A Musical Bestiary (article)
I’m very pleased that an article I co-authored with eco-musicologist Joseph Browning has finally seen the light of day! The article experiments with a 2-column layout in the style of a mediaeval bestiary comprising a strange kind of encyclopaedia of musical ‘creatures’ complete with illustrations, and an adjacent commentary. Begun in early 2019 and completed just as massive bushfires were raging during the Australian summer of 2019-20, the article’s publication was delayed by backlogs that mounted up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the issues that Joe and I found so urgent then are still relevant, (‘the productive ambiguities of art and the often-conflicted emotions, experiences and ideas that come with inhabiting the Anthropocene’), though perhaps our articulation of the ideas would be slightly different now. But it was a complete joy to develop ideas through conversation in speculative play and I’m enormously grateful to Joe for his many stimulating and brilliant insights and questions that had me thinking in new ways about my musical practice, and about just how weird and uncanny the world is when one brings an ecological view to things. We tried to express this weirdness in the form of the writing: recursive, wandering, non-linear and hopefully surprising and generative in its disjunctions and assemblages. Sonic Figurations for the Anthropocene: A Musical Bestiary in the Compositions of Liza Lim is published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and I’m very grateful to the editor Freya Jarman for supporting the unusual landscape format. The article is available online and since it’s an open access publication, I provide a downloadable pdf here.
Calling the Ancestral River (score/ performance)
I also recently experimented with composing a ‘template for playing and listening’ together with Karin Hellqvist (violin) and some of the musicians of the ELISION Ensemble: Joshua Hyde (saxophone), Tristram Williams (trumpet), Ben Marks (trombone) and Rohan Dasika (double bass). We presented the work as part of the Alfred Hook Lecture at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on 8 August 2024.
In the score I say: ‘This work is written to further explore interactions in a group based on musicians’ familiarity with musical languages of previous works by Liza Lim, eg: One and Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin), ASH – Music for the Eremozoic, Roda: the living circle, The Table of Knowledge and other works that have long been a part of the ELISION Ensemble’s repertoire.’ Part of the materials derive from the opening section of Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time and the work has the same title as the first movement of that work. I was curious to explore how embodied performance knowledges could be a base for improvisatory interactions. The score contains both highly detailed musical notation as the basis for further improvisatory elaboration and at times ‘labels’ that suggest types of sonic materials, gestures and intentions.
The terms are defined as follows:
SONG: a vital thread of lyrical sound with a questing, generative energy
NAME: each performer creates a personal sonic signature; this can be used to identify the person in the present, or performed with variations to invoke ancestral or future selves
PULSE: iterative time
BREATH: inhaling and exhaling gestures, aeration of sound
TUNING: deep listening in order to attune to the pitches/ qualities/ resonances of the group
CALL: an address to a point in time (past, present, future) or persons (both human and more-than-human)
FLOW: The purpose of these passages is to enter into a ‘high performance flow state’ through acts of repetition/ accurate practice in order to play the designated passages at a level of preternatural accuracy where action and actor are at one.
The video includes my lecture as well as comments from the musicians and a performance of the work.