ensemble has traveled from the university grounds and the experience was invaluable for us performers. The venue was well sourced for our brand of contemporary music, all members of the ensemble engaged passionately and professionally throughout the evening, and the public turn out helped to reassure us that there is still an audience for this style of music. Over the past year the transition from a student led independent group to a fully accredited ensemble has been seamless and I am confident that CUEE will continue to develop and expand its reach exponentially in the years to come.”

CUEE at IKLECTIK Anna Vaughan Jamie Turner Cath Roberts

Anna Vaughan (violin, centre) and Jamie Turner (guitar, right) perform Cath Robert’s ‘Wasps/Wolves’ with Leo Bennett (piano, left)