VISIONS | VESTIGES (2023)

Winner of ‘Work of the Year: Chamber Music’ at the 2024 Australian Art Music Awards.
“The panel agreed that this work was unlike any other they have encountered.” – Judges.

Vision (noun) c 1300 from Middle English visioun, ‘something seen in the imagination’.
Vestige (noun) c 1600 from French vestige, ‘a mark, trace, or sign’.

Performance-installation for bass clarinet, cello, percussion, live electronics, and notational sculpture (antique wood, handblown glass, water, Decibel ScorePlayer).
Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra for the Soundhub Project. Premiered on the 15th April, 2023, at LSO St Luke’s, London. Performers: Louise McMonagle (cello), Heather Roche (bass clarinet), Jacob Brown (percussion).
Full duration: 17 minutes.

Visions | Vestiges is a meditation on time and materiality. Drawing on a ubiquitous visual metaphor for future-seeing, instrumentalists read music notation from a crystal ball in performance. The notation is warped through glass and water, and the temporal linearity of the musical stave is distorted.

The composition uses evolving, repetitive motives throughout the duration of the work, which gradually emerge and recede as if seen through a dense fog. The work questions how we might build our future vision from that which is already stored in our memory.

This project is part of broader research into materiality and medium time, described by musicologist Georgina Born as “a temporality that… interferes technically, conceptually, and aesthetically with the musical temporalities at issue”. Do the objects engaged in music-making—notation included—act in and on time in their own right?