Workshop
(2004)
alto recorder
tape playback
flute
tape playback
Duration: 12'
Written for Susanna Borsch
Commissioned by the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst, Netherlands
First Performance: Badcuyp, Amsterdam, May 14th, 2004
Available on: Off Limits (KLR 007)

Available on Tools (KLR 011)
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"Combining acoustic instruments with machine sounds is nothing new, of course, but the composer's treatment of mechanistic noises is like a Tinguely sculpture in its sensitivity and humor."
- Guy Livingston, Paris Transatlantic
"A particularly impressive piece is Workshop by Ned McGowan... McGowan creates a wonderful environment of machine and construction 'noises', placed in timbral and rhythmic interplay with rapid, flashy recorder lines that travel into quieter sections and end exuberantly."
- Tom Bickley, American Recorder
"An extremely clever and often amusing juxtaposition of industrial construction sounds and composed music for his instrument."
- Scott MacClelland, Performing Arts Monterey Bay
Recorder and tape:
Score available from Donemus Publishing
Flute and tape:
Score available from Donemus Publishing
“A particularly impressive piece is Workshop by Ned McGowan... McGowan creates a wonderful environment of machine and construction ‘noises’, placed in timbral and rhythmic interplay with rapid, flashy recorder lines that travel into quieter sections and end exuberantly.”
- Tom Bickley, American Recorder
"This was one of the highlights of Audiograft"
- Audiograft 2013, Oxford
"The concert with Workshop on the programm was the highlight of the festival, and Workshop, was perhaps the highlight of that concert!! It totally rocked!"
- Oliver Schneller (SinusTon Festival)
"Workshop (2004) features the unlikely juxtaposition of the recorder with the sounds of industry and civil engineering. The contrast between this most apparently frail of western instruments with the brute force of the recorded industrial sounds gives rise to music of great charm and humour. McGowan decided to exploit the contrast of sound sources to the hilt: the challenge, he says, “was to find a way to blend the very subtle color of the recorder with the delicious variety of dirty machine sounds. To accomplish that I made use of its strengths, namely those of human expression and speed”. The piece falls into five linked sections, each offering a different model of the relationship between recorder and machine, running the gamut from sharp contrast to integration, from fight-for-supremacy to coexistence and cooperation (cog and machine). A uniquely Dutch phenomenon is recreated in the fourth section: some Dutch trains in and out of Amsterdam, McGowan notes, “have some kind of mechanical flaw which causes them to create a series of erratic microtones in the compartment. Sometimes quite loud, they are annoying to some, beautiful to others.”
- Bob Gilmore