Lost & Found Paul Whitty

As part of Exeter Contemporary Sound’s concert there will be a new work by Paul Whitty. Paul has worked with ECS in the past producing “Bury my love like Treasure” for the Back there on Earth Tour. Paul and I were both music students at Bath College of Higher Education (now Bath Spa University) quite a long time ago now.

“Ancient & modern 14062025”

Ancient & Modern is a multi-part project that sits at the intersection of field recording, auto-ethnography, rural studies, experimental composition and experiential sound research. The project examines the sounding behaviour of the Dart Valley and specifically plots a walking route between the parish churches of Cruwys Morchard, Templeton and Withleigh. For five years in the nineteen eighties I regularly attended these churches to play the organ for services across each Sunday, sometimes visiting all three. The pipe organ is the staple sound-maker and accompanying instrument for rural parish churches. As time passes the keys of the instruments become worn with the finger fall of those who have played them like the wear of footsteps on stone steps over centuries or the cutting of desire paths through countryside. The worn keys become a record of the use of the instrument over several hundred years and made me think about the paths that are less well-travelled in terms of interactions with the instruments, not just the use of the highest and lowest keys with their unblemished beautifully flat surfaces, but also activities that would be considered to be against the nature of the instrument in the way that it was used for hymn playing but are, in fact, fundamental to the nature of the instrument. These might include switching the blower on and off quickly while holding down keys to see how the wind leaves the pipes; pulling the stops out in small increments to create irregularities in tuning and tone including beating and glissandi; activities that explore the way that the instrument breathes in and out, activities that concentrate on sounds that are in the process of forming, rather than those that are fully formed.

Ancient & modern 14062025 invites performers to investigate a range of keyboard instruments, exploring their latent sound, the hum of loudspeakers, the pop as an on-off switch is engaged, slowly, the bristling of dirty contacts as the volume control is dialled up and down, the wind in the pipes beginning to form pitch, the moment before the sound becomes definitive, becomes how we expected it to sound, to resonate beyond the instrument into the space.