clay songs
instrumentation | string quartet, clay vessels, & track
date | 2023
duration | c. 20'
premiere | commissioned by the Kronos Performing Arts, premiere upcoming at Krannert Performing Arts Center 11.08.23
note | clay songs grew out of my 2022 residency at Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard research institute, museum, & garden in Washington, D.C. During my fellowship I was invited to musically activate their collection of original Pre-Columbian sounding objects including ceramic whistling jars & rain bowls, marble vessels, shell necklaces, and gold bells. It was a profound experience to animate and hear these ancestral voices sing vibrantly millennia later. I was invited to return to the collection after the culmination of my residency and my final presentation was a panel & sounding demo titled “Andean Whistling Pots in the Past, Present, and Future.”
While writing clay songs for the Kronos Quartet, I was inspired by the meeting of past and present voices through these artifacts. I imagined a past where ceramic melodies grew into mountain choruses and all the broken and surviving objects from pre-colonial eras, landscapes, and cultures sounded together. The whistling jar replicas for Kronos provide the means to communicate and harmonize with these pasts, experiment and explore new sonic worlds, and, hopefully, glimpse new futures.
date | 2023
duration | c. 20'
premiere | commissioned by the Kronos Performing Arts, premiere upcoming at Krannert Performing Arts Center 11.08.23
note | clay songs grew out of my 2022 residency at Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard research institute, museum, & garden in Washington, D.C. During my fellowship I was invited to musically activate their collection of original Pre-Columbian sounding objects including ceramic whistling jars & rain bowls, marble vessels, shell necklaces, and gold bells. It was a profound experience to animate and hear these ancestral voices sing vibrantly millennia later. I was invited to return to the collection after the culmination of my residency and my final presentation was a panel & sounding demo titled “Andean Whistling Pots in the Past, Present, and Future.”
While writing clay songs for the Kronos Quartet, I was inspired by the meeting of past and present voices through these artifacts. I imagined a past where ceramic melodies grew into mountain choruses and all the broken and surviving objects from pre-colonial eras, landscapes, and cultures sounded together. The whistling jar replicas for Kronos provide the means to communicate and harmonize with these pasts, experiment and explore new sonic worlds, and, hopefully, glimpse new futures.
