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Newsmusic
(excerpt) |
Newsmusic
Newsreaders have in the last fifty years been the medium through which
the ideal form of a language, "BBC English" for example, has often been
presented and upheld. In recent years this unity has been breaking down
with stations such as CNN having to include speakers from across the
globe in their attempt at international coverage. In South Africa the
attempt to include readers from all groups of the population has led to
newsbroadcasts in which English is spoken with a range of inflections
and accents. Instead of lamenting this phenomenon I decided to see the
music in it and use it as the basis of my string quartet.
Alongside the speech inflections themselves the form of the
Newsbroadcast is also of interest in itself. Every night an extremely
wide range of content is pressed into the same format that while
providing a convenient grid by which to process the varied information
on offer somehow also neutralizes the character of the stories being
told.
The basic material for the piece is taken from the eight o'clock news
as broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation during the
first week of November 2000.
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