Brian Lock, Senior Lecturer in Composition, visited Shanghai in October to prepare for performances of his new multimediate work, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.
Commissioned by Dai Xiaorong, Director of the Digital Media Arts School at Shanghai Conservatoire, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds is a collaboration between Brian and artist filmmaker Steve Geliot. It takes its inspiration from Bernard Le Bovier De Fontanelle’s poetic 1686 book of the same title. The work received its world premiere in the Shanghai International Arts Festival, performed by young musicians from the conservatoire.
This multimedia and fusion work for mixed Chinese and Western Ensemble, and electronics, is performed against visual design and cinematography. Brian’s music ‘fuses’ all sorts of things: musical traditions, traditional instruments of Chinese and Western orchestras, technology and traditional sounds, ‘found’ traditional sounds – like those of the bicycles and clocks – with the latest commercial computer generated sound worlds. The work was performed three times at the festival and will now tour — with Brian present as a hologram, having been filmed in front of a green screen!
