Traces: Nellie (2012)
Violin, Cello, Electronics
Premiere: November 2013, PONCHO Hall, Cornish College of the Arts
Traces 1-4 Streaming Concert on Wayward-in-Limbo Series
PROGRAM NOTES
Traces 1-4
One might consider them ghost stories. In my youth I was obsessed with Harry Houdini, especially his interactions with Sir Conan Doyle, and their arguments about spiritualism and the paranormal. From there I stumbled onto the practice of EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). As a young person with an obsessive relationship to sound and access to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, this seemed to give my life a purpose: to find and record “invisible” sounds and otherwise unheard voices. These four works for performers and interactive electronics are a remembrance of that period in my life, each a meditation on loss, grief, and memory. They are a search for what remains in the absence of known things, real things, loved things. They each began as an incantation, a conjuring, giving voice to the inaudible and form to the imperceptible. What emerges are traces and remnants of people, spaces, and memories – requiems for things lost.
In Traces:Nellie, the electronic sounds were created by making field recordings in historic PONCHO hall. These recordings were of noises occurring the space when empty, and with performers. These sounds were filtered so that in- or barely-audible frequencies were accentuated. The fixed-media soundtrack is accompanied by amplified violin and cello, each part is to play extended techniques as quietly as possible, while those sounds are amplified in the room. Together, these processes create a sonic landscape that is both new and old, living and dead, audible and inaudible.