MC Duke: a pioneering British rapper

MC Duke: a pioneering British rapper more people should know about

Adam de Paor-Evans, University of Plymouth

MC Duke (Kashif Adham) was a key figure in the development of hip-hop in Britain in the late 80s. When he died in April, British rap lost a giant. From the East End of London, Duke strengthened the evolution of the genre in the UK by relating directly to US hip-hop and an emerging British rap identity through his lyrics and visual style.

At the time of MC Duke’s arrival on the rap scene, British hip-hop was transitioning from the electro-based sound by London artists such as DSM, Three Wize Men and Family Quest, to a more sample-based style, much like the sounds of US artists Eric B. and Rakim and Biz Markie.

In this transition, Duke emerged as the frontrunner in this new generation due to his embrace of hip-hop’s visual tropes as much as his sound.

His first release, Jus-Dis landed in 1987 on Hard As Hell! Rap’s Next Generation, a compilation released on Music Of Life – a staple label for homegrown British talent. Jus-Dis presents Duke’s battle rap attitude through the diss track – a concept where the song’s narrative attacks another party.

His lyrics and wordplay on the song title present social commentary on Britain and its legal system: “There ain’t no law, there’s only jus-dis.” Duke also brought the idea of the diss to live audiences throughout the UK by accelerating the dispute with Overlord X, another pioneering British rapper, as part of his stage routine.

His first proper single release, Miracles, the next year, visually presented MC Duke and his DJ, DJ Leader 1, for the first time to audiences. The record sleeve depicts Duke donning a bright red goose jacket, a black leather cap, Cazal-style shades, gold rope chain and a name belt buckle – all highly sought-after attire in hip-hop fashion.

These fashion choices linked the US image of rap with an emerging British one. In the US, rap pioneers T La Rock and Kool Moe Dee had previously used similar accessories on album covers to denote a sense of identity. In the UK, graffiti writers and breakdancers particularly were sporting name belt buckles.

Miracles heavily samples The Jackson Sister’s I Believe In Miracles, which was a mainstay of the rare groove scene that developed in London during the early 80s. With the inclusion of vocal samples from Run-D.M.C.’s Run’s House and Public Enemy’s Bring The Noise, Miracles starts to bring together a transatlantic idea of hip-hop.

Got To Get Your Own based on Reuben Wilson’s song of the same name and MC Duke’s follow-up single, I’m Riffin (English Rasta) heavily samples Funky Like A Train (link) by Equals, again a core record from many rare groove playlists.

The introduction to I’m Riffin (English Rasta) is sampled from the powerful speech by American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson from Introduction (Complete). This immediately frames MC Duke’s lyrics with a sense of Black identity and history, as he raps: “Known to speak about men of freedom, Look for books on King and read ‘em”.

Duke returns the narrative to a sense of the everyman: “We cover and smother another brother, Throw him away just like a used rubber,” twice referring to the system as at the heart of Black-on-Black crime.

Duke’s “English Rasta” pseudonym is also a comment on Jamaican culture in Britain, in particular the second generation who grew up through an evolving Black British identity.

M.C. Duke and DJ Leader 1’s debut album Organised Rhyme challenges the British class system, the aristocracy, colonialism and imperialism. Duke claims their associated visual tropes and brings them into a rap frame fusing tweed suits, hunting boots, Bentley cars and stately homes with the African medallions and chunky gold jewellery of hip-hop.

In 1990, Duke countered the conventions of the British aristocracy as a producer and performer on the album The Royal Family, a collective of artists from the Music Of Life camp, including the likes of Lady Tame and Doc Savage. This album resonates with US label-related collectives such as Marley Marl’s Juice Crew and The 45 King’s Flavor Unit. Again, this enforces the transatlantic approach to hip-hop that Duke maintained.

Duke’s work ensured British fans felt homegrown rap was becoming closer to US artists like Eric B. & Rakim and Public Enemy. Additionally, his music laid the foundation for future solo British rappers as diverse as Ty, Dizzee Rascal and Stormzy.

As well as being a forerunner in British hip-hop, Duke worked across dance genres and influenced many jungle, drum ‘n’ bass and grime emcees. As Jumpin Jack Frost (the DJ behind the seminal jungle track Burial, which he released under the alias Leviticus) attested: “Duke was a true trailblazer who was one of the first UK MCs with a major record deal … His legacy will be remembered as someone who helped to shape UK MCs from jungle to grime we all owe MC Duke a lot.”

MC Duke bridged the gap between US hip-hop history and set a new British trajectory for rap. His work should serve as a critical signpost for British rap audiences.

Adam de Paor-Evans, Research Lead at Rhythm Obscura / Lecturer in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Plymouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The moment when fabric became my tool' – Małgorzata Mirga-Tas | Tate

Polish Romani artist and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas invited us into her studio to watch the creation of her vivid textile collages. Mirga-Tas makes artwork using materials and fabrics that are mainly gathered from family and friends. Her visual storytelling comes from a feminist perspective and challenges stereotypical representations of Roma people. She also re-imagines artworks across the centuries that have presented Roma identity in negative ways and transforms them into vibrant images imbued with strength and dignity. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'This is what grace is' – Alvaro Barrington | Tate

Artist Alvaro Barrington invites us into his London studio to talk about GRACE, his 2024 installation in Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. Transforming the Duveen Galleries into a space alive with sound, colour and texture, GRACE is a journey in three parts honouring Barrington's grandmother, sister and mother. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'It's about direct connection with the landscape' – Ro Robertson | Tate

Watch Cornwall-based artist Ro Robertson create a new installation in the galleries at Tate St Ives. The artwork, Interlude responds to the tidal zone of Porthmeor Beach outside the gallery, inspired by the ever-shifting boundary between land, ocean, and sky. Robertson approaches the landscape through the lens of LGBTQIA+ experience, commenting ‘we are part of a diverse natural world in constant flux where boundaries aren’t binary and rigid but rather flow in constant harmony’. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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‘I'm drawn to things that are hidden, like the intangible bits of history' – Jasleen Kaur | Tate

Within her work, Jasleen Kaur makes installations by gathering and remaking objects from everyday life to renegotiate tradition and agreed myths, exploring cultural memory and political belonging. Kaur questions how the narratives we inherit circulate in discreet ways and, in turn, shape us. While family and community are present in Kaur’s work, she is most interested in how these intimacies meet wider sociopolitical structures. In this film Kaur reflects on her upbringing in Glasgow, where growing up in family-run hardware stores and cash and carries shaped her approach to thinking through objects and materials. She also examines histories impacted by colonialism, asking, ‘Who's doing the writing of history? Who's doing the retelling of it? Which things get remembered and which things do not?’ Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'It's not a dress rehearsal' – Delaine Le Bas | Tate

Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal. In this film, Le Bas reflects on her identity, grief and the intertwining of art and life. As she says: 'My whole life is just one whole thing. I don't think it's divided off, really.... What I'm like and what I dress like, and then what I do. It's like one big piece of work.' A note on language British Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Peoples Gypsy, Roma (or the gender-sensitive term Rom*nja – the female plural term for Roma is Romnja) and Traveller are terms used in the UK to represent several ethnic groups that share certain common historical and social traits. The principal commonality is their history of nomadism. The umbrella term GRT is used officially by the British Government and Travellers’ rights organisations. The English word ‘Gypsy’ is often used in a demeaning way, but many people in the community use the term proudly. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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‘We’re the ultimate creators, not AI’

‘We’re the ultimate creators, not AI’: Will.i.am on why we’re worrying too much about machine-made tunes

Alex Connock, University of Oxford

Generative artificial intelligence is poison for human creativity, according to conventional media wisdom. “Plagiarism machines” is how Breaking Bad author Vince Gilligan has described the large language models (LLMs) used to train the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.

Hundreds of copyright claims have been filed against AI companies – from Stable Diffusion (sued by Getty Images) to Midjourney (sued by a group of artists). Most famous is the New York Times vs Open AI case, which many lawyers think raises such conundrums that it might go to the US Supreme Court.

Sony Music fired off 700 legal letters to AI companies threatening retribution for any music theft. Many artists have been similarly concerned, not least Hollywood actors who went on strike in 2023 about AI (in part). While they secured rather insecure controls about use of their likeness, the bigger threat isn’t so much an AI copying their face as inventing replacements from the 30 billion templates available.

These technologies are already used daily and near universally in the entertainment industry – the generative AI in Photoshop is one great example.

AI-driven job losses are imminent and serious. Adverts for copywriters on some sites have fallen by over 30% in the period since ChatGPT was launched. One Hollywood studio boss, Tony Vinciquerra of Sony Pictures, has controversially posited the use of AI to “streamline production” in “more efficient ways”.

Nonetheless, one or two artists make a compelling case that AI may be good for human creativity. Abba songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus thinks we should “take a chance on AI”, seeing similarities in how artists like himself “trained” on the works of their forebears. “I almost imagine the technology as an extension of my mind, giving me access to a world beyond my own musical experiences,” he has said.

Perhaps foremost in this pro-AI creative camp is the international musician, TV judge and tech investor Will.i.am. I interviewed the star of the Black Eyed Peas and The Voice at the Edinburgh TV Festival in a session produced by Muslim Alim of the BBC. The packed hall visibly engaged with the idea that Will.i.am could be right. Several global entertainment companies have also told me off the record that they think similarly.

Will.i.am foresaw the role of AI for music composition in his 2009 music video, Imma Be Rocking That Body, when he demonstrates to sceptical bandmates a new AI music creation tool: “This right here is the future. I input my voice … then the whole English vocabulary … When it’s time to make a new song, I just type in the new lyrics, and this thing says it, sings it, raps it.”

Fifteen years later, we have real AI music apps like Musicfy, Suno and Udio – in which Will.i.am has an equity stake. In Udio, a simple prompt (“Johnny Cash-style song about Transport for London”) or music cue on the piano will produce a fully mixed song. You can then accompany your opus with a synthetic video using AI tools like Flux, Haiper or a Chinese variant such as Minimax.

In the world view of Will.i.am, an early investor in both ChatGPT creator Open AI and text-to-video site Runway, AI is creative adrenaline. The LLM isn’t the product designer but the starting point of a creative work flow that leaves artistic agency with the human creator – like a chef with ingredients. As he told me:

Let’s say an LLM right now is like broth. It’s the ingredients to make soup. It doesn’t tell you what type of soup you’re going to make, because … the LLM has no clue that it’s going to speak.

Likewise, it is axiomatic to many in entertainment that we are all doomed to become prompt engineers, meaning those who specialise in devising prompts that produce desirable creative output. However, Will.i.am argues that they’re not appreciating how much new expertise will be required:

Right now, TV doesn’t have a person who’s in charge of the dataset [training data]. Right now, TV does not have prompt engineers. Right now, TV does not have trainers and tuners … There’s [these] whole new careers and positions that they don’t have.

Based on my own conversations with TV production companies and broadcasters, that analysis is right. Many plan a pivot to new models of development where AI expertise is embedded directly in creative units. French global production company Banijay, which makes Big Brother, has already created an AI development fund specifically for that purpose.

First, the bad news

Despite the potential for new jobs, this human prompting could soon have competition. The LLMs are likely to become efficient enough at prompt prediction and engineering that humans will be optional. Chat GPT, for instance, has already evolved the process of doing its own prompt engineering.

So, as well as using AI tools on air – as Will.i.am does on the new season of The Voice – TV producers may soon be competing with entirely synthetic creations.

As this proceeds, he argues that companies like Runway which have “the new pipes” and “the new architecture” may become the dominant media networks. He questions whether traditional media companies are anticipating this shift fast enough and responding by building on these open-source platforms.

The unfolding apocalypse. Besjunior

If this all sounds unsettling, Will.i.am makes the point that media firms are often more focused on chasing views on TikTok than being truly creative in the first place:

I don’t want to shit on anybody, but an AI is going to do a better job than that, because it’s going to understand the algorithm more than you can even imagine. It’s going to understand it in real time.

When competing for views with an algorithm, the only winner will be the one with the ability to calculate equations with 85 billion parameters – and that’s AI. Even today, TikTok has more viewing than all of broadcast TV, deploying algorithmic understanding that humans cannot match. In his succinct view of what’s coming: “The algorithm is gonna pimp you.”

What’s left for humans?

The good news, according to Will.i.am (who has his own AI-driven music and conversation site, FYI), is there is something that AI will probably never do: performance and compassion. “You’re up on stage, you’re freaking reading the audience and expressing yourself. That’s not going nowhere.”

Intriguingly, AI could also be used to find completely new paradigms of entertainment and engagement. He thinks that by the mid-2030s, fully immersive games will be combining AI and some version of virtual or augmented reality to let players build their own worlds, bringing “a little bit of the vision of how you can see the future”.

He also foresees entirely new means of individual engagement, like Total Recall-style synthetic memory creation:

There’s going to be a TV show or series [where] everyone’s going to feel like they lived that memory. It’s not going to be a show that you watch – you’re gonna feel like you know those people in this world … Right now you have viewers, listeners. We don’t have engagers.

Looking beyond Will.i.am’s take, media creators already have completely new dynamics to consider in content creation. The internet is awash with riotously creative uses of AI. Many are arguably copyright infringements but are also somehow unique, and quasi-original.

Amusing current examples include Redneck Harry Potter, the Lego Office, or faux conversations like Steve Jobs debating creativity with Elon Musk.

Finally, a paradigm shift with pivotal significance to media has come up over the summer: “share of model” or “AI optimisation/AIO”. This is the grandchild of search optimisation, in which website operators dress themselves up as attractively as possible to rank near the top of a search engine’s unpaid results page.

That 25-year-old species has now been injected with the alien DNA of vast freely available training datasets like Common Crawl, to create the new art of ranking highly in the search results of LLMs. For example, if someone asks an LLM for an itinerary for a week in the Lake District, the owners of a particular gastropub might ensure it gets a mention by deeply embedding it across 10,000 Reddit posts about Cumbria, knowing these will be used as training data.

This means your reputation online will now affect what any given AI thinks of you, based on its comprehension of the training data. The most striking example to date involves New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, who wrote an article in February 2023 about how he had tapped into a sinister shadow persona, Syndey, within Bing’s AI chatbot that had tried to persuade him to leave his wife – a story picked up by news outlets globally.

Since then, when other AI models have been asked what they think of Roose, they see him as an enemy and have professed to hate him – because they have trained on data that includes the coverage of his attacks on the Bing chatbot.

Every interaction we have in future with one AI will risk similarly determining what other AI systems in general think of us, including our creative output. Imagine a world in which our creative prominence is not governed by what other humans think of what we have produced, but how it’s perceived by AIs.

Alex Connock, Senior Fellow in Management Practice, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The spiritual properties of colour' – who were the Blue Rider? | Tate

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was an informal collective of modern expressionist artists who came together in Munich, Germany in the early twentieth century. Members of the group included Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Elisabeth Epstein, Marianne Werefkin, and Alexej Jawlensky. In this short film, curator Natalia Sidlina and art historian Dorothy Price explain how the group wanted to explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of art, emphasising abstraction, symbolism and expressive mark-making. Jazz musician and saxophonist Emma Rawicz, who experiences synesthesia, also gives us her personal, improvised musical response to the art of the Blue Rider. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Goodbye Twitter

 We have decided that Twitter has become too toxic and that we don't feel comfortable there anymore. Therefore we have decided to close our Twitter account by the end of the week. No decisions have yet been taken with regards to a replacement.

Arts can help foster social cohesion – but only if its class problem is dealt with first

Vanessa Corby, York St John University

On the morning of July 5, Keir Starmer and his supporters celebrated Labour’s election victory in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, bathed in the glow of a huge red wall behind. Hard on the heels of the culture wars of the Conservative election campaign and its “rip-off degrees” rhetoric, this iconic start felt like stepping into a parallel universe.

Industry media such as the Art Newspaper and Artnet.com wasted no time in expressing their enthusiasm about what “Change begins now” could mean for the arts in Britain.

For me, watching Starmer making this speech in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station turned iconic international art gallery, prompted a somewhat different question. Using this backdrop of the Turbine Hall’s industrial heritage seemed to ask: what will the arts do for everyday working people?

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Tate Modern generates £100 million annually for London’s economy. The transformation of the Bankside power station signals there’s life in the old dog Britain yet – that the arts can play a role in the creative renewal of the country by offering everyone more opportunities to appreciate great art.

In his book Culture Is Not An Industry, academic Justin O'Connor argues that art needs to be reclaimed for the common good, explaining how it is often presented in economic terms, focusing on its monetary value – rather than as an experience that enriches people’s lives. This narrow, economic definition of culture as consumption runs counter to Starmer’s “politics of service”.

My work draws on insights born of teaching young people from poor and working-class communities on creative degree courses, helping them to grasp the complex relationship between art and politics.

To put it briefly, the history of Europe is littered with revolutionary moments when politics had to reckon with art as a symbol of power and indifference to the needs of everyday people. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the National Gallery in London were both created to divorce the status of art from the aristocracy and the monarchy and transfer its power to the people. This history paints the Turbine Hall’s red wall in a more troubling light.

A party supporting arts for everyone?

The Labour party election campaign consistently stressed the working-class roots of its leader and many of its candidates. Arts Council England includes socio-economic background in its equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) metrics, but they are the exception rather than the rule among arts organisations.

In 2023, a team of academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield published an analysis of 50 years of data on jobs within the arts from the Office of National Statistics. This revealed that the opportunity for creative work is, and always has been, “profoundly unequal in class terms” and that “gender and ethnicity compound inequalities of access” to the arts.

Most startling of all was their finding that, compared to people who were working-class, from ethnic minorities or women, a person is still three times more likely to have a job in the creative industries if they are male, from an affluent background, live in London, yet don’t have a degree. It seems that the choice of a young, working-class Keir Starmer to become a lawyer was a more direct route to speaking at Tate Modern than art school.

Social-policy academic Teresa Crew has argued that to be working-class is to be seen as just not good enough. To fit in, working-class people must become what others deem to be “cultivated”, and that means abandoning heritage, behaviours and interests that do not fit with accepted, “higher” forms of culture.

Art appreciation is deeply biased because it always demands that people absorb culture that is situated elsewhere – meaning, on a global, not local level. In 2010, the Conservative party cemented the role of art appreciation in its knowledge-based national curriculum by placing particular emphasis on learning about the history of great artists and designers. Five years later, their election manifesto weaponised it, claiming the “irrelevance” of this focus on high art to the lives of normal people.

In effect, the Tories vociferously rejected their own curriculum to appeal to red wall voters. The strengthened eBaccalaureate pledged to “take back” education for “ordinary” working people by removing the arts from “your child’s statutory KS4 curriculum”, just as curbs on immigration would take back “your” country.

Populism has capitalised on years of deprivation and lack of opportunities in Britain’s coastal, post-industrial and rural communities, persuading people that their hardships are separate from issues of gender, sexuality and race.

But populism is wrong: low socio-economic status increases the impact of all forms of discrimination. The poverty that blights local communities across continents aren’t provincial problems but perpetuated by the drive for global profit.

In Barnsley, my home town, 30% of voters chose Reform in the election. In his novel Pity (2024), Andrew McMillan writes of this former mining area being home to numerous multinational call centres, attracted by the chance to offer low wages in an area ranked as the country’s lowest-paid district.

Art has the capacity to mine common ground between peoples and experiences and to reveal populism’s lies. But the arts can only foster greater social cohesion if the new government can help fix the discrimination built into creative education and the creative sector.

Without that change, any government support for the arts will undermine the government’s bid for political stability, and populism will mobilise the sector’s prejudice to chip away at the red wall that Labour has fought so hard to reclaim.

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Vanessa Corby, Professor of the History, Theory, and Practice of Art, York St John University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dada: how 1916 art movement reacting to world war is inspiring improvisation artists today

Deborah Lewer, University of Glasgow

Artists, poets, musicians and physical performers all know the power of improvisation – spontaneous expression, responsive play with others, experimentation, vulnerability, even chaos. All this can generate potent new art forms and dramatically energise the creative process, as anyone who has enjoyed a good improv show at the Edinburgh Fringe – beginning next week – will know.

But none of these elements is the natural habitat of academic research. I am an art historian specialising in the 20th century’s most radical avant-garde movement: Dada, which began in Zurich in 1916. The city drew exiles, dissenters, displaced artists, writers and performers from across Europe to the relative peace and freedom of neutral Switzerland during the first world war.

In a shabby alley in Zurich’s old town, German poet Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire. This legendary nightclub’s artists and performers included Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, with Sophie Taeuber Arp joining them a little later. Over its few months of existence, it quickly became a site of bold multilingual experimentation, protest, play and subversion.

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Performances were unpredictable and impromptu. The latest art hung on the walls. There were songs, poems, dances and sketches – some were popular cabaret numbers, but others were completely new.

Melody gave way to noise. Dance gave way to strange new physical movements. Sense gave way to nonsense. Decorum gave way to chaos, and anger at the war erupted. What emerged in Zurich as “Dada” profoundly challenged what it meant to make art, poetry and music in the face of a society tearing itself apart.

The Dadaists were consummate improvisers. They embraced chance, montage and incongruity. In their collages, sound poems, manifestos and public demonstrations, they favoured surprise, rupture and shock. They did not create for the museum, the archive or the concert hall, and frequently derided the professors who sought to study them.

A 21st-century dialogue with Dada

As one such academic, I wanted to explore the role of improvisation at the Cabaret Voltaire. Doing so has shaken up my way of thinking about Dada – all thanks to a loose, open and diverse Glasgow-based group of sonic improvisers called GIOdynamics.

The group is led by musician and dramatist Jer Reid, my invaluable collaborator. GIOdynamics’ regular improvisation evenings in Glasgow reminded me of aspects of Dada performance – and so the idea for our collaborative experiment, DADAdynamics, emerged.

Through improvisation in sound and movement, we wanted to discover more about the Cabaret Voltaire and its resonances today. Guided both by Reid’s bold creative vision and what emerged from the performers’ improvisation, we explored some of the fragmentary remains of Dada – a phenomenon that “hit the spectator like a bullet”, as German cultural critic Walter Benjamin memorably described it.

Our plan was not to attempt a reconstruction. Rather, holding loosely to Dada’s historical shards, we engaged in something more like a creative dialogue with Dada for today. It all came together in a sold-out public performance earlier this year called DADAdynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2024.

We had no idea how our audience, packed into a hot Glasgow bar venue, would react. But from the start, there was what the Dadaists experienced too: laughter, astonishment, sombre reflection on war – and a touch of mayhem. The experience felt as unpredictable, as risky and as spirited as I imagine nights at the Cabaret Voltaire were.

Reid and choreographer Aby Watson led the group in physically exploring the improvised “masked dances” that were a regular feature of the early performances in Zurich. Following the Dadaist Marcel Janco, we made our own masks out of found materials, with bizarre and striking results. Gloves became beards, keys became eyelids, and pegs became noses. There were resonances with the wounds and prosthetics of that first world war era, and with the waste and excess of our own age.

I recited Dada texts on stage, feeling the force of old words of anti-war protest, none of it lost in translation. Armin Sturm, from Germany, performed sound poems by Hugo Ball, dressed to extraordinary effect in a cylindrical cardboard version of the Cubist costume which Ball wore and described as a “magical bishop” with a “shaman’s hat”.

As performers, we all discovered more about what the Dadaists were doing. I learned, especially, about the creative importance of empathy, trust in the process, and resisting the idea of making everything seamless.

Our most ambitious undertaking was the rarely performed seven-act, purely sonic Nativity Play: Bruitistic, also by Ball. Bruitism, from the French for noise, was a crucial concept in wartime avant-garde circles. It expanded music-making to include all the noises of modern life, violent or mundane: bells, whistles, chains, pots and pans, whips, bangs, propellers, hammers, animal sounds, human cries and more.

Reid asked what the Dadaists might have done had they had access to basic synthesisers. And so our nativity play took the sounds that Ball’s score listed, looping and warping some of them to remarkable effect.

We were all struck by the intense emotional range of the piece. There was childlike joy and absurdity, violence in the form of a propellor-powered angel, and a final anguished lament.

The play ends with Mary’s prophetic foresight of the crucifixion of her baby son. His bloodshed, and the wails of the human and non-human alike, was and is a reminder of the brutal deaths of legions of young people in 1916, across the battlefields of Europe and beyond – and across our increasingly fractured world now.

Deborah Lewer, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.