2016, Smith, Paul

While many composers find inspiration in the musical works of others, a recent period of my compositional work has been interested not in the musical but in rendering the visual as musical. Going against the dominant musical pedagogy of studying composers and musical techniques, I have looked to Japanese anime, animated cartoons, as my source of artistic influence and found in the shapes, colours, tones and contours of animation everything I need to compose music. An added benefit of this is that it forces a correlation and consideration between the boundaries of artistic languages and sensory media. For a period in 2010 I was specifically interested in the way anime portrayed the Japanese aesthetic known as kawaii, which translates approximately as cuteness or cute. Writing for the Italian pianist Antonietta Lofreddo at this time, I was interested in composing music that explored childhood. As my own childhood was populated with cute anime characters, I took this as my creative impetus. The result was a four movement suite for piano I named the Kawaii Suite. The artistic act of writing four pieces of music drawing on kawaii aesthetics has forced me as a composer to consider the dynamic relationship between music and source material, particularly as the source material in this case is two-fold involving both the kawaii aesthetic more generally and the specific anime characters. To destabilise any formal qualities of authorship that may be used to view my process, I prefer to consider my music from this period as similar to a work of translation, which Zeller defines as ‘a work of art emanating from another author’s context’.

2021-06-19, Smith, Paul, City of Sydney: Australia

'12 THREADS' was a performance event of three newly developed and commissioned Australian art songs which presented contemporary stories, perspectives and thoughts from diverse Australian female artists.

12 THREADS utilised an innovative curatorial technique where 12 artists from diverse disciplines were brought together to collaborate on three new musical and vocal works. The project moved against the dominant composition process where the composer is seen as the central author of new music. In this project, vocalists, instrumentalists, writers, and composers were all equal contributors to the scope, focus, themes, and final aesthetic of the songs. Initial workshops encouraged collaboration and cross-disciplinary knowledge. The project drew on three types of writer, with the musicians collaborating across forms including poetry, prose fiction, and playwriting. The performances were all pairs of one singer and one instrumentalist and the work contributes to the Australia repertoire for cello, flute and recorder.

2020-09-08, Steward, Neil Raymond, Hewitt, Donna, Smith, Paul

Early Winter Light is a practice led project that investigates the influence and inspirations on compositional practice of place; a container of physical, environmental, social and cultural meanings and its concomitant connector – travel. Music and place are intimately bound together, each influencing the other; through environmental, cultural or political aspects, contribution to sounds and the timbres of music and through connections to composers. Music is able to conjure up images of, and feelings for, place, building individual political and cultural identities, providing cultural contexts through connection with place and facilitating and connecting memories. Place and travel inspire my creative practice through relating to my identity, stimulating me to create musical pieces, and influencing my musical representations. The resultant pieces display how these ideas and inspirations are approached, aesthetically, stylistically and technically, and how they are consolidated within a compositional approach. The associated exegesis explores and explains the works fashioned by the author’s journey as a composer reviewing the methodology and practices undertaken in creating this body of work. The project adds to, expands and becomes part of the body of the author’s compositional practice, as well as joining a broader and existing body of work that explores, models and illuminates the notions of place and travel within music.

2018-07-19, Smith, Paul

This opera responds to the question of how chamber opera can involve aspects of the cabaret aesthetic. The opera is a dark satire of many character and narrative opera tropes and mediates them through the cabaret aesthetic mixed with humour, slight-of-hand, physical comedy and burlesque. The opera has been performed in bars, cabaret venues and small theatres which contribute to its cabaret aesthetic. The show challenges traditional female relationships in opera and centres on the body of a dead man instead of a dead woman as so many canonic operas do.

2011, Smith, Paul

This work explores the Japanese kawaii aesthetic through music. It is an outcome of research that explores "ekphrasis" - the act of one art form remediating another. In this case, music is remediating the kawaii aesthetic of Japanese anime characters. Each movement of the work is based on a different animated character exploring musical and visual gesture.

2019-02-09, Hewitt, Donna, Smith, Paul, Chau, Jermaine, Fournier, Cloe

This work explores the intersections between opera, puppetry and wearable technologies and contributes to the growing body of work in the contemporary opera and experimental electronic music fields. Study II is a new experimental work for two performers that explores the dominant themes of puppetry and specifically the notion of control and interactions with the body and projection of the voice. The world of puppetry involves a complex hierarchy for the performers and also challenges audiences to consider causal actions during the show. The traditional relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer is examined in the first work, Study I, where the puppeteer is deliberately placed in the position of power, which is the prevalent understanding of the relationship.
One Amsterdam based puppeteer, Neville Trantor, who has been working with his puppet for 35 years says his work has been an experiment with the relationship between him and his puppet. ‘It all has to do with power,’ he says, ‘and who is the boss.' Sometimes it's him, sometimes it's the puppet. Study II however plays with the paradox of the relationship inverting the normal perceived power relationships and we see the influence of the puppet on the puppeteer. The role of vocal manipulation is also examined in the context of the relationship between the two characters on stage, drawing on the idea of the ventriloquist who moves the puppet, yet produces the voice of the puppet. This influence of the puppet on the puppeteer is portrayed in the design of the performance by the puppet having control over the voice of the puppeteer via the movement of their limbs which are tracked via sensors on the wearable devices. Data from the wearable controllers is fed into a computer where it controls the processing of the puppeteers voice.
The work draws together the fields of electronic music, and opera performance practice to consider how the musical and performative overlap can be structured in relation to the concept of puppetry. The use of wearable gestural controllers opens up a modern paradigm for the concept of the puppet, where the data from the movement of the bodies can be used in many ways to control the performance elements. The performers can control each other, their voice and the production of the sound and media elements. The work is significant and topical in relation to recent gender politics regarding control of the body. The work offers an opportunity to extend the practices of artists from discrete fields in a new and complimentary way and is significant in its attempt to expand opera practice in Australia. The development of this work was supported by the QLab residency program at the Q Theatre.
Reference: Smith, Amanda. The Uncanny Life of Puppets in the Body Sphere https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/bodysphere/features/puppets/4618828 Accessed 14 Feb 2019

2016-12-08, Smith, Paul

This composition is for altered piano duo made up of one piano and one toy piano. The work extends toy piano art music repertoire by being performed with a piano which is uncommon combination. The piece was written as part of a series of works by multiple composers who were exploring multiple keyboard compositions.

2022-07-05, Gleeson, Christopher John, Stoessel, Jason, Smith, Paul

The aim of this research is to demonstrate how Western classical music, involving the violin, can draw on jazz elements, to produce original musical compositions that contribute to the creation of new knowledge. As well as traditional research methods practice-led and research-led methodologies will be applied. Barbara Bolt’s concept of pragmatic concern will be exercised in determining the form and playability of musical ideas that have been conceived, invented and adapted both through experimentation and with reference to jazzimprovisation tutors. This research project will explore the translation of jazz improvisational material into notated compositional ideas that advance the knowledge of classical string players and fill a gap in the technical repertoire for violin. Jazz, with its African American origins, has influenced classical composers since the early 20th century. Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Erwin Schulhoff are outstanding examples of this. There have been many more recent developments in jazz that have yet to be incorporated in literature for the violin, especially with regard to the technical training repertoire.

2020-11, Smith, Paul

'Street Notes' was a two-week outdoor and livestreamed classical music festival in Western Sydney. Six mini concerts of music ranging from the Baroque period to 2021 were presented to the public to invigorate and alter public spaces with sound. The project asked: how can classical music be used to invigorate and alter public spaces emerging from COVID lockdowns in 2020. The curatorship of the project brought together eight emerging composers and performers of classical music. The artists were guided through rehearsal and repertoire choice by the artistic director. This was the first-time unrelated repertoire by women composers, composers-of-colour and new world premieres was performed in an outdoor festival in Western Sydney. The artistic director visited the locations and worked with the performers to choose appropriate repertoire for each location creating bespoke concerts for the public demonstrating a new curatorial methodology. The project blended aspects of and considered formal music performance, busking as well as the nature of fixed and transient audiences of classical music.

2017-11-07, Smith, Paul

Billy’s Swan is an electroacoustic work which assesses the fantastic escapism that dance can offer the young queer male identity. The audio adopts routine melodic fragments from Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, Swan Lake, and sets these against expressive digital sounds. The fantastic element is symbolised by a sprawling climax of bells chimes (sounds with queer potential) that develop as the piece progresses and the fragments of ballet score fade out. The piece uses musical traditions of arrangement and transcription coupled with the social and political meanings of different sound worlds to consider queer identities.