notebook
last updated: april 13 2023
... prelude ...
my grandfather, kept a small notebook to briefly take note of the various happenings of every day. similarly, my dad always has a sketchbook within arms reach. it seems to be that i have inherited a similar habit, though the form of my ‘notebook’ is perhaps a little more chaotic…a collage of ideas, notation, score excerpts, videos, sound files, images, sketches that feed into the music i compose.
as a high schooler, i loved learning about the concept of a ‘maquette’ - a sculptor's small preliminary model or sketch. i also fondly remember my art teacher introducing the class to the work of robert klippel, whose body of work included intricate sculptures made from found junk machine parts. a few years later, i sat in the AGNSW totally obsessed with a collection of klippel’s work eighty-seven small polychromed tin sculptures, only to discover that some of these tiny forms (macquettes) grew up to become much larger sculptures and structures klippel created. recently, it seems that i am enjoying and have gotten into the habit of composing lots of musical maquettes. some of these maquettes (or elements of) are already transforming into larger pieces. for others, who knows if, when and what they will grow up to become.
photo (by me) of klippel’s work
this page is my notebook of maquettes amongst other scribbles, experiments and things i am currently working on. last year, i assembled a similar collage for a collection of miniatures i composed - field notes. it was fun and i am hoping that this collage will also be fun. moreover…i hope it is fun for you to explore !
- elizabeth 🐨💕👂
p.s if you are liking what i am making and like the idea of me making more, you can support me here. in return, i would love to compose something for you and talk to you about what this might look like.
p.p.s whilst you’re here… if you like a good notebook, ideas in motion, scribbles, experiments, etctc… do check out jane aubourg’s musician’s log and caitlyn rowley’s notebooks
i have learnt so much via agnes varda and her films/work - something i hope to write more about in the future. i have been thinking a lot about the question above (from the gleaners and i), as i feel that it frames a lot of the things you will find on this page, a lot of the thoughts that bounce around in my mind and the thinking that seeps from this page/my mind into my other work.
accidental, live sound capsules
a while ago… i realised that many people were unknowingly keeping a consistent sound journal of sorts. owners of an iPhone (providing the setting is switched on) are regularly capturing small bites of sound via live photos. live photos record a video 1.5 seconds before and after a photo is taken. this video includes sound. for fun, i have since had the idea to build a shortcut that allows one to download the audio files from these moments and listen back in quick succession. it’s an interesting listen, trying to identify these moments of sound i have unintentionally captured. 8000 live photos on my phone = 6 hours of accidentally recorded sound…
animation triptych (april 2022)
a week of COVID-19 isolation resulted in explorations of “looom” - a beautifully designed and curious animation app. I enjoyed creating three little experiments - pairing my animations with some music created on various synthesisers. I enjoyed setting myself ‘homework’ ignorer to learning some new.
tea suite (june 2022)
june 1st 2022 was a particularly chilly winter’s day in Sydney. looking out at the wild weather and with a cup of tea on hand, I composed a suite of piano pieces inspired by tea. a few days earlier, beryl shereshewsky posted a call out asking for how people around the world have their tea and so I liked the idea of creating a musical response to this proposition. I also liked the idea of composing some piano pieces that were at an easy level for anyone to play! 😊
map #1 (with more maps to come)
the graphic below is the result of an exercise where I wanted to see what would happen if I were to attempt to map out some of the ideas and people behind my music. I specifically want to do this task without any preplanning to experiment with the accidental topography that would emerge from a relatively haphazard/stream of consciousness-driven process.
picnic piece (1)
currently, sydney is in lockdown. however, fully vaccinated people can enjoy five people picnics. i like picnics. and i liked the idea that a group of five picnic-ers could share in a game of music together whilst picnic-ing. here are the rules below that hopefully are written in a clear and fun enough way for anyone (who can play a few notes on an instrument) to explore !
one day, jane aubourg and i lived inside a score that we had constructed just moments before.
list 1.0 (as part of “engaging with the world”)
list 2.0
i recently participated in jennifer walshe and du yun’s “engaging with the world” workshop as part of darmstadt ferienkurse 2021. we were set the task to devise a list of 30 ideas. i love tasks. i love lists. and i love ideas. so i loved this task. i also had a hunch that jane aubourg would love this task as well. so, in one of our many joyful, helpful and fruitful conversations…i set the same task for both of us. jane wrote her list up on her studio’s wall. i wrote my list on sticky notes whilst walking around…allowing my surroundings to somewhat influence the ideas i was thinking. i recorded these ideas in motion (fun fact: it’s surprisingly hard to write on a strange surface and film at the same time!). if you’re reading this and you also like ideas and feel like a task, create your own list of 30 or so ideas and maybe even make something out of the process.
... sketch sandpit ...
i have been trying to compose quite a few miniatures for friends and for (my trustworthy friend) the piano. sometimes i am composing these minis for similar reasons one might do a sudoku puzzle everyday…others it is just nice to be composing something small and focused for friends (especially during the current situation of things). i am in the process of typesetting them and i’ll gradually upload them to this space…perhaps even with a few recordings…
in the meantime, you will find a rather random selection of recent score/sketch excerpts above…
i’m composing a bass flute miniature for lamorna nightingale. i began composing it during my weekly one hour livestream ‘sound on toast’. this is it in two mins.
an experiment with a record, knife, my trusty mini orange amp and a contact mic. this is an experiment that i keep returning to but have not yet ‘cracked’…in that i’m never happy with what results. anyway, i’ll keep trying.
prelude
to EXQUISITE CHORUS (2020) commissioned by Gaudeamus Muziekweek
an introductory letter to my web/game opera that you are welcome to read more about and explore as part of SCREEN DIVE.
you can dive straight in.
… fragments …
an excerpt from a project proposal written in dec 2019 for a work that should have eventuated in jul 2020. part of the proposal, describes a ‘livestream feedback loop’ performance situation that feeds a web series - ‘the sound keepers network’ , at the timing of dreaming this up, i would not have thought that live-streaming would become such a pertinent form in 2020…
this is a bricolage of clips from the rehearsal of roaming flute music i had composed for ‘voices of women ’ (a performance lost to COVID). a massive THANK YOU to naomi johnson, lamorna nightingale and jessica scott. though the piece was never performed in its entirety, i was happy to reflect and assemble our rehearsals into a little short film.
PING ECHO! (2022)
one summer’s evening, flutist naomi johnson and I explored sub-base platypus - formerly a torpedo factory, submarine base and gasworks in north sydney. one building - Retort House - was particularly intriguing. I had brought my camera and naomi had brought her piccolo. together we explored the site and this is the resulting experiment - a short (and imperfect) video work. I came up with the title from text found on the floor of the children’s playground.
... various experiments ...
peter ablinger’s DECISIONS 3/KOCHAM WOLNOŚĆ shared from a pedestrian footbridge above one of sydney’s busiest roads.
making messy music, learning, reflecting, playing, exploring with jane aubourg is one of my favourite things to do. here is one of our experiments.
playing with synth components above wednesday morning traffic on one of new south wale’s busiest roads.
sonic dreams by vanessa tomlinson
“an imagination of lost and unknown sounds” (the score is available on vanessa’s site)
i first heard the sound of a lesser stick-nest rat in 2017 @ the peggy glanville hicks house. vanessa’s entire set that night was so imaginative and ear-inspiring (listen to the recording of it ! ). reading through the score, i felt like i needed to capture the endangered/extinct sounds in glass jars and examine these specimens in my performance. i first ‘performed’ sonic dreams sitting at my desk in the darkness of my windowless study as part of a 1 hour livestream @ 7am as part of my weekly Sound on Toast/Hibernation Festival. afterwards i sifted through the video footage to create the video for you below.
aftermath of sonic dreams
face your ears
an improvisation/experiment/collage as part of weekly 'sound on toast' offering @ hibernation festival. often composers/creators can feel strangely about the music and ideas of others that have influenced them in some way or another along with the music they perhaps like to simply listen to...i think this is odd. i thought it would be fun to think about this in a media improvisation/experiment/collage of sorts - facing my ears and colliding/working with material (not limited to music alone - you'll spot some silent films, cartoons, interviews, documentaries, etc) that for whatever reason came to mind in the moment. i created the collage in OBS by capturing Youtube windows, changing the speeds of the videos, looping, layering videos...with my struggling laptop naturally glitching, distorting and creating interesting artefacts of sound. at one point, my laptop started to really struggle, so I scrolled/filtered through a folder of mp3 files and started dragging, layering them in.
still life ignoring
visual artist/designer tim jetis created the paintings during a livestream experiment "still life ignoring". i imagined them via a toy piano.
bits & blocks from SOUNDCRAFT
maquette for SOUNDCRAFT’s - MEGABLOCK: a noisy play-space for kids. or you can see the real thing.
moosic
mooshrooms making moosic on the giant red piano hotel. thank you to the mooshroom ensemble for their moosic.
SOUNDCRAFT was commissioned and produced by Campbelltown Arts Centre
goats by caitlin rowley
whilst preparing for the performance of goats by caitlin rowley, i had a very clear idea that the goat i would find to draw ‘that makes me happy’ would be wearing a hat. with thanks to the source of this goat - the facebook page ‘goats wearing hats’. the goats were drawn with pencils, textas, charcoal and whiteout on baking paper, styrofoam, an brown paper bag and a piece of paper i had used for micro 1 by takehisa kosugi.
mitta mitta 8344-n by ciaran frame
ciaran made a graphic score out of maps on a livestream from his apartment. i played it on a livestream from my noisy balcony. twice. here are the two versions at the same time.
strip of mitta mitta 8344-n by ciaran frame
clyde to carlingford
i went down to my local creek (byles creek) with my hydrophone and pink synth. byles creek is named after marie byles. marie byles was a committed conservationist, pacifist, the first practising female solicitor in nsw, mountaineer, explorer and avid bushwalker.
for light rye toast, contact mic, mini amp and music box.
one morning, i woke up and felt like staging a shoebox opera. the opera itself was a flop, however, it was picked up by the matchbox cinema. i’m not so happy with the resulting video, however, excited by some ideas that stem from this little experiment…
crumbs of ear crumbs (august 2021)
september 20 - aldstadt
still from a failed experiment (due to bad internet in the bush)
