Digital Audio AlbumPine Chant / Lachlan Skipworth.
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Featured Australian works
Work | Composer | Performers | Duration | |
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Pine Chant for chamber ensemble | Lachlan Skipworth | Lachlan Skipworth, Sara Fraker, Jackie Glazier, Marissa Olegario | 12 mins, 52 sec. |
Product details
Responding to this quote from dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet,
Pine Chant represents a kind of tree-listening of my own. I
composed music to align with the rhythms of annual tree growth,
drawing on a set of data shared with me by the Laboratory of
Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. But
the work also reflects my own lived experience amidst the current
climate uncertainty, as heard in the deep sadness pervading the
harmonic cycles upon which I mapped the tree data.
Each of the work's three sections deals with a particular tree
species: Colorado pinyon, Ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir. I used
the annual growth data to control various musical parameters
including the temporal placement, density or length of the
instrumental gestures. For the most part this plays out over a
floating sonic landscape abstracted by the use of reverb, echo
and distortion in the electronics. But in the faster third
section of the work the sonification becomes more explicit: I
wanted the listener to hear the changing climate.
Noticing a declining trend in the annual growth of Arizona's
Douglas Fir population across the twentieth century, I mapped
this data to the space between each musical gesture (in this case
rapidly falling arpeggios). The reduced growth over time creates
an increasingly frantic texture as the gestures become closer
together. We can also notice a greater synchronisation between
the three instruments, and their coming together in rhythmic
unison at the climax is for me symbolic: nature's messaging is
loud, clear and urgent.
In the work's final moments, I added into the electronics the
"voice" of another Douglas Fir dating from 1772, by far the
oldest tree in the data set. These bell-like sonorities above the
trio's sustained chord hark back to a time before
industrialisation. And I can't help but think that the footprint
of humanity is there in the trees, and it is upon all of us to
listen, and to act.
- Lachlan Skipworth
For full details of this collaborative project, see www.sarafraker.com/pinechant
Duration: 13 min.
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