Mapping Australia

This project, Mapping Australia (2014), presents my recent compositional interests in working with multimedia, presence, the conceptual and the kinesthetic in the development of new music performance and notational systems. It is a political work based on archival footage from 1966. The footage is about Australia's map-making processes but it also advertises Australia for foreign mining interests. I disagreed with what the footage represented and wanted to counter the self-importance and authority of the video. I turned movements from the people in the video into movements by the pianist inside the piano. The piano conceptually represents land and is mapped and notated in a spatial-choreographical manner, fused with my own musical ways of thinking about composition. The resulting sound is gritty, grinding, scraping, brushing and knocking sounds. The performer is asked to mimic silly movements in the video in an attempt to mock the source material – I also created humorous video manipulations to go along with the performance. The notes played on the keyboard are a distilled reworking of the music by the late Australian composer Robert Hughes (the music used in the archival footage). By removing certain notes and phrases I left behind only a trace of the driving lyrical trajectory of the music.