BY TAMARA KOHLER
Here I am sitting at Melbourne airport on the way to the first soloist rehearsal for the Australian premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s ‘Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni’ or ‘The Circle Cut by Sounds’. What an experience it has already been, and I haven’t even arrived in Canberra yet.
As part of the Australian Flute Festival, this immersive work features four flute soloists: Janet McKay (Brisbane), Lamorna Nightingale (Sydney), Melanie Walters (Adelaide), and me, Tamara Kohler (Melbourne). The soloists form a circle around the seated audience and create an accelerating swirl of sound, only to be interrupted by one hundred ‘migrating’ performers, who walk in procession through the space, introducing a forward flow of sound and movement while ‘cutting the circle’ of sounds.
It took me over three hours to assemble two scores which will accommodate soft and time-appropriate page turns and allow for the necessary movement around the performance space. Although this work might not be the most challenging piece of music from a technical point of view, it requires a level of concentration that has triggered me to frequent the term ‘brain-fried’.
Certainly, working on the piece has taught me to feel vast space within time. What a beautiful and calming concept to adopt in contrast to my usual manic time-scheduled day-to-day life. As Sciarrino wrote in his original 1997 score:
“There are no kinds of living creatures that do not change their location from time to time. Humans migrate too, and in recent times we have witnessed events we thought had disappeared from history. Dramatic events: our species is in fact restrained by a powerful opposing instinct, the homing instinct, the instinct for stability, the instinct to maintain society inside an impossible equilibrium.”
…surprising topical in 2015?!
I think my favourite part of this process has been watching countless faces drop over the last few weeks when I mentioned the figure ‘104flutes’ in conversation. To be honest, I would usually share their fear, as I am not a massive fan of the mass-flute experience. However, this is definitely something different.
I’ve run out of highlighters and attained a few paper-cuts in preparation for this performance, and I like to pretend that studying this score has improved my non-existent Italian skills. But I would still encourage you not to ask me to pronounce Sciarrino’s name.
So come along and enter a unique sound world with myself, Lamorna Nightingale, Janet McKay, Melanie Walters and around 80 other players from around the country.
If you’re interested to join the migranti, there are still a few spots available (BYO flute). Send me an email for more information: tamaralouisekohler@gmail.com.
‘Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni’ by Salvatore Sciarrino, performance at the High Court of Australia, Canberra, 7.30pm October 2. Free event.
Image supplied.
