I gave a keynote talk for a conference at Sydney Conservatorium of Music in September called ‘How to make a woodblock sing (using composition to experiment with thought)’. Eugene Ughetti performed the said woodblock piece, a 15 minute solo called ‘An Elemental Thing’ (2017) and the video is set to start at that point in the lecture (yes, it’s worth watching…)
Another recent work is the trumpet solo ‘Roda – the living circle’ (2017) which I wrote for Tristram Williams who premiered it in August as part of an ELISION tribute concert for the late celebrated musicologist Richard Toop. I expanded and circled around the trumpet material from the ensemble piece ‘Ronda – the Spinning World’ and this is part of my ongoing interest in working with interlaced repetition and with fluid timbral states in brass playing.
In the lead up to ELISION’s performances of my work at the the Shanghai New Music Week in September, I talked about ecology, performance practice, Wu Wei’s sheng playing and organic textures of time in ‘How Forests Think’ (2016).
A couple of weeks earlier, ICE with Wu Wei conducted by Baldur Brönnimann gave the US premiere of ‘How Forests Think’ at the Lincoln Centre in New York as part of ‘Mostly Mozart’ in a very touching concert together with music by Pauline Oliveros and Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
Liza Lim 