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Reviewed by:
  • Katherine Norman: London
  • Ian Stevenson
Katherine Norman: London Compact disc, 1996, NMC D034; available from NMC Recordings, 18-20 Southwark Street, London SE1 1TJ, UK; telephone + 44 (0)20 7403 9445; fax + 44 (0)20 7403 9446; electronic mail nmc@nmcrec.co.uk; World Wide Web www.nmcrec.co.uk

This compact disc by Katherine Norman is a collection of three musical soundscapes and a piece for clarinet and "tape" performed by Jonathan Cooper. The first three sections together form a sonic presentation of the composer's relationship with her home town, and are collectively titled London.

In Her Own Time (18'24")

This is a work of multiple layers. The listener is presented with an evocative documentary montage in which the composer represents her own remembering of her mother retelling her memories of wartime experience. The layering of imaginative "filters" of memory and interpretation over real experience creates an audible tension between the emotional distance in the mother's speech and the composer's strong and direct response to the retelling.

As if to highlight the veiled apprehension of truths and perhaps to promote a sense of aesthetic distance in the listener, the composer employs a resonant filtering device, which hangs mistily over the recordings. This sonic pointer to temporal and imaginative distance makes audible the metaphor of resonance. Another layer of subjective association is interposed in the listening as a result of this harmonic and occasionally tonal content.

The sound of this piece has a perceptibly raw quality. The surface is rough and abrasive. This surface texture speaks of the composer's emotional proximity to the subject. Despite the obscuring layers of the compositional process this proximity defies the inherent distancing.

Formally, the composition is punctuated by brief episodes where banks of tones replace the voice. The material comprises interviews between the composer and her mother recorded in various locations. The sections of monologue and interview are composed of overlapping sequences that draw themselves out of the tone banks and emerge sometimes gradually and at other times abruptly.

London E17 (22'49")

This movement contains elements of ecological study, sound walk, and musical montage.

How often is a sense of place represented or evoked in literature through the description of sound environments? Here, we are given the raw material itself. However, similar to a work of fiction, the author has selected, edited, and elaborated the details that define her personal sense of the place. Having lived for many years in East London myself, these scenes resonate in my imagination, transport me back, and bring back to life that personal sense born from my experience.


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Working at the intersection between poetry and music, the composer manipulates the sonic material, highlighting and revealing its intrinsic rhythms, textures, and timbres.

The piece takes us on a journey through various linked scenes. We start in the idyll of the suburban backyard and move out to the ever-present traffic of urban reality. Next, we venture into the explicitly identifiable London Underground complete with the local "soundmark" announcement reminding us to "mind the gap." We soon emerge into the local "greasy spoon," a typical East London cafe where you can almost taste the strength of the tea. Next, we find ourselves in the local market complete with cheeky Cockney "spruikers" (haranguers). Here, the compositional process reveals itself with orchestrated rhythmic editing. Subsequently, we are treated to a passage of musical jackhammers that transform themselves delightfully into the ever-present London drizzle. Finally, we return to the domestic environment and finish with a BBC Radio weather report.

During various sections of the piece the sound is shaded or colored [End Page 107] with gentle, resonant signal processing. This treatment transforms the material from mere document or artifact and invites the listener to augment the sounds with their imagination.

People Underground (17'33")

People Underground takes us into the unique but real acoustic environment of the underground foot tunnels that pass under the Thames. The composer exposes not only the sounds of this environment but also the effect of this acoustic immersion on the people within it. She captures the interactions of the more exuberant pedestrians...

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