Pagoda Charm/Mansard - Roger Doyle
Spirit Levels 14 - Roger Doyle
KBBL The Nightshow (excs) - Roger Doyle
Roger Doyle's reputation as a composer of electroacoustic music is unmatched by any other Irish composer. Extracts from his most ambitious work opened the Bank of Ireland "Mostly Modern" series at the bank's Arts Centre in Foster Place, Dublin, last Thursday.
The Babel Project is a multimedia concept which began in 1990 and is still in progress. Several portions have been performed, and it is typical of the concept that most sections can be presented in a variety of ways, incorporating dance, architecture and interactive technologies; or one can experience just the recorded parts, as on this occasion.
Each piece of music is envisaged as a place within an enormous tower-city, and incorporates one or many technologies and musical languages.
Thursday's concert presented three extracts: "Concert Music - Pagoda Charm" from Mansard, a room of childhood memories; "Spirit Levels 1-4", a "series of impossible dream spaces inhabited by ghosts and memories of peoples' lives" (this won the 1997 programme music prize at the prestigious Bourges International Electoacoustic Music Competition); and an extract from "The Nightshow", a programme by the city-tower's radio station. They contained respectively distorted echoes of pentatonic music; free, complex, yet vaguely human sounds; and a gentle parody of soft-centred easy-listening.
Doyle's command of electronic resources is impressive; and while he directs the imagination obviously, he allows some space for creative response. The ambition of his thinking is at once modern yet medieval, like the arcane maze in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. But unlike that maze, The Babel Project suggests no links between places and - thus far at least - no goal.
