Music EDM, performed by Ensemble Chronophonie
- The English Dancing Master Leads: or, Mr. Bailey’s Maggot, Barcelona, 2006
Multimedia composition, commissioned by the Ensemble Chronophonie and made by composer Christopher Williams and visual artist Tanja Smit, who dedicated it to the memory of improvising guitarist Derek Bailey. It is based on John Playford's 1651 country dance manual The English Dancing Master, of which the two short pieces Irish Trot and Faine I Would provide the new work's main ingredients. Williams started purely from the music of these tunes and Smit from the images that it´s texts and scores offered her. Parting from these first interventions new steps emerged, animating and complicating the conventionally dialectical relationship between sound, image, melody, language, performer, original, intervention, and between the artists themselves. The drawings and texts became a reference in the composing process, and the other way around. In live performances they are projected as an animation on the wall above the musicians. The piece premiered in Freiburg, Germany, in 2006.