Richard Bowers – Sketches A and B towards an Electra

http://www.richardbowers.co.uk/fork1b.htm

My overarching project – which currently bears the working title 14 Short Operas About 14 Long Operas – draws upon material I had produced as far back as my late teens right up to the present day.

This present work is a test piece for the operas. I’m trying out methods – notably the use of asemic vocals being given meaning through the use of subtitles. This is both a practical and a formal choice: practical in that the voice is freed from the limitations imposed by language; formal in that it corresponds to my predilection for collage and a correspondence of sound, text and vision that arises from circumstances the are both within my control and outside it.

I began with a layer of voice-like ‘mist’ that is renewed every 41 seconds and decorated with improvisations on flute and violin. Chords derived from recordings made with musicians during my Sunlight and Dirt project in 2019 puncture this static surface. This formed a scaffold for the visuals – composites of photographs made, or simply used, in Sunlight and Dirt. This ensemble formed the work Winter Scatters Berries on Brittle Snow for the exhibition The Coming of Age and was essentially a commentary on Sunlight and Dirt.

Barricade was made for Fringe Arts Bath in 2023. In this site-specific installation, recordings of soprano Grace Curtis were transfigured and filled the space of the chapel acoustically with a flood of asemic vocal texture.

Video A (cinema): Taking the Winter video and soundtrack as a starting point, I imposed a layer of the soprano recordings, tying them to a text derived from Electra, King Lear and Hamlet.

Video B (gallery): The movements of actor Sybille Schmitz’s face stand as ‘singer’, and fragments of text from Sunlight and Dirt provide the subtitles.