Fibreglass Forestry and A Horse is a Horse
Today we were so thrilled to share some of our music for UQ’s lunchtime concert series. You can re-watch the livestream of the concert on YouTube below.
In this very special concert we gathered expanded string forces to perform the large work “Fibreglass Forestry” and a brand new piece by Nonsemble member Briony Luttrell entitled “A Horse is a Horse”.
We open the concert with “Archaeopteryx”, from our upcoming album of the same name.
Then we’re joined on stage by some very special guests: Stacey Weir, Emily Winter, Helena Burns, and Daniel Casey, all performance students at UQ School of Music, and Claire Litwinowicz, an alumni performance fellow with Dots+Loops.
Composer Briony Luttrell has this to say about her beautiful new work:
A Horse is a Horse was inspired by the idea of chaperoning as an act of care. Care for a performer, for an audience, for our molecules. Things that help us into the next moment, or proteins that help us to put together or break apart tiny pieces of ourselves in ways that don’t result in nonfunctional structures. Potentially, as a result, this piece never gets anywhere because it’s too busy going somewhere. It would not have been possible without the creative chaperones in my life.
Fibreglass Forestry follows, a 20 minute single-movement work that we haven’t played since its premiere at GoMA in 2016. We were so excited to be able to give it another run with the help of our guests. Composer Chris Perren wrote ahead of its premiere in 2016:
Fibreglass Forestry is a large single-movement work that crystallizes spontaneous and fleeting gestures in the frozen form of fixed notation. In my work I am often caught between two competing interests: a Zen-influenced desire to leave my compositions loosely defined, dynamic, open to chaos; and a perfectionist compulsion to control every detail. Fibreglass Forestry mimics the spontaneity of improvisation within the contrived medium of notated music.
Where my previous compositions have been rather mechanical and procedural in their development, this work was much more intuitive. Its journey is more winding mountain path than machine conveyor belt. Perhaps the influence of having recently become a parent has led me to embrace mess and chaos in both life and art – this work is certainly the most deliberately untidy of my compositions to date. Much of it is the result of a kind of mental improvisation, to which the medium of notation grants powers of alignment and coherence unavailable to true improvisation.
The title is a play on this tension between the dynamic and the static: a forest constructed with fibreglass could have every leaf perfectly placed, but does not grow; it is a beautiful dead thing. But the metaphor is loose, because regardless of how strictly one tries to dictate a musical work, there is an abundance of life and chaos to be found in the very act of performance. The players, the audience, the space, and the wood and metal of the instruments are alive and organic. They are the true life-givers to a piece of music.
And we close the concert with our arrangement of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. Nonsemble is primarily made of tragic music fanatics, and creating arrangements of music we love has always been a core part of what we do. We arranged and recorded this incredible song for our 2017 CULTS EP, at the time feeling like we were unearthing a rare gem. None of us could have expected this song’s immense and sudden surge of popularity following its placement in the Stranger Things TV show. So we’ve retread our arrangement for larger forces to give an epic aura to everyone’s new favourite old song. As strange a thing the comeback is, few artists would deserve it more than the exceptional Kate Bush.