Georgia Rodgers once coined the term ‘locatedness’. It’s the most her word ever. Describing her piece Near and Far, the London composer used it to capture our geographical and environmental relationship with music, how we are able – and sometimes unable – to put a pin on what we’re hearing. An artist who focuses her energies on perspective, acoustic design and what she has described as ‘timbral detail’, Rodgers’ music takes space seriously, considering the conditions of an environment to be as significant a detail as the sound of an instrument.
An acoustics specialist, Rodgers’ work is performed in – and often designed for – specific venues, compositions made for the particular resonances and frequencies that belong to them. Buildings can be the starting point, in fact: performed at the eponymous church, St Andrew’s Lyddington began by considering the ‘impulse response’ of the space, in finding out which frequencies are optimal for it to host. This invisible work reveals a composer who works off paper as well as on it, crafting scenarios. Rodgers alludes to the idea of her work on St Andrew’s Lyddington as being ‘extraction’ – as if she is taking music that has always existed in the space and making it something we can hear. In a sense, it’s like she’s worked out what the building’s musical strengths are, what things it knows how to play.
Rodgers’ music explores how things are mapped out to synthesise with each other – or, often, to do the opposite, deliberately clashing into tones that bray around the senses. Near and Far echoes the juxtaposition of Emily Brontë’s poem Stars, which contrasts the smallness of human experience to the vastness of the universe above us. In making a musical representation of the poem, her piece spreads electronics and sine tones wide, creating what she describes as ‘ambiguity about the locatedness of the sounds and words [the listener] is hearing’. Just as we find the distance of faraway objects hard to parse, our perspective on sound can be muddled by our mind.
In 2019, her new work Line of Parts found yet another home. The piece was installed in the University of Huddersfield’s SPIRAL, a unique studio space structured like a cylinder. SPIRAL is so special it feels like walking in to an invention; the room’s walls are insulated to encase the room in its own sound, while it also boasts a finely-tuned, specifically placed technical set-up. Loudspeakers are arranged in a ring, a channel hangs from the top of the room and four subwoofers complete the roster. The room presents its own, specific opportunities, inviting artists to test their music in a different light, or build music in response to it. For her part, Rodgers took full advantage of the room, responding to its impressive technical capabilities while also – and perhaps more importantly – taking note of its vibe.
SPIRAL is an enclosed, almost hidden space, a private safety pod found at the tail-end of a corridor. It feels like a secret on the outside; once you’re inside, it feels like you have exited the real world. The piece was set up for Line of Parts in that way – as if it were an environment fabricated specially for its listener. A circle of chairs was set up in the middle of the room, with around five people at a time invited into the room. Around them, their own ecosystem evolved: an electric storm of rain poured down, eventually dissipating into chords, strains of sound that wavered in the air, pregnant with the downpour that had come before.
Considering Rodgers’ love of processing instruments and making heavy use of field recordings, it’s easy to imagine her compositional approach as an extraction. She is methodical and searching, bringing sounds above ground and carefully bringing out their particulars. She tends to start writing pieces by putting specific instruments through processing situations and seeing what unique effects come about from them. In the same way that a building’s architecture can direct Rodgers in her composing, so can the endless possibilities of a manipulated instrument. Her pieces are in the details, those tiny ‘grains’ of sound that emerge from the walls of buildings and the soundboards of instruments.