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Solo
2022
Gong
Metals
Pitched Percussion
- Program Notes
- The Body Becomes the Landscape emerged from a desire to explore how deeply, even subliminally tied the performer’s body could be to a piece, and the ways in which the physical act of performance could augment an audience’s experience of the musical material itself. The piece, therefore, is derived equally from specific choreographies “projected” onto the gong rack through performance, and musical ideas translated into choregraphies through the specific arrangement of gongs on the performance surface. Over the piece’s course, I imagined the body slowly disintegrating through and into the musical-choreographic material. It is this disintegration – the collapse of a body and the sense of loss it provoked in me – in which the emotional world of The Body Becomes the Landscape finds its shape. The Body Becomes the Landscape draws inspiration for its central title along with the title of its second movement, “the air shed its light”, from JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island about a man who, after crashing his car over a highway barrier, slowly loses his mind and body trapped alone on a“concrete island”. The first movement, entitled “the tenderness of stones”, borrows its name from Marion Fayolle’s graphic novel about the relationship between a child and her father as his depression slowly turns him to stone. I am grateful to these authors and many more for the imagery their work provided as The Body Becomes the Landscape took form. The Body Becomes the Landscape was commissioned and premiered by Nolan Ehlers with support from the University of Michigan: Ann Arbor.
- Performer Credits
- Nolan Ehlers
- Publisher
- Sound Foundries
- External Links