Photo: Melbourne Recital Centre, Matt Laing

About

This piece had a few different iterations over a few years, and once the piece had conceptually been realised the COVID-19 pandemic made it unfeasible; collecting and transporting all the percussion became problematic, and rehearsing the work would have been illegal.

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This lead to reframing the work, using the material that was to be used but confining it to the practical realities of the time; the pieces themselves only exist in the form they do because of the limitations imposed on us by the pandemic. Across the 3 movement work I've limited the piece to small, transportable percussion; Stockholm Syndrome uses castanets only, a garden near Eden uses the recorded sounds of bellbirds in Barragga Bay, NSW (a place I wouldn't have been were it not for the pandemic) and uses triangles instead of tubular bells for the idiophonic sounds in the piece, and Invention uses a miscellany of 8 random instruments as a nod to making do with what you have, of freedoms within confined spaces.

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My thanks to Ossicle Duo for commissioning this work, their commitment to performing it in a difficult time, their patience while I ask stupid questions, and for recording much of what is heard in the electronics part.

This work was written for Ossicle Duo, and supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.