Overview
McGill CORE pages
McGill University
OVERVIEW to Round 1
The Composer-Performer Orchestration Research Ensemble (CORE) is an ACTOR project where student composers and performers explore matters of orchestration through a research-creation process. McGill University’s first year of the CORE project was implemented as a year-long weekly seminar organized into 4 phases during the 2019-20 academic year:
An introduction phase included five lectures on timbre and orchestration from different perspectives, such as perception, performance, and aural sonology notation. The students then briefly presented as well - the composers presented seed ideas, and the performers presented their respective instruments and some of their capabilities as an ensemble. This phase was shared with the composition students from UdeM.
The exploration phase included improvisations and readings of sketches ranging from graphic scores to short written sections.This phase was shared with the composition students from UdeM.
The problem-solving phase consisted of rehearsals of in-progress drafts of the composers’ work, allowing for feedback from the performers and iterated revisions.
The realization phase consisted of the last rehearsals of the completed 8-10 minute pieces. It was also intended that rehearsals of pieces sent from the other CORE project institutions would happen, culminating in a final concert. These very last rehearsals and final concert were cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.
MATERIALS GENERATED AND ARCHIVED
PowerPoint presentations of lectures
Early sketches (diagrams, music notation, descriptions of targeted effects, audio recordings to imitate)
Scores at various stages (including scans of some conductor's scores)
Audio recordings (stereo) of all workshop sessions
Video recordings of selected lectures and workshop sessions
Video interviews in French or English
Transcriptions of all interviews