silent green 3

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Laura Bowler: Three

Three 20 minute works for voice, electronics and video commissioned from three very distinct female composers; Nwando Ebizie, Sivan Cohen Elias and Diana Soh. Performed by composer/vocalist Laura Bowler, these works were commissioned to explore what it is to place the female body on stage. Each composer has taken a vastly different approach, ranging from French children’s stories and autobiographical rituals to the fragmentation of the self and the creation of avatars.

Sivan Cohen Elias: Who-He-Huh

 “Who-He-Huh” embraces the confusion of our time at its core, where our identities are shredded into fragments of realities. In the plot, the singer is a social-media presenter who gives a tutorial on “how to teach your avatar emotions”. In parallel, she also creates a DIY figure that starts to move on the table. The piece is designed as a sequence of connected miniatures combining theatrical elements, visually and sonically, while using fixed media, live electronics and video.
– Sivan Cohen Elias

Nwando Ebizie: Dahlia (and you will be there forever and ever)

A ritual experience for one performer. A practice: committing to the experience of joy. Encompassing vivid memories of a wedding, a proposal, a dance and a dress. A reclaiming of what is beautiful. A heralding of new spring and a determination to grow.
– Nwando Ebizie

Diana Soh: La Ville-Zizi

“La Ville-Zizi” will be a virtuosic, non-stop, rapid-fire vocal work where the body of the performer is also solicited and her movements choreographed directly into the score. The text of the piece is translated and adapted from a feminist play by French actress and playwright Marion Aubert titled “Les Orpheline” (2009). The play begins with a foreword stating that there are countries in the world where baby girls are killed once they are born – an already striking statement that resonated with me, and one that further lured me into Marion Aubert’s universe. In her “absurd” and imaginary world, the character Monsieur is investigating the disappearances of little girls throughout the story. With his bags packed, he sets off on his journey but is almost immediately captured and imprisoned by a band of little girls, whose leader Violaine is one of those very missing girls. Violaine lives in an imaginary world and she gathers together all the little girls that do not have the right to live. During 30 days and 30 nights, Monsieur will encounter the hard lives of Violaine and her imaginary friends, including a she-devil (La Diablonne) and a he-devil (Le Diablon). There are numerous retellings of short stories in this play, one of which is the story about La ville de Zizi (the town of Zizi; it is noteworthy that “zizi” is a french children’s slang for penis and “zézette” is the slang for vagina). The story is told by La Diablonne, the persona and role that Laura Bowler (soprano) will undertake in this work “La Ville-Zizi”.
– Diana Soh

With

Laura Bowler – soloist
Diana Soh – electronics
Nwando Ebizie – live-video
Sam Redway – producer, dramaturg, movement director, video in Nwando Ebizie’s work

 

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Global Breath 2

Milica Djordjević: Monochrome, light blue darkness

The piece is like a monochrome, immersive painting, or a sculpture that invites the listeners to dive inside it. This is a comprehensive study of crystallised tones as an area that appears to remain static from the outside, its reflections changing from metallic to matt, while on the inside it is kinetic and constantly shimmering in a bright blue shadow of the darkness.
– Milica Djordjević

Dai Fujikura: Shimmer

Music is about communication. And the most important part of composing for me is collaboration. In this case with the trumpeter Marco Blaauw. […] We have known each other since 2005, and I have heard him play many pieces, but it was only in the pandemic that we started working together. Marco wanted to play a series of my solo works that weren’t written for the trumpet – they included a solo piece for bass flute and a solo work for the horn. I also wrote a piece for shō and electronics: the shō is a traditional Japanese mouth organ. Marco played this piece on the trumpet with electronics. I love writing music that gives the soloist the feeling that this music is capable of getting the best out of him. When I began writing the trumpet concerto, I was already familiar with Marco playing my own music. I sent Marco fragments of my music, and he would record them and send them back to me. I could then listen to the recordings, and this would inspire me to write the next part, and so on. A key question was how to make the trumpet sound sensual without giving the impression of a fanfare or some sort of powerful brass sound. I’m a big brass fan, but I don’t like the typical brass sound used in classical music. […]
– Dai Fujikura

Liza Lim: Intervention

 

Liza Lim: Shallow Grave

There’s an image that sticks in my mind: March 2022, 12 days into the war in Ukraine, a military brass band stands around a bomb crater playing into the hole. The image echoes on in our times of extreme and often incomprehensible violence and I’ve been thinking a lot about music’s power to address and reach into a hole in the ground and pull back up some life energy from what has been destroyed. The power of music to speak to the dead, to reach back in time and unwind something; to make passages for the living; music as a living knot in time between the ancestral and the unborn – these are some basic themes of recent work. “Shallow Grave” is in two parts. In the first part, Marco Blaauw plays a “Neolithic” horn, a replica of a 3,000-year-old terracotta horn excavated from a rock shelter in Vallabrix, Southern France, made by ceramic artist André Schlauch as part of the European Music Archaeology project. It’s shaped like an animal horn but I think of it as a lump of earth with a mouth. The second part of the piece, for the low-voiced alto trumpet in F, is music of bitter and sardonic humour for an imaginary “Punch and Judy” show. There the living haunt the dead.
– Liza Lim

Georg Friedrich Haas: I can’t breathe

“I can’t breathe” was conceived and written in 2014 as a response to the police execution of an African American citizen, Eric Garner, on a New York City street. Garner’s “crime” was selling “loosies,” single cigarettes from a pack. This was said to be technically a form of tax evasion, which is not a capital crime in the statute books. However, a bystander filmed a police officer restraining Garner bodily with an illegal chokehold. On the video, Garner was heard to repeat the words “I can’t breathe” eleven times, before passing out and lying on the ground for seven minutes. While the authorities waited for an ambulance, Garner passed away; the autopsy cited “[compression] of neck, compression of chest and prone position during physical restraint by police” as cause of death. Despite nationwide protests, charges were never brought against the officers involved, although one of them was eventually terminated in 2019.
– George E. Lewis

“I can’t breathe” – for solo trumpet, in memoriam Eric Garner – begins, quite traditionally, with a dirge: a free cantilena in the twelve-tone space. Then the intervals constrict. The song becomes increasingly smothered, ultimately in a 16th note scale. The dirge constricts within a sonic space of other trumpet notes of extreme registers and changing colours – cautionary symbols, perhaps, of the world from which the victim was violently torn away. I give no notes to the perpetrators. Performing the piece requires many rapid changes and slow alterations of mutes. Marco Blaauw’s double-bell trumpet is ideally suited for this.
– Georg Friedrich Haas

With

The Monochrome Project
Marco Blaauw, Christine Chapman, Mathilde Conley, Rike Huy, Bob Koertshuis, Nathan Plante, Markus Schwind, Laura Vukobratović– trumpet

Marco Blaauw – alto trumpet, double bell trumpet, “Neolithic” ceramic horn, trumpet

Laura Vukobratović – double bell trumpet

Edivaldo Ernesto – dance

Liza Lim – speaker