24 Hour Sibelius

24 Hour Sibelius is music in slow motion. By slowing Sibelius’ seven symphonies we can examine what is sound, what is music, what is noise. Something familiar can be unfamiliar and unknowable. We freeze the moments and step around them, looking, examining, listening. By abstracting Sibelius out of usual time, we can hear it.

I appropriate the words of Douglas Gordon talking about 24 Hour Psycho:

24 Hour Psycho, as I see it, is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation... it wasn't a straightforward case of abduction. The original work is a masterpiece in its own right, and I've always loved to watch it. ... I wanted to maintain the authorship of Hitchcock so that when an audience would see my 24 Hour Psycho they would think much more about Hitchcock and much less, or not at all, about me...

24 Hour Sibelius is not simply a work of appropriation. There is no disguising, manipulation or alteration of the music, other than slowing down the speed at which it is reproduced, which results in a corresponding drop in pitch. I wonder if it were played by an orchestra on another planet where the force of gravity makes the days longer and time flow differently, would all music sound like this.

By slowing down, we are able to hear the hidden parts of music, the secret dissonances. It’s like looking at it through a magnifying glass, seeing parts normally invisible, hearing the acoustic waves as they form.  We get to hear all the noises and silences that go into music, the sound you can hear sitting in the middle of an orchestra, or putting you head against a piano, listening to the echoes slamming around the wood and metal, and the silences, as dark as shadows.

24 Hour Sibelius follows the form of music, the same harmonies, rhythms and relationships between notes, exaggerated through the magnification of time.

Eleanor MacFarlane digital audio 24 hours 2013

Blogger unable to take audio files.

There is a 10 minute small file excerpt on Youtube:

http://youtu.be/Ouk2z715-OY

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Making and Finishing 24 Hour Sibelius

After deciding or realising that 24 Hour Sibelius was better as a sound piece without moving image, I have been finishing it.

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/24-hours-sibelius-project.html

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/just-like-that-plans-for-final-unit.html

There were some technical aspects of dealing with such a large file which stretched my equipment to the edge of capability. I had to make some decisions about how much to manipulate the sound, how many gaps of silence to leave, and so on. Any time I made a change everything took ages to remake. The biggest challenge was making it exactly 24 hours - it all fitted quite neatly into about 24 and a half hours, but at last it is exact.

I have made some tentative enquiries about finding somewhere to install it. My ideal would be a church. I can just imagine that, echoing, whispering, sometimes alarming. A piece of work is not really finished until it is shown, and so I hope to make that occasion happen.

22nd November 2013