David Prior (artist)
Encyclopedia
Early work
David Prior was born in the UK and studied Music and Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Bangor where he studied composition with Andrew LewisAndrew Lewis (composer)
Andrew Lewis is a British composer known mainly for his acousmatic music, that is, electroacoustic music heard only over loudspeakers, though he also composes some chamber and orchestral music....
. He was awarded the prize for composition in his final year for his piece Dense http://www.davidprior.org/dense which went on to win a Prix de Residence at the 1996 Bourges
Bourges
Bourges is a city in central France on the Yèvre river. It is the capital of the department of Cher and also was the capital of the former province of Berry.-History:...
International Electroacoustic Music Competition http://www.imeb.net/MFLi/, leading to a residency at Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
' UPIC
UPIC
UPIC is a computerised musical composition tool, devised by the composer Iannis Xenakis. It was developed at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales in Paris, and was completed in 1977. The name is an acronym of Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu...
studio in Paris the following year. The piece was short-listed by the Society for the Promotion of New Music
Society for the Promotion of New Music
The Society for the Promotion of New Music was founded in London in 1943 with the intention of promoting the creation, performance and appreciation of new music...
(SPNM) and following a performance at the Purcell Room
Purcell Room
The Purcell Room is a concert and performance venue which forms part of the Southbank Centre, one of central London's leading cultural complexes. It is named after the 17th century English composer Henry Purcell and has 370 seats....
in 1998, it was selected by then SPNM artistic director Howard Skempton
Howard Skempton
Howard Skempton is a British composer and accordionist. Since the late 1960s, when he helped organize the Scratch Orchestra, he has been associated with the English school of experimental music...
for the George Butterworth
George Butterworth
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC was an English composer best known for the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and his song settings of A. E...
award – a prize awarded annually by the SPNM for the most outstanding piece performed in that artistic season.
From Bangor
Bangor, Gwynedd
Bangor is a city in Gwynedd, north west Wales, and one of the smallest cities in Britain. It is a university city with a population of 13,725 at the 2001 census, not including around 10,000 students at Bangor University. Including nearby Menai Bridge on Anglesey, which does not however form part of...
, Prior went on to study composition with Jonty Harrison
Jonty Harrison
Jonty Harrison is an electroacoustic music composer born April 27, 1952 in Scunthorpe, UK, and currently living in Birmingham, UK.Jonty Harrison is an electroacoustic music composer born April 27, 1952 in Scunthorpe, UK, and currently living in Birmingham, UK.Jonty Harrison is an electroacoustic...
at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, graduating with a PhD in 2001. During his time in Birmingham, Prior's work was often concerned with integrating acoustic space as a compositional parameter in his work. This theme stimulated interests which still define the work he is involved in today, whether that be through his installations, sound-walks, acousmatic
Acousmatic
Acousmatic sound is sound one hears without seeing an originating cause. The word acousmatic, from the French acousmatique, is derived from ἀκουσματικοί akousmatikoi, a term used to refer to probationary pupils of the philosopher Pythagoras who, so that they might better concentrate on his...
compositions or the sound design
Sound design
Sound design is the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating audio elements. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking, television production, theatre, sound recording and reproduction, live performance, sound art, post-production and video game software...
s he has made for museums and galleries. Another feature of the work Prior was producing during this period but less evident in more recent projects, was the attempt to assimilate free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
into the devising of his ultimately 'fixed' compositions. Somewhere Submarine (1996), for piano and tape (joint winner of the 1997 Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...
Composition Competition) and Another Poisonous Sunset (1998), both being good examples of this.
Prior was awarded a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) stipendium in 1999, funding a one-year residency at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he completed the work submitted for his PhD. Following the completion of his residency, he stayed living in Berlin, undertaking a commission from the DAAD Kunstlerprogram which lead to his twenty-four channel acousmatic
Acousmatic
Acousmatic sound is sound one hears without seeing an originating cause. The word acousmatic, from the French acousmatique, is derived from ἀκουσματικοί akousmatikoi, a term used to refer to probationary pupils of the philosopher Pythagoras who, so that they might better concentrate on his...
piece Love and Death, premiered at the Parochialkirche
Parochialkirche
The Parochialkirche is a Reformed church in the Klosterviertel neighbourhood of the Mitte borough in Berlin. The church, now a listed building, was built between 1695 and 1703, it is the oldest church in Berlin built as a Protestant place of worship. The church is now used and owned by the...
, Berlin as part of the Inventionen festival http://www.inventionen.de, 2000.
In 1997, Prior collaborated with Swiss choreographers Jürg Koch http://faculty.washington.edu/kochj/ and R. Lucia Baumgartner http://www.influx-dance.com/ on the piece an die Materie and the music from this piece went on to win an honorary mention at the 1998 Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition http://www.imeb.net/MFLi/ and first prize in the 1998 EAR (Hungarian Radio) composition prize. When Koch went on to join CandoCo
CandoCo
Candoco Dance Company is a contemporary dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers, founded in 1991 by Celeste Dandeker and Adam Benjamin. Dandeker, who had previously trained with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, suffered a fall whilst dancing on stage...
dance company, he worked with Prior again, commissioning him to write the score for Amaze in You in 2002.
Liminal: sound and architecture
Prior first collaborated with architect Frances Crow in 1997 on Triptych, an installation jointly commissioned by SPNM and the Southbank Centre, London. They worked together again on the Arts CouncilArts council
An arts council is a government or private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing events at home and abroad...
funded Good Vibrations children's education project in 1999 but it wasn't until 2003 that they formally established Liminal, a design studio with a particular interest in exploring sound and architecture. The partnership has resulted in projects ranging from installations to sound-walks as well as commercial sound design and consultancy and a number of theoretical publications and conference papers. Liminal was formed as a company in order to undertake Swash (2003), a large-scale, immersive sound installation for Living Coasts in Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
and in keeping with other recent work, this piece has evolved into a number of different iterations. Two years after the completion of the installation version of Swash, Prior made an eight-channel, acousmatic concert version of the piece which was first performed at the Martin Harris Hall in Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
as part of the Sonic Arts Expo, 2006 http://www.sonicartsnetwork.org/. In 2007, Prior was commissioned by the SpACE-Net http://space-net.org.uk/ spatial audio research group in York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
to produce a third, improvised version of the work which has been performed a number of times subsequently. Following the completion of Swash, liminal were made lead sound designers for the Churchill Museum in London designed by celebrated designers Casson Mann. The Churchill Museum has gone on to win a string of awards and was nominated for both the D&AD
D&AD
Design and Art Direction is a British educational charity which exists to promote excellence in design and advertising...
Award for Outstanding Achievement in Digital Installations and the 2006 Gulbenkian Prize
Gulbenkian Prize
The Art Fund Prize, formerly known as the Gulbenkian Prize, is an annual prize awarded to a museum or gallery in the United Kingdom for a "track record of imagination, innovation and excellence"...
.
Since 2006, liminal have been involved as lead artists in the Warwick Bar
Warwick Bar
The Warwick Bar conservation area is a conservation area in Birmingham, England which was home to many canalside factories during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries....
development in Birmingham. Their work on this project involved close collaboration with masterplanning architects Kinetic-AIU http://www.kinetic-aiu.com/ and has since been cited as an exemplar for artist-architect collaborations by CABE
Cabe
Cabe can refer to:*Cabe , a tributary of the Sil River in Spain*CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment...
, who part-funded liminal's involvement through their PROJECT fund and features as a case-study in their Artists & Places publication http://www.cabe.org.uk/default.aspx?contentitemid=2467. It was during this project that liminal developed their use of the sound-walk as a research tool, in this instance consolidating the extensive research undertaken into the soundscape of the Warwick Bar site into a binaural walk available to the public. Liminal later contributed to the Cotswold Water Park
Cotswold Water Park
The Cotswold Water Park is the United Kingdom's largest water park. It consists of 147 numbered lakeswhich were formed by allowing old gravel quarries to become filled with water.-Location:...
's twenty year strategic plan, working with masterplanning consultants Scott Wilson http://www.scottwilson.com/ and building on the research techniques they developed for the Warwick Bar project on a series of proposals which address the soundscape of the water park. Liminal's recent work has focussed on the creation of 'listening spaces', whether this takes the form of a site-specific sound-walk, such as Black Water Brown Water (2008) or architectural interventions such as Song Pole with poet Larry Lynch (2008), the point of departure for these pieces is to create a reflexive listening experience for the audience; focussing attention back onto the act of listening itself.
Other sound and music collaborations
Prior began working with New Zealander Dugal McKinnon http://www.nzsm.ac.nz/people/staff/dugal-mckinnon.aspx in 1998 on a composed radio documentary Ways of Hearing http://cec.concordia.ca/radio/long/Prior.html for Resonance FMResonance FM
Resonance 104.4 FM is a London based non-profit community radio station run by the London Musicians' Collective .The station is staffed by four permanent staff members, including programme controller Ed Baxter and over 300 volunteer technical and production staff.Until September 2007, ResonanceFM...
as part of John Peel
John Peel
John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, OBE , known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter, record producer and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004...
's Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre, London. The pair went on to form Arcades http://www.davidprior.org/arcades_load2.html in 2000, slowly working towards their album Who's Most Lost? which was completed in late 2007. Meanwhile, Prior was also asked by UK songwriter John Matthias http://www.westburymusicltd.co.uk/4artisttrackdb/showarticle.php?id=29 to produce two tracks on his Ninja Tune
Ninja Tune
Ninja Tune is a London-based independent record label started by DJs Matt Black and Jonathan More, better known as Coldcut and managed by Peter Quicke. The label has a strong leaning towards mostly Electronic Music...
release Stories From the Water Cooler. Prior and Matthias went on to form Derailer, whose first project was to remix a track by Corker Conboy http://www.corkerconboy.com/ called Radiant Idiot. The resulting Radiant Idiot Remake, was chosen by American independent film-maker Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine
The story is told from the perspective of a young man suffering from untreated schizophrenia, played by Ewen Bremner, as he tries to understand his deteriorating world. Julien's abusive father is played by Werner Herzog...
for his acclaimed Thornton's television commercial Stuckhttp://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/12/indy-director-h.html. The pair have remixed work by as well as working towards an album of original material. Prior also remixed John Matthias and Nick Ryan's Cortical Songs, released on the non-classical label http://www.nonclassical.co.uk/. Prior has recorded and/or produced work for artists and ensembles including Icebreaker
Icebreaker
An icebreaker is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and navigate through ice-covered waters. Although the term usually refers to ice-breaking ships, it may also refer to smaller vessels .For a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most...
, Nicola Hitchcock
Nicola Hitchcock
Nicola Hitchcock is a British singer and songwriter. She is best known for having been the singer of the band Mandalay...
and Michael Bassett as well as contributing sound designs to films by artists Jane Grant and Anya Lewin http://www.yesandnu.com/anyalewin/painlesscredits.htm. In 2007, Prior was invited by improvising vocalist Steve Lewis http://www.deepcabaret.co.uk/ to join Antti Sakari Saario
Antti Sakari Saario
Antti Saario is a contemporary electroacoustic composer and academic.- Career :Born in Lahti, Finland, Antti Sakari Saario graduated in Mathematics and Electronic music at Keele University in 1997....
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=162026813 in providing live electronics for his Flocking project based around an improvising ensemble. Since 2002, Prior has been working with his brother Andrew Prior http://www.aprior.net/ on a series of collaborative music projects. Their piece Gem Sprinter features on the Yacht Club http://www.yachtclub.fi/ compilation release Pallomeri under the moniker Orlando Hooks.
Films
Since 2002, Prior has made a series of short films often characterized by their brevity and simplicity. On a number of these films, Prior has collaborated with poet Larry Lynch, who as well as contributing texts often features in the films themselves. Their collaboration On What it Might Mean to be Spinning features the voice of poet John Hall http://www.johnhallpoet.org.uk/visualpoems.htm and was premiered in February 2008 as part of the Voices III festival http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event2007.htm in PlymouthPlymouth
Plymouth is a city and unitary authority area on the coast of Devon, England, about south-west of London. It is built between the mouths of the rivers Plym to the east and Tamar to the west, where they join Plymouth Sound...
, UK. Prior's films have been screened across the UK, in Russia, Korea, China, Sweden, Holland and the USA.
Awards
Prior's work has won numerous prizes including a number of awards from the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, Cornelius CardewCornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...
Prize, E.A.R (the composition prize of Hungarian National Radio), the George Butterworth
George Butterworth
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC was an English composer best known for the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and his song settings of A. E...
prize and a ATOM award. Prior has received awards from the University of Birmingham Alumni award, M.J. West Foundation, the Arts Council of England, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the DAAD and UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
.
Academic work
Prior began teaching in the music department at the University of Birmingham in the late 1990s while a post-graduate student there. Since 2001, Prior has been a lecturer, then senior lecturer in music at Dartington College of ArtsDartington College of Arts
Dartington College of Arts was a specialist arts institution near Totnes, Devon, South West England, it specialized in post-dramatic theatre, music, choreography, Performance Writing and visual performance, focusing on a performative and multi-disciplinary approach to the arts. In addition to this,...
, Devon. Prior has given guest lectures and presentations around the world at institutions including the Icelandic Academy of Arts http://www.lhi.is/English/, Reykjavík
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the capital and largest city in Iceland.Its latitude at 64°08' N makes it the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state. It is located in southwestern Iceland, on the southern shore of Faxaflói Bay...
, Stadia Helsinki
Helsinki
Helsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, located in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is , making it by far the most populous municipality in Finland. Helsinki is...
Polytechnic http://www.stadia.fi/English/index.asp and ESMAE School of Music and Performing Arts, Porto
Porto
Porto , also known as Oporto in English, is the second largest city in Portugal and one of the major urban areas in the Iberian Peninsula. Its administrative limits include a population of 237,559 inhabitants distributed within 15 civil parishes...
.