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Work Overview
Mapping Australia is an experimental multimedia piece
for piano, electronics, video score, live camera, and video.
Archival footage of Australia's cartography practices from the
1960s are transformed into a video score for a performer to
engage with by tracing the movements of the people in the video.
The footage documents the prospective sale of Australian land to
foreign mining interests. Land, and who it belongs to, remains a
contentious socio-political issue in Australia today. The
interior of a piano is 'mapped' by the performer using a variety
of percussion mallets, where the piano is segregated into
'zones'. It explores the piano as geographic territory and
criticises the 'terra nullius' idea in Australian history.
All sounds and actions have a strong association to the film. The
man's pencil moving around on the map become the performer's
movement with a wooden mallet on the strings. The crumbling bark
on a tree as it falls (after being bulldozed) are converted into
the crunching sounds of bamboo. And the rock pick hitting hard
rock in search of minerals turns into synchronised rubber mallet
strikes on the stress bars. Footage of a large printing machine
continuously and monotonously prints maps of Australia, which
shows a heartless, corporate view that sees land as a product,
with a false proprietorial, colonial mindset. The pitch choice
played on the keyboard are a distilled reworking of the original
triumphant music in the film. And the recording of the narrator
speaking in Dutch emerges periodically throughout the piece which
sits barely audible in amougst the sound field.
Work Details
Year: 2014
Instrumentation: Piano, electronics and video score.
Duration: 7 min.
Difficulty: Medium
First performance: by Tamara Anna Cislowska — 30 Aug 14. Playing with Fire Event, Performance Space, Western Sydney University
Further details on the composer's website.
Winner of the Winston Music ECF commission at the Soundstream Emerging Composers' Forum
Performances of this work
4 Nov 14: Soundstream’s Emerging Composers Forum, Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide, Australia.. Featuring Gabriella Smart.
30 Aug 14: Playing with Fire Event, Performance Space, Western Sydney University. Featuring Tamara Anna Cislowska.
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