Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

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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.

It is listed in our catalogue because an event featuring a performance of this work was included in our calendar of Australian music. Details of this performance are listed below.

Work Overview

This piece has 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.

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.

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.

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

Matt Laing 8/20

Work Details

Year: 2020

Instrumentation: Bass trombone, percussion, electronics.

Duration: 17 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Commission note: Commissioned by Ossicle Duo with funds provided by City of Melbourne.. Commissioned with assistance from the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.

First performance: by Ossicle Duo at from these old skins (Melbourne Recital Centre, Primrose Potter Salon) on 27 Mar 2021