The sounds of colour: exploring the creative affordances of "colour-scores" through composition

Authors

Abstract

In this thesis I explore the affordances of colour as a component of musical scores. The accompanying artistic portfolio includes eleven new compositions and recordings which each examine a different facet of colour as notation. Through arts-based action research, I composed and rehearsed the compositions in conjunction with thirty-five performing musicians to gather their musical and reflective responses to the notations. Their nuanced yet closely connected responses revealed various insights into the nature of musical interpretation, relationships between musicians and score, and multi-modal score practices, which are shared through five discussion chapters. In Chapter 3, I discuss my portfolio of colour-scores, describing my musical and visual choices for each work. The compositions shared here are not only tools for research: their chronology represents the narrative of my artistic growth, each developing organically and responsively to my synaesthesia and experiences of the visual world. This chapter acts as an artistic glossary for recordings, participant names, and themes. Chapters 4 and 5 share my development of a new theory of cross-modal interpretation. Cross-modal interpretation describes musicians' embodied and physically-enacted engagement with cross-modal correspondences (cross-sensory associations based in language, culture, and lived experience) during their musical interpretations of open colour notations. Importantly, I found cross-modal interpretation to be mediated by both visual and situational context. In Chapters 6 and 7, I move beyond the musical outcomes to examine the role of non-conventional notations in facilitating interactions between score, performer, composer, music, and audience. When colour was positioned as an open (or indeterminate) notation, the process of interpretation moved away from one of realisation or reproduction toward a more collaborative act of collective negotiation among those involved. In this context, any and all graphic signs became potential arbiters of musical meaning, including extra-musical pictorial graphics which contributed to "immersive," "embodied," and "imaginative" engagement with the scores. A final key finding relates to my own experiences immersing myself within a new compositional medium. Through autoethnographic inquiry, I share how my composition practice is intertwined with my identity an Autistic woman, and how I learned to "un-mask" my Autistic traits in tandem with my embrace of graphic colour-scores.

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