for SAAB a cappella

9 minutes

Program Note

“Escuchando: a madrigal of shadows for four voices” is conceived as incidental music to the video art work “...escuchando...” by visual artist Marsia Alexander-Clarke. The artist describes her idiom with the concept of “video as mark”, borrowing a common term used in drawing and painting. Such marks most notably include narrow luminous slivers set against a dark background. Often these slivers function as the outer frames of highly filtered images of real life, particularly relating to the intricate play of light on plants. Marks are used as primary compositional motives in what the artist describes as a “visual narrative which develops sequentially, like a silent, visual fugue.” In this respect, one experiences marks in a dual way: as crevices through which we can gauge glimpses of our perception of the world, and as pure forms, autonomous abstract entities masterfully assembled and arranged in time.

The composition “Escuchando: a madrigal of shadows for four voices” is conceived as an aural and intellectual counterpoint to Alexander-Clarke’s homonymous work. I engage with the idea of aural marks as perceptual crevices into a world of indistinct memories and as pure sonic objects in an abstract form. Slivers of embodied sounds consisting of minute gradations of breath emerge from islands of long silences, gradually giving way to fragile sung lines, assembled and arranged in response to the artist’s idea of a “silent, visual fugue.”

“Escuchando: a madrigal of shadows for four voices” can be performed live in tandem with a screening of “...escuchando...” or as a stand-alone work.

Escuchando was composed for Holly Druckman and Carduus, and was recorded the work on October 1, 2021.

Purchase

Please fill out the form HERE to request the performance score for this work.