For contrabass flute with live electronics and installation of kinetic instruments
For Claire Chase
Commissioned by Claire Chase with funds from Harvard University.
Creative development supported by Sydney University’s ‘Harvard Mobility Fund’.
Premiere: 12-14 May 2020, Queenslab, New York
Claire Chase (contrabass flute), Levy Lorenzo (electronics/instrument builder)
Duration: 50 minutes
This is a work about the sacred erotic in women’s history.
This is a work about an alternative cultural logic of women’s power as connected to cycles of the womb – the life-making powers of childbirth, the ‘skin-changing’, world-synchronising temporalities of the body and the womb centre as a site of divinatory wisdom.
The figure of the Pythoness is invoked: the flute and flutist become channels for oracular utterance.
Flute becomes drum through a feedback system of multiple transducer speakers on membranes activated by the percussive capacities of breath and keys playing in dialogue with kinetic rotary percussion instruments.
