Music

MUSICAL TREATMENT

The narrative offers several key landscape/soundscape qualities – Jungle themes:  deep protective womblike, shattered violated disrupted; Rhinoceros: themes of the heart – longing, memory, love, loneliness, hope; of the animal voice – whalesong, eeps and whistleblows; of the physical body – wallowing, wandering, falling, swimming, grieving, retreating; Aerial: flying, fleeing, swinging, falling, Birds: fleeing, helping, bickering, witnessing; Underwater- the plunge, amniotic buoyancy, dissolution, whalesong chorus.

These themes will be developed for 4 singers and small ensemble of percussion, string, brass and woodwind, using vocal and instrumental textures arising from and in counterpoint to sampled sound recordings from field and studio sources. Extended vocal techniques drawing on key animal vocalisations and the indigenous vocal cultures of Sumatra, to be explored with individual singers where possible, will potentially contribute to the sound palette.

Interplays around the cusp between post fin-de-siecle expressionism and orientalist jazz age minimalisms, (refs to Alban Berg, Poulenc); Juxtaposing old stately order with urban modernisms, as it teeters between the lyrical and the ludic; Clashing with forays into the technology-driven processes of sampling and manipulating analogue sounds of nature.