Wednesday
PIERS PLOWRIGHT
In ‘Ghost Voices’, Plowright considers the immediacy and power of the human voice and what it tells and doesn’t tell us. And what listening might tell us about looking.
‘WHAT’S REAL, ANYWAY’ – STEPHEN DEUTSCH, HONOR BEDDARD, MIKE GUNTON and GIDEON KOPPEL discuss sound in documentary, focusing on the representation of nature. Nature is depicted in a variety of ways, from ‘fly-on-the-wall’ programmes such as Naturewatch to Hollywood-treatment, big-budget, blockbuster series such as Planet Earth. It is also depicted in exhibitions, often mute, in films about locations and people, and through sound alone. Each type aims to present the natural world in an engaging and truthful manner, but the range of styles employed makes one wonder what ‘truthful’ means in some of these contexts.
ADAM ROBERTS presents ‘Chantal Akerman’s musicality’
Akerman, talking about the soundtrack for her 1976 film News From Home, said: “It was like a musical piece. We see one car – but the sound is not totally [in] synch… I put the sound more musically than realistically”. What does Akerman mean by ‘musically’? A search for clues in her films making mention of her contact with the contemporary music scene in Downtown New York in the early 1970s.
JULIAN HENRIQUES – ‘Thinking Through Sound – and Learning from Jamaican Bass/Base Culture’ explores the ways of knowing and the ways of making which Jamaican sound system engineers have pioneered over the last 50 years, looking at their understanding of how sound works both in electronic circuitry and on human anatomy. Henriques examines the ways of making the street technology of the sound system set as a musical instrument. He considers the critical influence the instrument of the sound system has on Jamaican music, principally riddim (rhythm), versioning and, of course, dub.
Thursday
SARAH TURNER presents her award-winning, Grierson nominated documentary Public House and the notions of cultural memory and sonic ethnography it embraces. About the film she wrote: ‘I thought of the soundscape as a participative memory work in order to give form to the collective voice and also to move from the I, to the WE, which in many ways is what the Ivy House story represents.’
HANS PETER KUHN gives an overview of his work, specifically since 2002 when he was last at the School of Sound. He will talk about the development of sound in that short period, both technological and in society.
HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP
‘Environmental sound and soundscape composition in landscape and nature documentaries.’ I will discuss this overarching theme in the context of my involvement with two films, both of which address landscapes in British Columbia threatened by fundamental changes in its land use: my first attempt from the 1980s in the film This Borrowed Land, by Bonnie Kreps and my latest involvement with Koneline – Our Land Beautiful, by Nettie Wild.
PETER MIDDLETON and JAMES SPINNEY, directors of Notes on Blindness, present the thinking and research behind their acclaimed film. In addition to its arresting use of sound and image, the film delves into sometimes unnerving notions of human perception.
Friday
CATHERINE ALEXANDER theatre director, actor and teacher presents ‘Sound, Acting and Theatre Making: Using sound as part of actor training, text analysis and theatre devising processes’. “In theatre we can become over-reliant on the visual elements of storytelling and spoken text. I have been exploring how to use sound with actors to discover and communicate dramatic, literal, dynamic and emotional spaces as part of an embodied “felt” experience.”
GEORGE HOME-COOK In ‘Paying Attention to (Theatre) Sound’, Home-Cook investigates what it means to attend theatre by means of listening. Offering insights on aural attention, and by focusing on four core aural phenomena – noise, designed sound, silence and immersion – the talk will end with some reflections on theatrical listening and the aesthetics of atmosphere.
WERNER CEE presents ’I used To Be a Painter’
‘The special character of my ars acustica can be traced back to my studies of painting, to my way of thinking in terms of images and painting techniques. This is what distinguishes my compositions from other, purely musically or narratively conceived works.
For me, it has always been exciting to see how the modes of thought of painters and “sound designers” can be mutually inspiring. There are numerous parallels between painting and sound art and there are terms that play a decisive role in the composition of both visual and acoustic works. Please don’t expect ultimate answers. This is just a kind of audiovisual “slip box” (Zettelkasten) containing hints to some of the subjects that matter in the realms of painting and sound.’
MYCHAEL DANNA (via videolink) speaks about the contemporary challenges and responses to the art of film scoring, drawing upon his fusion of cross-cultural musical styles across a wide range of filmmaking, from the psychological dramas of Atom Egoyan and Ang Lee to animation and the FX series Tyrant.
Saturday
MEET THE SPEAKERS
MARK UNDERWOOD with NEIL BRAND
‘Hearing Voices in the Noise’: A short seminar exploring the phenomena of audio hallucination, and its possible connections to the way we perceive sound and moving image. We will explore our innate desire to make sense of our audio and visual world; to seek order from chaos, to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, safety in the unsettling, and patterns in random information.
PATSY RODENBURG
‘The Voice meeting the Word. Sound equals Sense. When this is enough and when it isn’t. When voices and language need help and when they don’t.’
“During this session I will be discussing craft in speakers and then the lack of it. When the voice and words are not embodied. Hearing but not listening. When words are enough and when they need support. Microphones, underscoring, soundscapes. Understanding the responsibility of the performer and when the technology cannot help. When that which is imposed can reduce and generalise a text and when it enhances it. The power of simplicity and silence.”
WALTER MURCH and ANNABELLE PANGBORN close this year’s School with a discussion looking back and forward, rebooting the discussion about sound in the arts and media. From William Dickson’s prophetic vision of film in 1895 to contemporary forms of audio-visual media, they look at the development of the sensory synergy between sound and image. Key to this, of course, is how we listen and, then, how do we learn to work with these materials.
LARRY SIDER and DIANE SIDER – Closing remarks
Speakers’ Biographies
CATHERINE ALEXANDER studied Drama at Manchester University and trained at L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq. Catherine is Artistic Director of Quiconque and Associate Director for Complicite (including The Master and Margarita, A Disappearing Number and The Elephant Vanishes) with whom she has collaborated for over twenty years. Directing includes The Gypsy Bible, Opera North, Touching Space, Complicite / Royal Academy of Art and The Boy from Centreville, Pleasance. Other work includes Wild Oats, Bristol Old Vic and Coram Boy, National Theatre. Catherine won the Young Vic / Jerwood Prize in 2006 for a five week process exploring sound design in relation to Ionesco’s Amedee. In 2011, she won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. She currently runs BA (Hons.) Acting CDT at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
HONOR BEDDARD is exhibitions curator at the Wellcome Collection in London, where she curated Making Nature (2016-17) and co-curated The Institute of Sexology (2014-15). Previously she was a curator at the Freud Museum and the V&A.
NEIL BRAND has been a silent film accompanist for over 30 years, regularly in London at the Barbican and BFI National Film Theatres, throughout the UK and at film festivals and special events around the world, where he has inaugurated the School of Music and Image to teach up-and-coming young pianists about silent film accompaniment.
Training originally as an actor, he has made his name as a writer/performer/composer, scoring BFI video releases of such films as South (Shackleton’s Journey to the South Pole), The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock, Piccadilly (premiered at the Lincoln Centre), the great lost film The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, and Early Cinema. His most recent DVD scores are for Sherlock Holmes (the great lost Gilette film), Ozu Classics for Criterion and, for the Cinémathèque Française, Maison du Mystere, Le Brasier Ardent, Les Adventures de Robert Macaire and Mauprat.
Neil is also a prolific radio playwright including Sony – and Tinniswood – nominated dramas Stan (which he adapted for BBC TV) and Getting the Joke, as well as establishing the regular live-recorded musical series The Big Broadcast. Recently he has toured to Edinburgh Fringe, Finland’s Midnight Sun Festival, Padua Opera House, Kilkenny comedy festival, the Middle Eastern International Film Festival and throughout the UK and abroad with his hilarious and touching one-man-show The Silent Pianist Speaks.
Neil is becoming well-known as a TV presenter on BBC4 with his hugely successful series Sound of Cinema, The Music that Made the Movies and Sound of Song. He is a regular presenter on Radio 4’s Film Programme, a Fellow of Aberystwyth University and a Visiting Professor of the Royal College of Music and is considered one of the finest improvising piano accompanists in the world. http://www.neilbrand.comvisuals) and radio playwright (creating visuals out of sound alone). www.neilbrand.com
WERNER CEE is a German Sound Art composer, musician and creator of radio art. He has realised more than 30 large-scale Ars Acustica productions for major national broadcasting stations in Germany.
He is not the man to tackle light subjects. His radio works include Luis Buñuel’s last screenplay Agón turned into an acoustical thriller, an inferno of drum sounds (recorded in Buñuel’s home town Calanda) and Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, composed into a fever dream about the end of the world in the Year without a Summer 1816. He focuses on sound dramaturgy, mastering the balancing act betweeen the narrative and the musical meanings of sound.
His special sensitivity for acoustic polysemy can be traced back to his roots in the visual arts. Having studied at the University of Fine Arts Frankfurt/Main in the 70s, he elaborates his radio plays into sounding images, associative scenes and sceneries – but he also works with the ‘real’ image in sound installations/stagings of sound works for festivals such as Herrenhäuser Gärten in Hanover or Schumann Festival Castle Benrath, and in his audio slide shows, where he confronts sounds with his photography.
He has received many international grants and awards. Further information and links to be found on www.wernercee.de.
MYCHAEL DANNA is an Academy Award-winning film composer recognized for his evocative blending of non-western traditions with orchestral and electronic music. His highly awarded works include the Oscar-winning score for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, and his many Genie Award-winning scores for director and longtime collaborator, Atom Egoyan.
His passion for presenting complex ideas in a musically accessible way began as Danna learned his craft at the University of Toronto. There, he was exposed to early- and world-music that later influenced his style. It is also where he began scoring for student theatre groups, as he launched his artistic partnership with Egoyan. Danna has scored all of Egoyan’s films since 1987’s Family Viewing. Danna earned the 2013 Golden Globe and 2013 Oscar for scoring Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, following his collaborations with Lee on The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride with the Devil (1999). Life of Pi’s rich soundscape reflects a deeply transnational story with inventive cross-cultural arrangements: Indian sitars play French melodies, European accordions play South Asian motifs, a church choir sings in Sanskrit, and a variety of other musical combinations soar alongside a full studio orchestra.
Other celebrated collaborations include those with Bennett Miller on Moneyball (2011) and Capote (2005); with Terry Gilliam on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and Tideland (2005); with Mira Nair on Vanity Fair (2004), Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996). Danna’s credits also include the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine (2006). For television, Mychael won an Emmy for World Without End. Mychael and his brother Jeff Danna wrote the original music for the FX series Tyrant. Most recently, they worked on the score for Disney / Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur and received an Annie nomination for Outstanding Achievement, Music in an Animated Feature Production.
STEPHEN DEUTSCH has had his concert music performed by eminent artists, including the Medici Quartet, David Campbell, The Gaudier Ensemble, Andrew Ball, The London Mozart Players and many others. He has composed over thirty scores for film, theatre, radio and television. His many collaborations with the late playwright Peter Barnes include Jubilee (2001), the Olivier Award winning play, Red Noses (1985) and the feature film Hard Times (1994).
Stephen was educated initially in the United States (initial training – Julliard Preparatory Division; BMus – SMU; MA – San Francisco State University). After settling in Britain he attended the Royal College of Music where he was engaged in electro-acoustic composition under the direction of Tristram Cary. In 1971 he and two partners established Synthesizer Music Services, Ltd., an electro-acoustic studio in London.
His recent activity has been in combining music and sound design for moving images. He has directed and composed music/sound for a documentary, Pictures from Applecross which was released in April 2017.
At Bournemouth University, he is Professor of Post-Production. He has also served as Visiting Tutor in Screen Composition at the National Film & Television School. Within both institutions he has trained over 60 composers, some of whom have since provided music for feature films, theatre, television and computer games.
He is an editor of The New Soundtrack, an academic journal which focuses its attention on all the aural elements which combine with moving images.
His first novel, Zweck, was published by Troubador Press in 2016.
MIKE GUNTON, Creative Director BBC Natural History Unit. Mike began working for the BBC after he graduated with a first class degree in Zoology and a Doctorate at Bristol and Cambridge Universities.
Mike’s work within the Natural History Unit has seen him establish the ‘People and Animals’ output, run the Natural World strand and oversee over 120 wildlife films including many award-winning and critically acclaimed series from Yellowstone to Life, Africa, and Life Story.
Outside of TV, Mike has directed the Emmy award winning film One Life, worked closely with Sir David Attenborough and has interviewed E.O. Wilson demonstrating his fundamental grounding in the scientific community. He speaks internationally at media, entertainment and scientific gatherings as an ambassador.
Some of Mike’s recent successful projects include Shark (2015) and Waking Giants (2016) and now Planet Earth II, with exciting upcoming projects like Dynasty.
PROF JULIAN HENRIQUES is convenor of the MA Scriptwriting programme, director of the Topology Research Unit and a former Joint Head of the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. Before Goldsmiths, Julian ran the film and television department at CARIMAC at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica.
His credits as a writer and director include the 1998 feature film Babymother, a reggae musical and improvised short drama We the Ragamuffin and numerous BBC and Channel Four documentaries. Julian researches street cultures, music and technologies and is interested in the uses of sound as a critical and creative tool. In addition, he is also exploring in how some of the mathematics concepts of topology can be used in the understanding social and cultural change.
Julian’s professional practice has recently turned to sound sculpture, with Knots & Donuts installed Tate Modern, in 2011, and at Khoj, New Delhi, in 2013. His publications include Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing, published in 2011; the jointly authored Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (1984) and he was a founding editor of the Ideology & Consciousness journal. Sonic Media Technology, Sociality and Ways of Making is forthcoming. http://www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications/staff/henriques/
DR GEORGE HOME-COOK is a performance practitioner-researcher and freelance lecturer, based in the UK. His research in theatre phenomenology, theatre sound and the aesthetics of atmosphere, has received international recognition and has been translated into French and German. George has taught theatre studies, performance philosophy and the study of sound at a variety of academic institutions, including the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the Royal Academy of Music, Queen Mary, University of London, Buckinghamshire New University and the University of Surrey. He also continues to work as a professional actor, having trained at East 15 Acting School. George is the author of the critically-acclaimed monograph, Theatre and Aural Attention (Palgrave Macmillan), which was nominated for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Theatre and Drama 2014-2015.
GIDEON KOPPEL originally started a mathematics undergraduate degree at London University leaving to take up a job at Utopia Sound Recording Studios as an assistant engineer, where his last album credits were for ‘Flash Gordon’ by Queen and ‘Neutronica’ by Donovan. He returned to full-time education at The London College of Printing and then as a postgraduate student at The Slade School of Fine Art, working in Stuart Brisley’s studio.
Koppel made films for and about various fashion designers including a film installation for ‘Comme des Garçons’ which opened the door for him to make film and television commercials. His first film for broadcast television was Jones for BBC Wales – a maverick drama based on the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones – apparently the only film ever made with a Welsh-speaking Freud. sleep furiously with a soundtrack by Aphex Twin, was one of the most critically acclaimed British films of 2009, winning The Guardian First Feature Film Award. Koppel’s work as an artist has been exhibited in galleries from Tate Modern in London to MoMA in New York.
He is Professor Emeritus of Film at Aberystwyth University and an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.
HANS PETER KUHN is a sound artist and composer. Born in 1952 in Kiel (DE), he lives and works in Berlin and Amino (Kyoto, JP). His light and sound installations are exhibited in many museums and galleries and on public sites worldwide, among others the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Centre Pompidou Paris, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Seattle Art Museum, Tokushima Modern Art Museum. The installation Memory Loss by Robert Wilson and Hans Peter Kuhn was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice 1993. He has worked for theatre with directors like Luc Bondy, Claus Peyman, Peter Zadek and Peter Stein and is best known for the music and sound environments he created in his long-term collaboration with Robert Wilson. He composed the music for dances by Laurie Booth, Dana Reitz, Suzushi Hanayagi, Sasha Waltz and Junko Wada. For this he received the Bessie Award New York and the Suzukinu Hanayagi Award Osaka. Hearing and listening are the themes of his performances that are shown worldwide. Since 2012 he is Guest Professor for Sound Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
PETER MIDDLETON AND JAMES SPINNEY have been working together for the past seven years on a range of fiction, documentary and cross-platform projects. During this period they have adapted the audio diaries of theologian John Hull into a series of award-winning short films. The first of their films, Rainfall, won the Best Documentary Award at Hot Docs 2013, followed in 2014 by the Emmy Award-winning New York Times Op-Doc, Notes on Blindness.
Their debut feature documentary, also entitled Notes on Blindness, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize at the 59th San Francisco Film Festival and the Wellcome Trust Innovation and Storytelling Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest. The project was released alongside the groundbreaking virtual reality project Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, which won the Storyscapes Award at 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, the Prix Europa and the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest.
WALTER MURCH was the first filmmaker to be given the credit ‘sound designer’, several generations of filmmakers have become aware of both the exquisite complexities and sublime joys of film editing and sound design. He has been honoured by both British and American Motion Picture Academies for his picture editing and sound mixing, in 1997 receiving an unprecedented double Oscar for both film editing and sound mixing on The English Patient (A. Minghella), as well as that year’s British Academy Award for best editing. He is currently working in London, editing an independently-financed feature-length documentary on Operation Ajax, the CIA-backed coup that erased the democratic government of Iran in 1953.
ANNABELLE PANGBORN trained as a musician and composer at the London College of Music, and as a filmmaker at the Royal College of Art. She has worked extensively in film and television as a composer and sound designer on award winning drama, documentary, dance film and experimental animation. Collaborations have included work with Penny Woolcock, Sarah Turner, Beeban Kidron, Simon Pummell and most recently, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy on his hugely ambitious film and arts project DAU. She has taught throughout Europe and the UK and was formerly Head of Editing, Sound and Music at the National Film & Television School, UK. She has recently been appointed Director of the Northern Film School, Leeds.
PIERS PLOWRIGHT, radio producer and presenter, has had the pleasure and honour of giving the opening talk at all eleven previous Schools of Sound. His career has been in radio, making radio plays and documentaries for the BBC until 1997 and working as a freelance lecturer and broadcaster since then. But film has meant a great deal to him, from childhood and adolescent visits to the legendary north London cinema, the Everyman – he saw everything from Ingmar Bergman to Jacques Tati – to teaching on the ‘Without Images’ course at the UK’s National Film and TV School. How sound works – or doesn’t work – in movies has become a growing interest, and the human voice and the stories it tells his main fascination.
Piers has won three Italia Prizes for radio documentaries, is a Chicago Third Coast Audio Luminary, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds an honorary DLitt at Bournemouth University.
ADAM ROBERTS, a writer and filmmaker, has won prizes for his work at Ebensee and Angers International film festivals. He has made a series of dance films with choreographer Jonathan Burrows including blue/yellow commissioned and performed by Sylvie Guillem for BBC TV and France 2. Roberts has also made work for gallery exhibition, shown at Siobhan Davies Space, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, BFI Southbank and Haus der Kunst. He is co-founder with Joanna Hogg of A Nos Amours, that has most recently curated a complete Chantal Akerman retrospective at ICA London, and an exhibition of Akerman’s installation art at Ambika P3 London. His writing includes Notes on Film Dance in the International Journal of Screen Dance. His recent film Remake (published by filmarmalade) is showing in the exhibition Nightfall at the Musée Rath, Geneva, curated by Justine Moeckli. He is writing a chapter on Chantal Akerman for a forthcoming book. www.anosamours.co.uk
PATSY RODENBURG, Master Voice and Shakespeare teacher
Patsy is the Head of Voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (26 years) and until recently at the Royal National Theatre (16 years). She is recognised as one of the world’s leading voice and acting coaches. Previously, Patsy was in residence with the Royal Shakespeare Company for nine years and also works with The Royal Court Theatre, Donmar and Almeida Theatre, London. She also has worked extensively with many of the great world theatres including the Moscow Art Theatre, Complicite, Cheek by Jowl, Comedie-Francaise, etc.
Over the past 30 years, Patsy Rodenburg, has become a world expert on teaching voice, speech and presentation skills, initially to actors, but more recently in high profile corporate spheres.
Patsy originally trained as an actor but soon moved into voice coaching, fast becoming an associate of the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and eventually working as Head of Voice at the Royal National Theatre for 16 years. Her first book, The Right to Speak, was first published by Methuen in 1992 and was re-printed in 2015. Patsy then wrote The Need for Words (Methuen, 1993), The Actor Speaks (Methuen, 1997), and Speaking Shakespeare (Methuen, 2001), the last of which is viewed by the theatrical industry as a seminal work on the performance of Shakespeare.
She has worked extensively with actors (including Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Daniel Craig, and Natalie Portman), directors (Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Franco Zeffirelli and Tim Burton) and playwrights (Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett), earning her OBE in 2005 for services to drama. She has also coached extensively for high profile politicians and statesmen. www.patsyrodenburg.co.uk
SARAH TURNER, filmmaker and lecturer, director of Public House
Sarah trained at St Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She is an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic. Her feature films include Ecology, Perestroika (which featured in Tate Britain’s major survey, Assembly), and Perestroika: Reconstructed, conceived and executed as a gallery work (Carroll Fletcher Gallery, London, May 2013).
Her latest feature, Public House, premiered in the Documentary competition, LFF 2015, nominated for the Grierson Award.
Turner’s short film, Cut (18 mins, 2000), was commissioned by Channel 4 and A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater (20 mins, 1996) and Sheller Shares Her Secret (8 mins, 1994), both headlined Midnight Underground when they were broadcast on Channel 4. Sarah has had feature scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films. Amongst other curatorial projects, Turner produced (with Jon Thomson) the launch programme for Lux Cinema in 1997; Hygiene and Hysteria: The body desired and the body debased for Arts Council England and programmes for Tate and the National Film Theatre.
Sarah is currently Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research in the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent.
MARK UNDERWOOD originally trained as a theatre sound designer and live music engineer. He has worked internationally as such for many years. An interest in sound for moving image led him to undertake an MA in film sound post production at the National Film and Television School, where he enjoyed working on numerous documentary, animation and fiction projects. In 2016 Mark was offered the opportunity to commence a program of Post Graduate Research at the University of Surrey, leading to a PhD.
Whilst Head of Sound at Rambert Dance Company in the 1990s Mark recorded and mixed live scores by composers including Steve Reich, Hans Peter Kuhn, Morton Subontnik and Gavin Briars. He developed a particular interest in the use of pre-recorded and edited environmental sound, co-composing the sound score for Siobhan Davies’ Winnsoboro’ Cotton Mill Blues, which went on to win an Olivier award for dance.
Mark has an ongoing fascination with the liminal area between score and soundtrack, and the perceived function of sound in relation to the moving image.
HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP’s work focuses on listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology. She was a member of the original World Soundscape Project, working with R. Murray Schafer; has taught courses in Acoustic Communication at Simon Fraser University with Barry Truax; has worked with writers Norbert Ruebsaat and Sharon Thesen, with photographer Florence Debeugny and has conducted soundscape workshops and given concerts and lectures internationally. Some of her compositional work appears in US filmmaker Gus van Sants films Elephant and Last Days and most recently in Vancouver filmmaker Nettie Wild’s stunning film Koneline – Our Land Beautiful.
By focusing the ears’ attention to details in the acoustic environment, her compositional work draws attention to the act of listening itself and to the inner, hidden spaces of the environment we inhabit. For details check her website: www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca.
Her music has been commissioned by CBC Radio, Canada Pavilion at Expo ’86, Ars Electronica (Linz), Österreichischer Rundfunk, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Germany. She received Honorable Mentions in competitions such as Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, Prix Italia, and the International Competition for Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, as well as a Recommendation for Broadcast from the International Music Council’s 4th International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music. Her articles have been published in Radio Rethink, Kunstforum, Musicworks, MusikTexte and a variety of books. For an extensive exploration into her compositional work see Andra McCartney’s Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Work of Hildegard Westerkamp, York University, Toronto, 1999, and at: http://beatrouteproductions.com/Andradiss.pdf
In the Fall 2014 her compositions were featured in Vancouver New Music’s Festival Sonic Topographies. In March 2016 she was invited to Paris where she presented her 8-channel compositions at PRESENCES electronique in Paris (see website), where she lectured, and developed a soundwalk with students and presented her compositional work at the festival Transitions sonores at the Université 8 (see website).
As part of Vancouver New Music’s yearly season she has coordinated and led Soundwalks since 2003, which in turn inspired the creation of The Vancouver Soundwalk Collective:She is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), and until recently, long-time co-editor of its journal Soundscape – The Journal of Acoustic Ecology.