Last week, I was fortunate to spend a week in Ontario’s beautiful rural countryside with the ground-breaking and innovative percussion-piano duo, SHHH!! Ensemble.
Edana and Zac have commissioned me to compose a new large-scale artivist composition on the theme of climate change. We used this opportunity to park ourselves at Port William Sound to dream about and brainstorm what we want this project to convey. We also enjoyed a beautiful hike in nearby Frontenac Provincial Park. It’s amazing how great ideas are born out of spending time in the great outdoors. The week concluded with us formulating a plan for the structure of this new piece along with selecting a number of percussion instruments that will be included.
With the working title, An Auditory Survey of the Last Days of the Holocene, this composition will index those sounds of our destructive past and present, with the hope that the music becomes a historical catalogue, like a museum gallery, for those destructive reverberations that no longer exist in the wild because humans decided it was time to dismantle them. If we choose this path, we can ensure a future for the sounds that are truly important to us, making certain those continue to thrive for epochs to come. We might be entering a new age out of the mistakes of our past but with a re-birth comes the ability to choose how you want to move forward.
This continuous single-movement 60-minute composition will be for various percussion instruments (both pitched and non-pitched), grand piano, possibly other keyboard instruments and fixed sound design. The sound design will be made up of audio samples that capture various activities that are associated with environmental degradation that are contributing to human-made climate change.
We plan to return to Port William Sound in early December to work more on the piece. I will complete composing the work in early 2023 and then I’ll work with SHHH!! in the production of the Holocene recording at the pristine venue of Domaine Forget in Spring 2023.
All this would not be possible without the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Stay tuned to my social media channels, my blog posts and my e-newsletter for updates on our progress.
