Stephane Crayton

Roles

PhD Candidate

Disorder in music

The writings and music of Luciano Berio

Beethoven (especially the quartets and late works)

Early C18th conceptions of musical order

History and analysis of 'Quatuor pour la fin du Temps'

The graphic works of William Hogarth

Biography

My research essentially concerns musical meaning—how is it possible that music can move us? I focus on conceptions of order: their codification, and relation to their social, physical and notational histories. I'm interested especially in the music and writings of Luciano Berio, who was writing at a time when order seemed unbounded, as well as in the codifications of order that manifested in the early eighteenth century.

My PhD is Out of Order, an examination of the expressive operations of disorder. I present disorder as a simultaneously creative and destructive agent, and argue that the perception of a work's expression is the sense of its disorder, offering as evidence close readings of work by Beethoven and Messiaen, before turning to the writings and music of Berio, whose work I present as a kind of encyclopaedia of musical order, a living network of potential musical relations.

My compositions reassess various social dynamics of performance, inventing new traditions and, sometimes, old ones. I have written for the CBSO, the Ligeti Quartet, as well as for rites, a musical and theatrical collective I co-founded in 2016 alongside Rachel Stroud and Zephyr Brüggen, which questions and challenges rituals and conventions of the concert hall. You can find more about this on my website.

I have taught at the Royal Academy of Music, junior department, since 2018 (composition, theory, chamber music), and I perform regularly as a violinist.

Away from music, I also write about Hogarth (especially the graphic works), and I work with analogue photography.

Teaching and Supervisions

Teaching:

Composition

Analysis

Tonal Skills (especially quartets before 1827)

Other Professional Activities

i, Byrd (2016)
an immersive event which mapped music onto the physical architecture of King's College Chapel: ensembles at 415 and 440 Hz performed concurrently at opposite ends of the building, in which audience members were free to curate their own performance. Based on Purcell's Fantazias, as well as modern reimaginings by George Benjamin, and a work of mine.

tessitura a tratteggio (2017)
for string orchestra

Winter Pass (2017)
for chamber ensemble and mezzo

kreng (2017)
for string quartet (Ligeti Quartet)
Beethoven's "Heiliger Dankgesang" disassembled into a collection of thousands of notes, and rearranged to stage a dialogue of prescriptive and descriptive notations.

Threads (2018)
for rites
a chamber opera I composed that examined "the stage": throughout the performace a web of red thread was woven between the central pillars of the round church, ensnaring Arianna, the protagonist, in a web, space the audience had previously inhabited.

Encore (2020)
for orchestra (CBSO)

Image (2022)
for chamber ensemble and photographer
an attempt to sonify the analogue photographic process: I made a giant dark room which the audience could inhabit; an exposure was captured, developed and printed, while music I had written attempted to map onto this physical process.

3 Dreams (2022)
for baroque violin and modern violin
in collaboration with Lorenzo Bastida: lectures and recitations on dreaming in Dante's La divina commedia, interspersed with music.