Rough Music

Rough Music is the result of a project undertaken by Nathan whilst he was the Sound & Music Embedded Composer at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford - the result of a confluence of parallel research streams he was exploring; particularly around work song and his grandfather’s musical meat cleaver. It therefore utilises DRO but is not ‘of’ it.

The performance featured below took place in August 2014 at OVADA's warehouse space as part of the Audiograft Festival.

“I started to investigate this term ‘rough music’, and it turns out that rough music was used in celebrations, at elections and during times of protest. I found a text in which there was a group of East London butchers who would take meat cleavers and grind them down so they could take them to weddings to play rough music.” - Nathaniel Mann

An interview with Nathan is available here, in which he explains the project, along with other developments from the residency, including his work with pigeon whistles!

This BBC Radio 4 documentary Nathan has made also goes into the history of the cleavers and their making…