flickering presences: 5 new pieces for flute, projection & digital sound
The performer & composers gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the RVW Trust in supporting this project.
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TOMB | Nina Whiteman (amplified alto flute, projection, digital sound)
soundcloud audio here TOMB is an underground adventure, an exploration of an unknown location, an attempt to navigate, a discovery of lost things, a place to become lost… Inspired in part by the fictional (?) house of changing dimensions in Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000), TOMB places the performer in a disconcerting environment they may never leave. An abandoned copper mine in Alderley Edge – Wood Mine – was the location for the film. A map of the mine informed the modular structure of TOMB: the flute player must navigate the interconnected regions of the mine, following a confusing array of signposts. These regions correspond to the areas of the mine seen in the video, and are named as follows in the score: ENTRANCE ADIT/MAZE/FLUX/CAVERN/EXERTION/DEPTHS/DEAD END…
Areas may be explored in any order, and the work is designed to be of flexible duration. TOMB is part of a collection of works exploring sonic realisations of ideas deriving from mazes and labyrinths (design, literature, psychology). The score employs idiosyncratic maze-like notation, and features a defaced ‘artefact’ page from my piece House of Mazes (2017). |
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Underfoot | Sarah Keirle (amplified bass flute, projection, digital sound) In the forest grows and withers A multitude of living things Underfoot lie ancient beings They decay And yet new life takes shape |
see the video + audio for Underfoot here
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wisteria | Rachel Graff (amplified alto flute, projection, digital sound) Fragments examined from every angle, rotating, transforming, breaking down or perhaps becoming something new... The majority of my compositions invite the performer to explore some or all of the score. Therefore, using video, which demands that the performer look at each frame in that specific order, gave me a chance to explore a new way of creating material for performers to respond to. This tied in nicely with my experiments in moving away from traditional notation (although some elements have still crept in!). The result is more of a duet between performer and video rather than a score that the performer has to strictly adhere to. |
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The performer is given the freedom to respond to the images and explore the sound world they create.
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patterned perspectives | Elizabeth Ditmanson
(bass flute, projection, digital sound) patterned perspectives examines a series of sonic and visual moments – frozen and repeated, looped. Intrigued by minute patterns and repetitions in everyday life, I was drawn to the notion that looped moments, despite similarities and repetitions between them, each have their own unique character defined by their occurrence, and surrounding context. With an open-form score, the flute player may approach the loops of the piece slightly differently with each performance, inflecting unique intricacies, relationships and perspectives on and between them each time. |
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Liturgie des cristals III | Kelly Jayne Jones (flute, projection, digital sound) You are sat here, gathered with people, some you know and some you don’t know, you perhaps have a bagof some form, which contains some elements currently reflective of your existence. Here there is a performance by Gavin Osborn, Liturgie des Cristals III. We met up several times to discuss things like: how emotion is physically projected into a flute, how often we feel out of our comfort zone, multiphonics, fragility, how to move around the space with a large crystal, anxiety, the etymology of liturgy from the Ancient Greek leitougíatranslated as work of the peopleand the transformation of the word liturgy from its original secular meaning to it becoming synonymous with the divine ritual of public worship. The improvisation a bird makes time and time again (growing in the shape of multiple golden crystals passed from generation to generation in a vocal tradition), communicates in pulses, multiphonics, inflections, with a range of frequencies incomprehensible and inaudible to themselves and ourselves.
What ways of experiencing ourselves together can we imagine, where we invite the unmeasurable mystery of being, where the poverty of words is imagined and where ineffable means to communicate are sought? -------------------------------------- “He is horrified of having thought so little of the sacred, Of having made so little of it, that speech seems to him a Sin, and though still alive, he closes his mouth. That which the initiate prohibits himself, a sage Law also prohibits the poorest souls: to make known what he had seen, heard, felt during the sacred night” Hegel, poem on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries |
