Egan, K., Pinchbeck, M., 2023.

Matchstalks Re-mastered: (De)composing popular music scores for contemporary performance

Egan & Pinchbeck share their original approach of devising contemporary performance from musical stimuli using the 1978 hit, 'Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs', which premiered at Future Flares (2023). They translated the track, inspired by the paintings of LS Lowry, into theatrical motifs working with a live jazz trio who used the paintings as a visual score for their improvisation. Following the song's structure, the piece of music was broken down into scenes exploring the visual language of Lowry's paintings and the song's lyrical poetry. As part of the work, Egan & Pinchbeck question how painting becomes music, music becomes theatre and props become performers. For this paper, Egan and Pinchbeck present a performance lecture using documentation of the work to explore the process as a (de)composing of the score that inspired it.

This activity continues Egan & Pinchbeck's collaborative research into 'staging scores' following a recent co-authored Open Library of Humanities article: 'Staging Scores: Devising Contemporary Performances from Classical Music' (2022). They have recently collaborated on an Intellect Playtext publication, co-edited by Pinchbeck: The Ravel Trilogy: Following the Score (2023). The original methodology outlined here will be used as a blueprint for future projects on '(de)composing scores'.