Robin Minard - 2 March

Robin was our first guest for forum - a Canadian born German Composer who has been creating sound installations in public (or shared) spaces, for over twenty years.

In the forum, Robin explained how he developed his compositional approach in response to the muzak piped throughout the extensive Montreal subway. He described how this muzak (more about social control than about music) made him angry for a number of years until he realised that as a trained composer he could do something about it.1

This epiphany led Robin to explore the relationship between music and space. Like a sonic interior designer, Robin described how he explored colouring space with sound.1

Robin's music is not designed for performance, he emphasized the difference between his work and "concert" or "narrative" music.1 To create a form appropriate for his needs, Robin began composing by exploring the relationship between frequencies. Although Robin showed us some slides of his workings on this, my ignorance of how sound works, combined with the brevity of his talk, meant that I didn't fully understand his compositional process.

Ironically, after discussing how the music was not designed for concert, Robin played a recording of his 1984 work Music for Quiet Spaces, and we sat quietly and listened as we would in a concert. Despite this odd presentation, my experience of the music was as Robin described. It was architectural music. Musically, it described to me a space incredibly clean with glass and marble and steel and water - imagine Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion.

Robin also played an excerpt from a piece commissioned for a Horticulture Show. The musical elements were recordings drawn from the environment of the show - his music mirrored and magnified the show's 'natural' sounds, and drew the listener's attention to the show.

The slides of this show were of the speakers, arranged to look like flowers, and presented in clear boxes, with grass growing around them.

Through these, and other slides it was clear that the presentation of the speakers is an integral part of Robin's work, how the speakers are arranged is both part of the musical experience (another layer to Robin's exploration of space) and visually stunning sculpture.

The brief overview that Robin presented took us from his first, 1984 architectural music to his current work of soundsculpturespeakerswires flowers, where the flowers responded - among other things - to sunlight. I don't know how serious he was when he said that the next thing to consider was how the flowers could respond to other elements such as temperature and humidity.1

The organic sense of this work struck me as divergent from the early, architectural music, and I wondered if Robin saw his work evolving from built environments, to an exploration of more organic sculpture and sound.

Through the slides, I realised these stunning installations must require serious undertaking in design and set up. Robin only alluded to this in response to a question, and I remained curious about the amount of work involved in his pieces.

Robin spoke of how his music helps people listen. After listening to some excerpts of his music, my ears were indeed opened and I became acutely aurally aware. As I sat in my next class, the soundtrack of chairs, chatting, books opening and closing, pens on tables and so on was almost overwhelming!

1. Robin Minard. Lecture presented at University of Adelaide, 2 March 2006.