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Work

Secret Sandhills (found/unconventional instruments)

by Ross Bolleter (2005)

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The Australian Music Centre's catalogue does not include any recordings or sheet music of this work. This entry is for information purposes only.

Materials for this work may be lodged in our collection in the future. Until then, any enquiries should be made directly to the composer/sound artist or their agent.

Work Overview

The genesis of Secret Sandhills

I began the creation of Secret Sandhills in 2000. It was inspired by Timmy Payungka Tjapangati's painting Secret Sandhills. He painted Secret Sandhills in the oppressive, desolate and poverty-stricken conditions of the government settlement at Papunya, 250 miles west of Alice Springs, in 1972. The artist used synthetic polymer powder paint on a piece of irregularly shaped masonite (particle board), picked up in the Papunya rubbish dump. It also seems that he painted over a previous painting.

The musical composition doesn't draw on the painting as a visual score, but rather as a force field of luminous power--a matrix of the timeful and the timeless--created out of its own inner necessity. Regarding the six ruined pianos on which I improvised elements of Secret Sandhills, four are from Alice Springs, which is to the east of Timmy Tjapangati's country, and two ruined pianos are from the Murchison goldfields of Western Australia - far to the south west of his country. These two aggregations of ruined pianos flank, from opposite sides of the desert, Timmy Tjapangati's country of birth and childhood.
Ross Bolleter

Work Details

Year: 2005

Instrumentation: Six ruined pianos.

Duration: 28 min.

Difficulty: N/A - Not for live performance

Dedication note: Dedicated to the memory of Timmy Payungka Tjapangarti (c. 1940-2000)

First performance: 2005. Performed in 5.1 surround as part of Tura's Totally Huge New Music Festival at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Subjects

Performances of this work

2005: Performed in 5.1 surround as part of Tura's Totally Huge New Music Festival at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

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