Background

Decreation resulted from artist and writer Lily Hibberd approaching Philip to provide music for "a very weird sound installation involving a counter-tenor, a Schoenberg score, and something akin to Goblin's Suspiria soundtrack as a backdrop to a 13-channel voiceover installation". The basic music tracks were recorded but the project never saw fruition due to lack of funding.

Credits

Text & direction - Lily Hibberd
Music - Philip Brophy
Vocalist - Dean Sky-Lucas

2009

Developed - project terminated

Overview

In Lily's words: "In 1912 Schoenberg premiered Pierrot Lunaire, a composition that set Albert Giraud’s poem of the same name to an atonal score. The text is delivered as Sprechstimme, or spoken word, a style that emphasised the male narrator’s voice (usually a soprano), and dramatised the relationship between voice and instrumentation in a combination that Schoenberg called ‘melodrama’. Pierrot Lunaire, or ‘Moonstruck Pierrot’, is a work of many contradictions; contrasting classical music form with a cabaret style, and progressive rock is arguably a contemporary incarnation of this blending of forms. Decreation melds corresponding elements of disphonic, atonal and classical structural design in its melange of Pierrot Lunaire’s vocal score with a prog rock composition especially created for the project.

The thematic tendency of both these musical styles is toward the mythical and the cosmic, and these universal concerns underpin Decreation too. The title of this work is drawn from the practical philosophy of French theologian Simone Weil. In Gravity and Grace Weil used the term ‘decreation’ to describe a kind of liberation through a form of undoing, saying ‘We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves’. These themes pervade the music and lyrics of Decreation." .

Technical

The initial work developed for Decreation entailed first recording Dean singing a passage Lily had selected and edited from Weil's text. These words were sung to Schoenberg's Sprechstimme score from Pierrot Lunaire. This idea of Lily's was central to the concept and method of fusing the two texts. Following this session, a new atonal composition was cpmposed to match the pitch and phrasing of Dean's vocals. One version of this resulting track was performed on piano; a second version was recorded with bass and keyboards. Finally, a series of digital abstractions of Dean's solo singing were constructed, each providing a granular vocality that evoked a human singing as well as non-human utterances and glossolalia.