Two Minutes From Home

20 x 2 Minute
Online Composition
Commissions for 2020

DECIBEL NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE

20 x 2 minute compositions for digital scores

Like many other ensembles and art organisations, Decibel had its activity for 2020 cancelled or delayed indefinitely. With members split across Perth and Melbourne, we wanted to keep playing and commissioning music while we were in and out of lockdown and looking to an unknown future, whilst providing some support for our community of artists and audience.

"'An internet opera in 20 parts" Daniel Portelli, Resonate Magazine.
"beautiful, eye-catching miniatures" Angus McPherson, Limelight.
"an interesting and challenging new take on playing and commissioning music" Ara Jansen, SeeSaw

We devised the 2 Minutes from Home project, where we commissioned 2 minute works from artists we have worked with in the past, or had planned to work with in 2020, from Australia and overseas.

Each work was presented as a fortnightly video release on social media between July and December 2020. They show the ensembles playing their parts in their homes, alongside the score in motion, in a series of uniquely designed videos created by videographer Karl Ockelford. These create a fascinating myriad of different music styles, video and score approaches.

The 21 works are created by the 6 ensemble members and videographer, as well as Lionel Marchetti (France), Marina Rosenfeld (USA), Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir (Iceland/USA), J.G. Thirwell (USA), Jon Rose, Thembi Soddell, Pedro Alvarez, Gail Priest, Erik Griswold, Dominic Flynn, Amanda Stewart, Dan Thorpe, and Cathy Milliken.

Each new work is created for the Decibel ScorePlayer, an iPad application developed by the ensemble to enable the coordinated reading of graphic notations. Viewers follow the music as the musicians play it, enjoying the wide range of notational approaches the composers bring. The ongoing making of the project was challenging, as performers and composers each faced different stages and impacts of the pandemic at different times. This is elaborated in an associated series of podcasts that reflect these anthropological details, in addition to extra information about each work itself.

The 21 videos have been made into a 46 minute film that has been shown at the Festival Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques, (Canada, February 2021), Earth Day Art Model Festival (USA, April 2021), TENOR International Conference on Music Notation and Representation, (Germany, May 2021) and Classical: NEXT Encore Showcase (The Netherlands, May 2021).

The live program was premiered at the Revelation Film Festival in June 2022, and has since been performed in Melbourne at the Recital Centre in July 2022. It will have it’s UK premiere as part of the UK/Australia Season in November 2022.

There are blog articles about this project in LoudMouth, and Resonate, an interview in SeeSaw, and paywalled articles in Limelight and The Saturday Paper.

You can read reviews of the digital program in Resonate and Limelight, and read a review of the live show here.