MATTHEW HERBERT

MATTHEW HERBERT- INNOVATION AWARD

When the musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer proposed in the 1940s that – thanks to the recent invention of the microphone and tape recording – all sound could now become music, he sought ways to approach those sounds directly, and abstractly: to remove the ‘train-ness’ from the recordings of locomotives that form the basis of his seminal Etude aux chemins de fer (1948). For almost 25 years, Matthew Herbert has sought to reverse this position: to restore the ‘train-ness’ of sound. Sound, he argues, is inseparable from its source, its context, the way it was produced or recorded, and so on. And, to an equally endless degree, any given sound cannot be divorced from the collective meanings that listeners may ascribe to it.

Herbert’s early reputation was founded on albums such as Bodily Functions (2001) and Plat du jour (2005), composed entirely from samples of parts of the human body, and links in the food chain from battery farming to fine dining. With his recomposition of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony for Deutsche Grammophon’s Recomposed project (2010), he sampled Mahler being played beside his grave in Grinzig, from within a coffin and from a passing hearse. In his numerous scores for film and TV (including four productions with the Chilean director Sebastián Lelio), he often composes with sound sources derived from the film’s location. Beyond music, Herbert has created installations for the Palazzo Reale, Milan (The Unheard, 2017) and Eufonia festival (Speaker, 2019), in which objects narrate in sound the stories of their own creation. And in his ‘novel through sound’, The Music (2018), he realises (in words alone) an idealised experience of listening to the totality of sounds around the world in a single given hour. Across his wide body of work in numerous media, Herbert has comprehensively re-imagined the capacity of sound to create meaning, and the possibilities and responsibilities of listening.