Premiere: 29 April 2018, Witten & 7 May 2018, Vienna for flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon/contrabassoon, trumpet, horn, tenor-bass trombone, piano, percussion, violin, ‘cello, double bass duration: c. 40 minutes
Vast conglomerations of plastic trash circulate in five gyres in the world’s ocean currents and are ground into toxic fragments that sediment on remote islands and within the fish we eat. Our every-day rubbish shelters hermit crabs even as acid waters dissolve their former shell habitations. Albatrosses scoop up meals of plastic packaging to feed their chicks that then choke and starve as they ingest this colourful non-food.
Like this plastic waste, all time and its traces are with us still, albeit in residual and pulverised states. I have made a music out of heterogeneous relics of the past – a coarse sampling of ‘extinction events’ ranging from the spectral echoes of a creaking 19th century in piano music ‘on an overgrown path’ (Janáček), to a faulty transcription of a recording of the last mating call ever heard of the now extinct Kauai O’o bird, to tracings of a star map that captured the Chinese southern night sky in the 9th century. These time-traces rub against each other in ever-degraded cycles. Fleeting repetitions are pulsations of disappearance and point to the uncertainties of human memory and its collapse in abject forgetting.
There is broken grandeur and there are attempts to sing.
There is the uncanny dawn chorus of the fish-life that populates an endangered Australian coral reef.
Liza Lim (b. 1966, Australia) is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices.
Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works.
Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights listening to more-than-human realms.
Widely commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2021-22.
Her music is published by Ricordi Berlin.
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