The Talking Board

For ensemble and electronics. Composed with Lindsay Vickery. The Talking Board explores the idea of presenting notation to performers in a The score for this work projected for the performers to read. Each player has their own “planchette” a coloured circle enclosing the materials that they must perform. The four planchettes independent traverse the graphically notated score creating a progression of material for the performer’s to realise.The score itself is a 4 by 5 rectangle of images created and collected by Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery, assembled in using the surrealist “exquisite corpse” technique (each person can only see fragments of the other’s images until they are all assembled).The term Talking Board is a generic name for the Ouija board a game invented by Hasbro Ltd that rapidly grew in the early 20th century into a favoured medium for supposedly contacting the dead. In our version the only “ghosts” are (hopefully) in the machine.