telescopic tu-yo, vibrating membranes, The Pipe and OverTone flutes

Commission: Productions Totem contemporain

Premiere: March 1, 2015, Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques 2015: L’air du temps, Hexagram Black Box — Édifice EV — Université Concordia, Montréal (Québec)

Humans exaggerate on a regular basis. Typical hyperboles might be “this bag weighs a ton”, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse”, or any of the invariably (!) hilarious “Yo’ mama so fat…” jokes. Perhaps even worse than footballers (“I hit the post. I was gutted”) are artists. Have you ever sat silently suffering (“dying”, anyone?) at a contemporary poetry reading, as the reciter over-emotes their way through a litany of subtexts we can summarise by “me, me, me! I’m so deep and clever!”? Such occasions often merely reinforce the popular perception of artistic outputs as being expressive of the creator’s emotions. But that is less interesting than artworks’ invitation to be social, communal, and at the same time to introspect and inspect our personal, perhaps emotional reactions to intrinsically neutral objects. This is the fourth version in a series of works for live instrument (s) and computer. The beautiful hyperbola relevant here comes from Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Living to Tell the Tale, from 2003: “At that time Bogota was a remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the 16th century.” As I write this, the rain is pouring in Edinburgh, in typical November fashion. I’m dreaming of the sun. I note that, although it has more sunshine, Montreal has 50% more precipitation than Edinburgh. Let’s keep our heads above the cats and dogs out there.

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