'Pacific Pathways': Capturing 'The Idea of South' in the imagined past and the globalised present.

An original work, Pacific Pathways (PP), for 4 solo voices and orchestra will be composed, realised via a series of workshops with the vocal ensemble Scottish Voices and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, and documented in score, recording, conference paper and journal article

Summary of theme and text
The (pre-Enlightenment) European view of The South (the Mediterranean) was comprehensively re-configured in the 18th century, by voyages of 'discovery', which opened up the southern hemisphere to more extensive mutual interchange with the northern. Another process of cultural re-configuration has been brought about in the last century by technical innovations, from air-travel to internet, which generated the cultural concept of a global world in which all the component parts are simultaneously present and inter-connected in the collective mind.
The Great Circle journey (Britain to Australia and back), as traversed by Cook and Banks, is the iconic image of the first re-configuration The incessant multi-directional tracking of satellites over our inter-active 21st-century world is the iconic image of the second. Into the South (ITS), my prequel to PP, was concerned primarily with the first of these re-configurations. PP expatiates on the second.

My text has been especially written by Canberra-based poet Alan Gould (author of 20 published volumes, including 10 of poetry). One of Gould's fingerprints is the way in which he presents aspects of a globalised contemporary Australia (drawing upon contemporary, often technological, vocabulary and topics) infused with echoes from the country's 18th- and 19th-century past, alongside vocabulary and topics echoing 40,000 years of aboriginal culture. This was the reason for choosing Gould as the text's commissionee. Following the structure of Gould's text, PP will have 7 movements, albeit performed continuously without a break

In ITS, I imagined the 18th-century journeys in the context of Australia's remote past as part of the ancient land-mass comprised of the pre-historic continents Pangaia, Laurasia and Gondwanaland. Alongside the 18th-century narrative, ITS traced the land's gradual coming to life over millennia of geological time, and the arrival firstly of flora and fauna and later of human (aboriginal) cultures. The form of ITS therefore comprised 2 sections, representing these pre-historic and post-Enlightenment narratives: one a large-scale variation of the other

PP will project these elements into the present, presenting Australia from the 21st-century perspective of a satellite tracking over the continent and its global (esp South Pacific) environment. Again the present is imagined in the context of the past: this time, the past as unfolded in ITS, with its pre-historic and 18th-century histories. So, there are again 2 components, but instead of 2 consecutive sections, 2 simultaneous layers, one laid over the other
.....2 layers with different natures: a sub-stratum representing the pre-historic and 18th-century elements (basically narrative in character) and a super-structure representing the present (basically a tissue of multi-directional intertwining networks, characterised by teeming, labyrinthine detail)
.....2 layers interacting polyphonically as PP proceeds, metaphorically reenacting the interconnectedness of past and present

The task is to realise all this in specific musical practices and events. My Case for Support is therefore devoted to as comprehensive an exegesis of the conceptual path from general to particular as 2000 words will permit: from topics in critical theory, cultural studies and literature, through various 'points of departure' in recent and historic musics, to detailed compositional practices: treatment of pitch-collections, time-series, textural configurations, formal archetypes, 'frame-based' musical architecture, transformational theory et al) and strategies for developing, amending, redirecting or recontextualising these.