Francesca Caston

After more than forty years, Francesca is a returning experimental musician/composer. This latest stage of her development has its origins in her studies, both practical and theoretical, of musiques concrete at the University of East Anglia in the late seventies.

After a working life as a teacher and university lecturer in the field of education, she now finds herself in Turin, Northern Italy about to start the second year of Composizione musicale elettroacustica 2. Francesca prefers the term Experimental music and, throughout the year she will reflect on whether or not this is a useful distinction.

Why is she going back to school? Back in the early days of musique concrète the music was created with recorded sounds manipulated on magnetic tape and sometimes modulated by patching the signal through an early synth, the EMS VCS1. The difference now is that one can still work with recorded sounds but do the processing with a DAW and computer. Since we will still be using recorded sounds, something I hope to look into is the aesthetic judgments and technical challenges of field recordings. Also, I’d like to consider the aesthetics of working with ‘dirty’ field recordings and whether or not these imperfections can be enshrined in the totality of a musical style.