Ascendent Messages is a commissioning project aimed at expanding the repertoire for classical guitar and percussion. Supported by a grant from the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, four new works were commissioned by award-winning Australian composers Kate Milligan, Alice Humphries, Maria Grenfell and Kathy Potter. Each work showcases the distinct voice of its composer, creating an engaging and diverse program that ranges from the tuneful to the experimental, which will resonate with both seasoned listeners and newcomers alike. The works will be premiered at the 2025 Perth Fringe Festival, and subsequently recorded for commercial CD release.
Launch Concert
When: Saturday 8 February 2025, 7:00pm
Where: Callaway Music Auditorium, UWA Conservatorium of Music
Tickets: $25 - $21.50 Concession - $17.50 Friends of Fringe
https://fringeworld.com.au/
About the Works
Red Earth Mine (2024) - Kate Milligan
Red Earth Mine is a soundscape for the iron ore mining industry in deep time. In the first movement, Deform, material is repeated with stubborn insistence, and subject to a gradual extraction process—a musical metaphor for the extraction industry. As the work progresses the performers must negotiate dwindling resources, for example as the range shortens, physically constricting both the guitarist and percussionist in their upper registers. As the acoustic material degrades, so does the electronic material, which is made up of an archival recording of a mine blast.
In the second movement, a graphic score entitled Reform, the same musical material is rearranged in structured improvisation, freed from the rigid extraction processes. The work ends as a speculative sound-world for this landscape in the deep future—what will happen to the red earth over deep timescales, long after human activity has ceased?
Red Earth Mine draws on familial knowledge of the extraction industry in the north of Western Australia, as both my father and grandfather worked on iron ore mines (Mount Tom Price and Paraburdoo) as engineers in the latter half of last century. The impetus for this work came from conversations with my father especially, who has spent his career subsequently campaigning for a green energy industry. We reflected on the tremendous scale of human impact upon the landscape, the beauty in engineering processes, the politics of land ownership as it translates to profit (and the ongoing violence enacted upon our First Nations communities), and the ubiquity of the energy industry as it underpins all our lives. This piece is dedicated to my father, a man who understands that sustainability is measured in deep time.
ascendent messages (2024) - Alice Humphries
Ascendant Messages explores how trees communicate through underground mycorrhizal networks and through releasing chemical signals into the air, and, how we as humans might receive messages from the earth. This piece imagines messages received, sometimes subconsciously, from these deep networks being gathered into our root systems and ascending through us and out into the world. Not all messages are bad. Not all are good. But if we listen, what then?
Promenade (2024) - Maria Grenfell
Promenade for guitar and percussion explores the idea of instruments moving along together at several different speeds. The first movement, Perambulation, has the players perambulating, or strolling. The second movement is an Interlude, with free rubato and conversational tempo, and the third movement is a presto Perpetual Motion, with a nod to French composer Claude Bolling.
Space Junk (2024) - Kathy Potter
For a composer, self criticism can be debilitating; experienced during the process of writing Space Junk, however, it was a source of inspiration. Will my piece just exist as a piece of musical debris in the orbit of streaming services? Will I be a liability to the performers’ project, my musical offering simply, well, junk? Thoughts of unwanted pieces of satellites whizzing around indefinitely ensued.
Rather than spiralling into some sort of musical existential crisis, I was able to fashion these doubts into something useful - something that could inform how I treated thematic material. This involved starting with a musical idea (akin to an object going into orbit), followed by development/decay/fragmentation (as the object breaks down in orbit, perhaps into unrecognisable portions of debris), followed by another musical idea suddenly appearing (new object appearing). The final, lengthy section of Space Junk is a passacaglia: a bass line is introduced by the guitar and bowed vibraphone which is then repeated many, many times - the Earth in constant rotation on its axis. Along with figures that reinforce the harmonic progression atop this bass line are reintroductions of musical ‘debris’ from the previous sections that’s still ‘floating around’. The piece ends with one of these reemergent figures in the guitar, a somewhat ill-fitting remnant proclaiming that debris can be, well, interesting.