The Screen as Performer: Perspectives on composing with moving image for the concert environment.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the creation of interdisciplinary art works incorporating music and moving image, which have sought to explore the relationship between the two media beyond the more established realms of collaborative practices within film. Lately, the concert hall itself has been subject to such explorations offering a platform for musicians and composers to absorb visual media into their own artistic environment as a way of expanding their work into the multidisciplinary or simply enhancing the concert experience. Yet, while music and the moving image continue to blossom together in the gallery and movie theatre, the same relationship in the live concert environment can still constitute a somewhat uncomfortable and often problematic combination. Is this merely a simple question of temporality, a practical or aesthetic issue concerning interaction and synchronicity or is there more to it than that? Could one problem be that there is a visual element already in existence in any concert performance for the simple fact that we see the performer(s) onstage? Is the concert performance already an interdisciplinary environment?By considering the role of the moving image in the context of live musical performance from the rather more unusual perspective of the concert composer and with particular reference to areas of my PhD research including examples from my own works incorporating video, this paper aims to address and offer solutions to some of the practical and aesthetic considerations surrounding this thoroughly engaging development in music and the moving image.