Popular Contexts, Volume 6 (2013)

Popular Contexts is a series of pieces that combine pre-recorded sounds with live instrumental music to investigate aspects of everyday and popular culture with the aspiration of opening up a listening experience that enhances perception of the familiar. The recordings provide contextual frames for the instrumental music and vice versa. The recordings for the first two movements of Volume 6 are ‘musical’: the vibraphone and drum-kit are combined with recordings of saxophones in the first, and recordings of bass guitars in the second. The recordings for the final two movements consist of ‘everyday’ sounds from the world with each movement based on a given topic: air travel in the third and crowd noise in the fourth.

Written for and dedicated to Speak Percussion. First performance by Speak Percussion at MaerzMusik, Berlin, Germany, March 16, 2013. Commissioned by Maerzmusik and Speak Percussion with support from Julian Burnside AO QC.

www.shlom.com

[99 Words] (2014)

- Camera as storage
(It will let me see later)

- Camera as prosthetics
(It lets me see what I can’t)

- Camera as simulation
(It will let me remember later what I can’t see now)

- Vito Acconci

Commissioned by line upon line and premiered November 7, 2014 at Big Medium Gallery, Austin, TX.

www.andrewgreenwald.net

The Great Knot (2011)

The piece, The Great Knot, is based on the migratory patterns of the bird, the Great Knot. This species breeds in Siberia in the summer but heads to Australia and Southern Asia during the northern winter. (The Great Knot is also sometimes vagrant in Europe, although whether this is by accident or providence, one cannot be sure.) What is also for us a long-haul flight, the bird makes the journey with only one stopover. The Great Knot is now considered vulnerable as a species due to a combination of factors, not only in part due to the reclamation of the bird’s stopover grounds between Siberia and the South Seas (namely, mud flats in South Korea). Furthermore, given its strange ‘international’ status, that is its territory is not fixed to any specific nation state, the bird is more difficult to protect. In this manner, Great Knots are birds without passports, so to speak, and are without anywhere to land. The piece, The Great Knot, attempts to approach the event horizon of the species’ extinction with a kind of perverted joy. It does this if not to bring about some minor attention to these international travelers, then at least to attempt to suspend the tragedy attached with the demise of these birds by using their flight paths as a model for music composition (namely, ‘how to get from A to B.’)

The Great Knot is dedicated to Speak Percussion for whom it was written. First performance by Speak Percussion at Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Centre Melbourne, April 16, 2011.

www.thomasmeadowcroft.com