Having had its premiere in Brisbane earlier this year, Macarthur Clough and Angus Wilson of Kupka’s Piano recorded my new work Dust, dew for the New Waves podcast series by the ABC. Commissioned by Kupka’s Piano, my work also featured alongside works by Samantha Wolf, Samuel Smith, Hannah Reardon-Smith, and Lisa Illean.
My work Dust, dew lies within a body of duo’s I’ve been writing over the last year (and increasingly looking like to continue into 2019), exploring the nature of two musicians/people within the same setting – not necessarily playing together or at the same time. The work further delves into the microtonal, ornamental, and highly erratic material that has interested me, with a closer attention to extremes in timbre, most notably articulated by the title – that between dry and static gestures, attacks, colours etc. and those fluid, malleable, and almost slippery. I think these varying extremes also correlate rather beautifully to the extremes in parts of Australian suburbia – housing estates of freshly laid turf, brick and render homes one after the other, sprinklers and fresh gardens, all cropping up at the very outskirts of our cities while on the other side of the fence a dry, harsh, rural landscape unfolds… (see for example Melton and Tarneit on the outskirts of Melbourne!) …(I’ll upload a photo later!)
Two works in particular where a massive source of inspiration and study when writing this piece. Firstly, Elliott Gyger‘s A wilderness of mirrors – especially looking at his writing for the Eb clarinet, that which for me perfectly incapsulates the entirely unique sound and colour of this instrument, and embracing the use of silence (one which Elliott had brought up many times during our past lessons). Secondly, Liza Lim‘s An Elemental Thing – drawing from Liza’s desire and ability to (as she puts) make such a humble and simple instrument sing… This strongly informed my desire to firstly write for the snare drum, an instrument that I typically avoided (due to what I saw as a heavily typecast ‘one-tricky pony’), and secondly to rethink the way I thought about musical and gestural possibilities, especially in relation to solo percussion! There is a fantastic video of Liza’s An Elemental Thing performed by Eugene Ughetti available here:
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A sample page and further details of my work Dust, dew can be found here in my list of work.
Jakob Bragg 