6 instruments and processing

Commission: Festival MusiMars 2006, McGill Digital Composition Studios with support from The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology

Premiere: March 2, 2006, MusiMars 2006: Concert 5, Salle Pollack — Pavillon Strathcona — Université McGill, Montréal (Québec)

…flock and fill the line and circle with pulse, sway and spiral, track the wisp and flourish bound to the current, to the flow and curve of wind-thrust and wave-crash as past fills present…

Written in 2006, Flocking, Filling, Tracking, a work for six instruments and digital signal processing, is based on the three concepts expressed in the title. They control the work’s episodes. Three new works, to which Tracking belongs, have thereafter focuses on a single word/concept, exploring it in full. This work explores a variety of visual and acoustic situations as well as relationships that stem from the concept of the chase: observation, tracking, situation, focalization, and distance. The interactions between violin and digital signal processing, movement and image as well as the tracking of the performer’s gestures, and sound and light create angular lines, complex textures, spatial paths and a visecral and dynamic environment, in which the soloist negotiates the hierachy between the leader and follower, the tracker and the trackee.

Tracking was written for violinist Julien-Anne Derome, who performed it at the 2009 Transit Festival in Louvain, Belgium.

Laurie Radford