Composing network forms: an evolving artistic practice

Shipsey, Laura 2024. Composing network forms: an evolving artistic practice. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

	PDF (Volume one of two: portfolio of original compositions) - Accepted Post-Print Version Download (9MB)
	PDF (Volume two of two: academic commentary) - Accepted Post-Print Version Download (3MB)
	PDF (Supplementary materials: recordings) - Supplemental Material Download (229kB)
	PDF (Cardiff University Electronic Publication Form) Restricted to Repository staff only Download (131kB)

Abstract

This collection of music and the commentary that accompanies it offer a window into four years of research in music composition. Beginning with the paradoxical question of creating continuing discontinuity in musical form, the project quickly widens and refocuses, examining the fabric from which form emerges, and the logic through which it speaks, suggesting network form as one possible answer. Working with disparate materials spanning the notated and improvised, the remembered, borrowed, and imagined, this research is concerned with bringing a diversity of objects into conversation, and with standing in amongst the material web. In this context the act of composition becomes both an observational and mediatory practice, softly spoken details as important as grand statements. The music that emerges does so through a language of brightly coloured character, charged intricacy, and varying degrees of directness. The portfolio of scores in volume one, written between 2020 and 2024, ranges from solo to ensemble works, forces including acoustic instrumental, vocal, and flexible ensemble. The commentary in volume two sets out three phases in the research. The first phase focused on the paradoxical idea of continuing discontinuity and the possible answer of network form. The second on the material fabric of these forms and the increasingly important role of intricacy and expanded awareness in my practice. The third phase, building on a musical language now rooted in network form, considers extended networks and understanding these forms as an expressive force concerned with the real and imaginary, the personal and shared.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Music
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	21 August 2025
Last Modified:	21 Aug 2025 08:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180582

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