An exploration of the possibilities of generating music from text

In the seven compositions presented in this folio I explore ways in which text can generate music. A central focus of this research is to explore my response, through musical composition, to the analysis and interpretation of text. In the course of this exploration, ideas about text and musical composition have been drawn from a range of writers in the cultural disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, and musicology. The compositions offer different approaches to this exploration. Four of the seven compositions incorporate the voice, singing or speaking, either as a soloist or in a choral group. Two of these involve electro-acoustic treatments. Another of the compositions is the setting of a poem for solo piano while two are instrumental trios that draw on a number of musical and linguistic texts. The texts are selected from a range of writers, from the well known to the anonymous, from poets to composers. My subjective response to a writer’s work, and to what I have come to know about that writer, informs my compositional process. The seven compositions are accompanied by a critical commentary that outlines the ideas about text that have informed my research. The commentary describes the compositional approaches, methods and techniques that I have employed in each of the works. It also provides background information and my response to the texts that have inspired the compositions, and details how these texts have generated the musical materials