Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

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Work Overview

BloodRiverRootTree is a multimedia orchestra / voice piece based on fractal and quantum theories. It describes the nature, interaction and flow of life across the planet, from the molecular aspects of biology to the inner workings of living organisms, through to ecosystems and beyond into features of the universe. These theories reveal a consistency and continuum across life in the greater universe. This fills in me a sense of home in a magnificent life-scape.

In the compositional process, Noemi transcribed recordings of heart beats a medical monitor, and it is this natural time, established at the beginning of the piece with the anvil.

Both fractal vein shapes, and natural time elements are contracted, stretched, layered and reoriented throughout the piece to form the basis and narrative of transformation across the four movements, Blood, River, Root, Tree, delivered as a continuous body of music.

The trajectory of the piece begins with sonically illustrated blood pulsing through veins. These veins then are stretched, thickened, refined and contracted to form four layers of a river of; shimmering waves, weaving currents, a silent, still suspension, and the dense riverbed, before the vein turn downward transforming in to a root system, along which droplets of water descend into the earth to nourish a seed being born.

The gestating seed represents the unknowable mysteries that spark the processes of life.

The seed bursts into life, rapidly stretching upwards to create a tree. This sudden contraction of time depicts how even the slow rise of a great tree takes place in a split moment relative to the ancient universe in which we live.

BloodRiverRootTree was inspired by two C20th titans of experimental, immersive and science inspired composition: Iannis Xenakis in his Arborescence era and Gérard Grisey's 'natural time'.

Work Details

Year: 2025

Instrumentation: 3 voices, bassoon, contrabassoon, violin, scordatura viola, viola, scordatura cello, percussion, projected animation.

Duration: 34 min.

Difficulty: Advanced — This work contains scordatura tuning, extended and experimental techniques, vertically layered pulses and the libretto is transliterated (and translated) from a non European language.

Commission note: This work is dedicated to my beautiful Mum, for whom I wrote this piece, who passed away shortly after the premier of this work.

First performance: 10 Sep 25. The Norla Dome, Docklands, Melbourne