Sound Drawing in Space
Drawing Sound In Space Program (PDF)
“An imaginative night… pushing the frontiers of music, scoring, instruments, or performance, not just for the sake of it but, like all significant art, to make a deeper statement” Ian Lilburne, Xpress magazine.
World Premiere performance at the Rechabite Hall, William St Nortbridge
‘Sound Drawing in Space’ is a live music performance program where music notations are read in 3 dimesional space – an immersive and innovative program where the concept of what music notation is and can be is challenged.
This is a world premiere program of chamber music as you will never have experienced it berfore. The music notations are designed to be shared simultaneously with the audience and musicians. Facilitated by reknown media artist Sohan Ariel Hayes, the notation will be in motion, in colour, as light, as animation on places, shapes and surfaces you don’t expect
The Composers
World premieres from Brenda Gifford (NSW), Kate Milligan (WA), Donna Hewitt (NSW), Kezia Yap (NSW), Dave Brown (VIC) as well as WA premiere by Jaslyn Robertson (VIC) and a special reworking of Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) “Atmosphères” (1961) by Decibel member Lindsay Vickery to honour the composers’ centenary.
Program
- as though my ears are your ears – Kezia Yap (VIC) (world premiere)
- Shadow Aria – Jaslyn Robertson (VIC) 2022 (WA premiere)
- Bardju – Brenda Gifford (NSW) (world premiere)
- Sum (some) of the Parts – Donna Hewitt (NSW) (world premiere)
- bad snake laugh – David Brown (aka Candlensuffer) (VIC) 2005/2023 (world premiere)
- The Forecast – Kate Milligan (WA) (world premiere)
- after atmospheres – Lindsay Vickery/ György Ligeti (WA/Hungary) ( world premiere)
Curators Note
Decibel began in 2009 with a clear objective – to perform music where acoustic and electronic sound combine in chamber music settings. This led us to perform music where alternate music notations were common, which is not suprising given that traditional music notation does not serve electronic sounds very well. As a result, we become engaged with methods to manage and coordinate unusual, more picture orientated notations. The Decibel ScorePlayer, and iPad app that coordinates networked, predominately graphic scores, that is now used by composers and ensembles worldwide is a direct outcome of that.
Decibel’s work in this space is recognised internationally, as a result of numerous tours, publications and album releases since our inception. In 2020, a European Research Council grant was awarded to a team of academics to explore the possibilities of digital notation, and this prog is Decibel’s contribution to that project. The result is Decibel’s most experimental project to date. It turns out that tinkering with the possibilities of notation leaks out into every aspect of the performance – where we do it, how we set the audience and performers in the space, how to break away from the two dimensional ‘paper shape’ that has delivered notation to musicians for centuries. Principally, we aimed to take the music score away from the concept of a ‘page’ and into three dimensional space. We control the spatial diffusion of sound to reinforce that. The music notation is extracted from its usual position in front of the musicians, and drawn out into the entirety of the venue. With this brings opportunities to present the notation in unique ways, and with the assistance of media artist Sohan Arial Hayes and the individual composers, the scores have been designed for projection in space – where musicians still ‘read’ the notation from scores, but also share this task with the audience.
The composers approached for this project have been asked to experiment with their concept of notation, and think of it as something that can exist in the common music space – where we all listen – beyond the space of the performer reading. Brenda Gifford does this by offering us all a journey, from one camp to another, where we respond to what we encounter on the way. Kate Milligan uses the instability of water as a way of distorting an animated score concerning itself with the weather. Jaslyn Robertson uses lighting as a score – instructing musicians when to stop and start playing. Donna Hewitt uses facial expressions as a method of notation, and Kezia Yap uses simple animations to guide musicians to discover the sounds of the surfaces in a building she can’t explore herself. David Brown provides sound as well as graphic instructions to facilitate a reading of his work, and Decibel member Lindsay Vickery celebrates the centenary of Gyorgy Ligeti, an early adopter of alternative notation, in his dedication that using the spectrographic imagery generated by a Ligeti work as a point of departure for the score and soundworld.
As I write this, I am not sure what the result will be exactly – but I know the very proposition of challenging the concept of notation has opened up a variety of possibilities for the presentation of the works, as well as composers and performers themselves.
Cat Hope, 9 December 2023
Program Notes
- as though my ears are your ears – Kezia Yap
Writing for an unknown space, as though my ears are your ears is an attempt at long-distance familiarisation. Thinking through the lens of the room itself simultaneously constituting and realising a score, the performers get to know the space through touch and sound, inviting the audience on their journey through close listening. The performers are guided on their explorations by fixed media “tape” and projections, as the play the walls, floors and corners.
Working across mediums and disciplines, Kezia Yap’s practice contemplates the expanded musical score as a vehicle through which to invite critical listening, and engage with various extramusical ideas. Kezia uses space and silence as tools to explore themes including natural and built environments, spatio-temporal relationships, and cultural and linguistic identities. She is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney), and most recently completed a Master of Fine Arts in Research (Visual Arts) at the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne). Kezia is also a producer for The Music Show on ABC Radio National.
- Shadow Aria – Jaslyn Robertson
Shadow Aria is a piece about silenced voices, and an experiment with lighting and multichannel audio as digital scores. A few years ago, Iinterviewed Helen Gifford, one of the most interesting Australian composers of the last century. She told me about orchestral pieces and operas she had written over the years that were never performed because of gendered discrimination and the restrictions of her illness. Since then, I have wondered how many pieces have been lost, or never written, due to the lack of opportunities given to marginalised people. In this piece, we hear the accompaniment to a silent soloist.
Jaslyn Robertson is a queer, multidisciplinary composer and researcher. Driven by collaboration and experimentation, she works with video, spatialised audio and new forms of notation to realise her creative concepts. Working closely with improvising performers, artists, writers and fashion designers expands her perspective. The aim of her work is to form multisensory performances that raise questions and unfold into discussion on complex social issues. In her PhD at Monash University, she is developing an opera that queers concepts of censorship. She seeks to contribute to a wider discussion about self-censorship within structures of power through her work.
3 Bardju – Brenda Gifford
Bardju is about a journey from a woman’s camp to the community camp, and the experiences along the road, such as the water hole they visit, animals and landmarks they see along the way. A journey that encompasses the old and the new, at the core of this piece is culture. The field recording featured in this performance is by Stuart James, and was made on Whadjuk Noongar country.
Brenda Gifford is a Yuin, First Nations Contemporary Classical Composer. Her culture is the basis of her music. She is working on a piece for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and has been commissioned by Four Winds Festival and others. Her music is available through ABC Classic Music. The Album Women of Note (Bardju). She works collaboratively and is interested in using the medium of music to express her culture. Brenda is a Yuin woman, originally from Wreck Bay, south coast NSW. She is currently writing a story about her experiences as an Aboriginal woman musician on the road and the adventures she has experienced. She has twenty years extensive experience as a musician and is a composer, saxophonist, pianist and teacher. Brenda was a member of the Band Mixed Relations with Bart Willoughby from No Fixed Address. She toured extensively nationally to Aboriginal communities around Australia and Internationally to Native American communities and the Pacific Islands. She has worked with Kev Carmody, on his album Eulogy (for a black person) playing saxophone on the track Blood Red Rose, album/CD/-Festival/D-30692. She wrote the album sleeve notes for the reissued The Loner Album by Uncle Vic Simms. She has done over one hundred interviews and oral histories.
- Sum (some) of the Parts – Donna Hewitt
Facial expressions are a silent universal language that conveys a wealth of information and emotion. They hold a profound significance within the realm of music, theatre and visual media as a powerful tool for artists and semiotic for audiences. The nuanced interplay of emotions and the technical challenges faced by musicians during their performance are intricately interwoven into the delicate fabric of these expressions. Similarly, musicians glean vital cues from the conductor or choir master’s expressions reading the unspoken instructions etched upon their faces, which serve as an interpretive lens for their musical performance. Sum of the Parts utilises facial expressions as the artefact of a musical score for the performers. The composition draws its inspiration from the language of the human face to communicate intricate and specific musical messages.
Videographer – John Montgomery
Donna Hewitt is a composer, performer, instrument designer and academic. Her creative practice explores mediatized performance environments and new ways of interfacing the human body and voice with electronic media. She is currently working on the development of an electronic Opera about AI with all female identifying Australian choir, The House, with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts and a recent Bundanon Arts residency. In Feb 2023 she undertook a residency at ARUP Sydney’s 16 channel immersive studio which was supported by CreateNSW. She is currently an Associate Professor in Music at the University of New England.
- bad snake laugh – David Brown (aka Candlensuffer)
The graphic score ‘bad snake laugh’ is a pictorial, literal and phonetic transcription drawn
from an existing, studio based, recorded composition of the same name, which was first
aired on the “candlesnuffer” CD release ‘apsomeophone’ in 2005. The pictorial score was more recently arrived at through two iterations. The first a rough version drawn using red ballpoint pen, and the second a more considered and poured over colourful drawing showing individual instrumental parts, and executed on Arches watercolour paper, using various coloured ballpoints. The first rough version was drawn during repeated listenings to small segments of the recorded version, in an attempt to capture all the compositional elements graphically, this process progressing chronologically through the recorded composition until a complete drawn transcription was arrived at.
Upon completion of the final coloured score a legend was drawn up where colourscorrespond to and denote instrumentation. The legend, loose instructions and rough time indicators, along with the original audio recording provide a guide and reference points butinterpretation by the performing ensemble is open.
David Brown has been involved in the Melbourne avant-garde, art rock/punk rock scene since the mid-seventies. The focus of his solo project “candlesnuffer” has increasingly centred on the development of composing techniques which meld opposing streams like conventional electroacoustic methods with noise and rock and also the development of a vocabulary of tiny acoustic sounds enlarged outside their normal context. He has continued to develop a vocabulary that runs the gamut from rock bassist through experimental guitarist to sound artist and has recently completed a PhD project researching the use of electroacoustic compositions in a public hospital Emergency Department.
6. The Forecast – Kate Milligan
The Forecast is a performance-installation wherein water is a co-creator. Fragments of text circulate in a custom wishing well, and instrumental whispers mingle with the shards of light reflected by the water’s surface. The text is sourced from weather reports in old editions of The West Australian—published exactly one hundred years ago to the date of the premiere of this new work. Combined with the visual metaphor of a wishing well, these archival texts encourage us to think about humanity’s historical entanglement with natural systems, and the methods we use—magical or scientific—to reconcile with these greater forces. At the core of The Forecast is the balance of human (text) and non-human (generative, watery) notation. Performers respond to both with semi-structured improvisation. Ultimately, this work is about how environmental prediction becomes compulsion in the face of the climate crisis, and about the futility of our human-scale instruments against unruly natural systems. As the proverb goes: be careful what you wish for.
Kate Milligan is a Western Australian composer, designer, and musicologist currently based in the United Kingdom. She works with exploratory music notation, and interrogates audio-visual correlation through graphic, animated, and sculptural media. She has been commissioned by electro-acoustic ensembles across Australia and the UK. Recent work includes a performance-installation for the London Symphony Orchestra Soundhub, and a spin-system instrument presented at the IRCAM Forum for spatial sound. Kate is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, and The University of Western Australia. Her writing on new music and art is published in both popular and academic contexts.
- after atmospheres – Lindsay Vickery/ Gyorgy Ligeti (WA/Hungary) World Premiere
Strangely, after Cat Hope asked if I would be interested in making a Decibel arrangement of György Ligeti’s atmospheres (1961), I remembered that I had actually dreamt of rehearsing an arrangement of the piece a few years earlier. Of course it is exactly the kind of crazy idea that would occur to you in a dream: arranging a work for an orchestra of over ninety independent parts for just six performers. But this is a special work to many composers – one of the seminal examples of Sound Mass, the musical approach that foregrounded texture and timbre over melody and harmony. atmospheres is something of a foundational work for the sound and focus of Decibel. Over the last decade or so the composers in Decibel all explored approaches to evoke Ligeti-like textures for the ensemble using electronic enhancements, and so in after atmospheres some of these Decibel techniques find their way back to their source. after atmospheres is not quite an arrangement, and also not a new work, but hopefully an evocation of, and homage to, Ligeti’s inspirational ground-breaking original in the centenary of his birth.
Lindsay Vickery is a prolific composer – his over 200 works explore: new forms of score presentation and musical structure; the nexus of electronic and acoustic music; and composed, improvised and interactive approaches. His music has been performed throughout Australia, the USA (13 states), Europe (14 countries) and Asia Pacific (6 countries). His work together with Decibel colleagues on methods of coordinating live performers and electronics, including his role in the development of the ground-breaking Decibel ScorePlayer for iPad, has been at the leading edge of international developments for the past decade.
This program is supported by funds from the European Research Council’s ‘DigiScore’ project, and Monash University