Work by three Music PhD students and members of the Reid School of Music's resident ensemble, Plus-Minus Ensemble, was streamed on 4 September as part of the final phase of our Summer 2020 Graduate Showcase.

The students involved were Ioannis Panagiotou, Jack Walker and Aggelos Mastrantonis.

Dr Gareth Williams, Chancellor’s Fellow in Reid School of Music, said: "What should have been a live concert by our visiting ensemble became a multimedia, online set of works that have a really intense, almost introverted and haunted quality to them as a result. The three pieces seem to mourn the loss of live music in the world just now, but also celebrate the act of creating new sounds in all its anarchic splendour.”

The performers and composers involved included:

Plus Minus Ensemble performers

• Aisha Orazbayeva, Violin
• Vicky Wright, Clarinet
• Mark Knoop, Piano

Composers

• Ioannis Panagiotou, “Play Me”
• Jack Walker, “Assembly Lines”
• Aggelos Mastrantonis, “Shoggoth”

Ioannis Panagiotou, Play Me

Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, "PLAY ME" is a video work that discusses the difference between physical-perceptual experience and our limited understanding of the outer world. The artwork uses a first-person walking practice in combination with narration and sound as a mapping tool, and public pianos as a guide for exploring our cities and the aesthetics of digital culture.

Ioannis Panagiotou is a Greek UK-based artist, composer and researcher. As an artist he explores transdisciplinarity by combining various media, materials and technologies. Works by him have been exhibited and performed in Dialogues Festival, PLUG Festival, Greek National Opera, Audio Visual Arts Festival, MIRY Concertzaal, MUSA Collection Centre, Vilniaus rotušė and Corfu's Museum of Asian Art & Old Venetian Fortress among others. He has also collaborated with contemporary ensembles such as Red Note, Edinburgh Quartet, Decoda, Edinburgh Film Music Orchestra, Edinburgh Contemporary Ensemble and St Andrews New Music Ensemble.
 

Jack Walker, Assembly Lines

Assembly Lines is the result of a prompt-based improvisation game. Each member of the ensemble sits alone, listens to a sound that was prepared earlier, and records themselves playing over the top of it. Alongside each sound-prompt is a list of written suggestions, tailored roughly to the player/instrument in question, which supplies ideas for certain types of musical behaviour that Jack wants to encourage at certain parts of the prompt.

Jack is a composer and computer programmer who enjoys working with improvising musicians and autonomous computer systems. He wants to get to a point at which it is very difficult to tell the difference between the two.