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Home / Listen / Musicworks magazine recordings / Musicworks 111 CD
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Various artists issue # 111
1Condo Living (2010) Audio available on CD only. Composed by Sarah Peebles. Solitary dwelling bees and wasps seem to scratch a lot when they’re building nests. Occasionally they buzz. They sometimes even fight. Wasps often make noises that sound a little like a dentist’s drill. This is what the Audio Bee Booth often sounds like on a warm, sunny day. Recorded by Sarah Peebles at the Toronto Zoo outdoor holding. © 2010 Sarah Peebles -
2Lift (2006) Audio available on CD only. Composed and performed by Sarah Peebles, laptop and shoh. “You can’t have flight if you don’t have lift.” Lift was inspired by my experience recording soundscapes in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2004–2005 for Radio New Zealand’s RPM. Although I was exploring the sounds of managed honeybees, I later learned that before Europeans arrived on the scene in NZ only nineteen species of indigenous bees (all solitary ground-nesters) and many varieties of birds were solely responsible for pollination there. Lift is dedicated to the remaining native flora and fauna of Aotearoa. Recorded by Sarah Peebles. © 2006 Sarah Peebles -
3Hive Study no. 3 (2010) Audio available on CD only. Composed and performed by Sarah Peebles, laptop and shoh. Hive Study no. 3 reflects on cultivated pollinators with whom humans have had a very long cultural and agricultural association. As of late, we have widely replaced cultivated honeybee species historically used in Asia, India, Africa, Mexico, and other places with domesticated Western honeybees (Apis mellifera), which are not indigenous to North America. Other bees managed for large-scale agribusiness include three species of bumblebee (Bombus), one species of leafcutter bee (Megachile), and one species of orchard bee. Sixteen million alkali bee (of a single type genus Nomada) are managed in the U.S. In contrast, there are more than 18,000 species of bees worldwide. Recorded by Sarah Peebles. © 2010 Sarah Peebles -
4MotherVoiceTalk (2008) Audio available on CD only. Composed for two digital soundtracks by Hildegard Westerkamp. The making of MotherVoiceTalk was a journey in search of resonance with the work and life of the Japanese-Canadian artist Roy Kiyooka. My task as I perceived it, was to listen to Kiyooka’s artistic and personal voices on all possible levels and bring them into dialogue with the musical, sonic tools of my own compositional and personal voices. The final piece emerged out of this process of listening and was, to say the least, a bit of a surprise to me! Perhaps I could call it a thought piece in sounds and words. I was curious about the relationship between Kiyooka’s Japanese-Canadian past—his coming of age during WWII and thus inside Canada’s so-called enemy-alien culture and language—and his strong position inside the contemporary English-Canadian cultural scene during his adult life. Like so many other Canadians—myself included—he carried within himself another language and culture and learned to integrate it into the cultural environment of the Canadian world around him. This makes for a unique inner dialogue and is bound to find its expression in any artistic work, however conscious or subconscious it may be. Kiyooka’s book Mothertalk (ed. Daphne Marlatt), created from interviews with his mother, accompanied me throughout the making of MotherVoiceTalk. Roy seemed to connect frequently and strongly with his mother in her old age, just as I have been connecting with mine for many years now—connecting in other words, with their powerful female presence in us, their stories, and thus the language of our childhoods. Listening to some of the tapes that Roy Kiyooka had made himself or that were made of his readings, musical improvisations and presentations, I was struck by the multitude of moods and expressions in his speaking and sound making. Short excerpts of these became the sonic/musical materials for this piece, e.g. sounds from his zither, or ‘harp’ as he would call it, from a whistle, and his spoken voice. The Japanese voice of his mother Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, and the German voice of my own mother, Agnes Westerkamp, both found their way into the composition. © 2008 Hildegard Westerkamp -
5Motion (2010) Composed by Nico Muhly. Performed by Aurora Orchestra: Thomas Gould, leader; Nicholas colon, conductor; Timothy Orpen, clarinet/bass clarinet; John Reid, piano/celesta; Thomas Gould and Jamie Campbell, violin; Max Baillie, viola; Oliver Coates, cello. Orlando Gibbons’s verse anthem See, see, the Word is incarnate is one of my favourite pieces of text setting: Gibbons divides up Godfrey Goodman’s verses into solo bits for solo or coupled countertenors, who weave in and out of a texture of viols. Then, the chorus comes in at the end of each verse, like a 1960s girl group, echoing the soloist: “Let us welcome such a guest!” “Goodwill towards men!” Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorized everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like “See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the pricks of thorns, the print of nails”?) and miss my entrance. My piece, Motion, tries to capture the nervous energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as on an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello criss-cross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’s melody “in the sight of multitudes a glorious Ascension”. The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: “the blind have sight and cripples have their motion” – the word “motion”, in Gibbons’s setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables. Recorded by John Rutter at Britten Studio, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Aldeburgh Music, 19 and 20 October 2010. © 2010 Decca, <www.deccaclassics.com>, used with permission. Nico Muhly appears courtesy of Decca Classics. 7:30
6a glass is not a glass (Mov. I to VI, 2010) Composed by Adam Basanta. The sound of a common wine glass encapsulates both its banal everyday use as well as the inherent musicality of everyday objects. This ordinary sound, excited by various means, is treated with a metaphoric sonic magnifying lens, highlighting its various characteristics: attack and resonance, harmonicity and inharmonicity, and rhythm and texture. This concert version contains movements I to VI out of the eleven movements which comprise the extended version. © 2010 Adam Basanta 9:41
7feelings i’m too tired for (2011) Composed by Adam Basanta. Performed by Krista Martynes, bass clarinet and electronics. One figure stands facing a wall. A vigorous conversation turns in to an argument, yells; but we can’t argue as hard as we could anymore. All that remains is the will to push, to exert, to exhaust oneself: sometimes the wall answers back, sometimes one is left in silence. This work is envisioned as a testing of performer virtuosity through metaphors of effort, difficulty, and resulting frustration. Recorded by Adam Basanta at the Concordia University studio. © 2011 Adam Basanta 8:22
8Next door neighbour blues (2011) Performed by Brian Ruryk, guitar and litter. Recorded summer 2010. © 2011 Brian Ruryk 8:06
9Condo Living (Headphones remix, 2010) Audio available on CD only. Composed by Sarah Peebles. Recorded by Sarah Peebles at the Toronto Zoo outdoor holding. © 2010 Sarah Peebles -
