Teaching artist, musician and writer
Works
Open access score collection - promoting creativity, improvisation, and listening. If you are interested in using one of these scores, or commissioning a score, please get in contact here.
At Night the Whole World Hums (2022)
Text score for flute, violin, viola, cello and everyone in the space. Written for 'Embodiment' - Carclew SALA Exhibition 2022.
SALA Artist Statement:
“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
- Pauline Oliveros
What does it mean to take a walk at night as a femme person in a world that has urged us not to? How can we truly listen when our breath rushes through our ears and our bodies reject the call to silence from a need to assert ourselves as we move through public space?
One of Oliveros’ most quotable Sonic Meditations, the above 2 instructions invite the practitioner to enter the unique sonic world of the night soundscape, where the details of the world are diminished visually and sonic details become enlivened. At Night the Whole World Hums is a musical response to this text score, written for small chamber ensemble, recounting the sounds heard, the movements and the sensations experienced in solitary walking as a femme person. Incorporating elements of psychogeography, (the mapping of emotional contours of space), text notation and improvisation, At Night the Whole World Hums seeks to immerse the listener in both personal and collective memories of walking alone at night, recounted through the performers’ combined musical languages.
In performance, audience/participants will be invited to contribute sounds of breathing and humming, entangled with the sounds of the instrumentalists - Thea Martin (violin), Ella Beard (viola), Clara Gillam Grant (cello) and Maria Zhdanovich (flute).
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Pocket Sounds for Routine (2022)
A text score based in walking, listening and sound imagining for any individual. First distributed in Scoring in Text - A Creativity Workshop in Sound Part 4, September 2021. Published in A Year of Deep Listening by the Center for Deep Listening in honour of Pauline Oliveros' 90th birthday. Read more here.
Sand Steps (2021)
First realised by Clara Gillam Grant, Maria Zhdanovich, Brandon Bartholomeusz, Sam Wilson, Miles Farnan and Thea Martin
Text published in MUD November Newsletter 2021:
“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
- Pauline Oliveros
Text scores are a site of balance for language and sound. Scores allow us to transfer ideas. They can be both a template or a starting point. Also called verbal notation, event scores, or instructional scores, text scores developed out of the experimental music scene of the 1950s, particularly in America. Text scores not only transfer ideas, but invite us to ‘realise’ the ideas through increased elements of indeterminacy, calls for improvisation, collaboration and creativity. They use only words to instruct, describe, prompt or guide a sound-making (or imagining) process. Some are instructional and direct - like a cookbook full of instructions for creating specific sounds. Some are allusive and abstract, poetic even - opening up an increased breadth of potential sonic experience that notes on a stave cannot access. Sand Steps is a piece scored in text for a small ensemble (percussion, cello/ voice, flute, violin and saxophone), written during August of this year after I took a walk on the beach. I tried to walk so silently that the bottom of my feet could become ears. I listened and listened and listened. I found so many delicate, scratching and sinking sounds. I tried my best to write them down. The score functions as a guided improvisation within a narrative structure, and is an exploration of the sonic associations of sand as we interact with it – both imagined and real. The process of scoring draws upon my own pedagogical values, the Sound Imaginings of Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young’s score: “this piece is a little whirlpool out in the middle of the ocean”.
- Thea Martin
Post-Scores (with regards to James Tenney) (2021)
A text score based in sound imagining and sharing for any individual or group. First realised in Scoring in Text - A Creativity Workshop in Sound Part 4, September 2021.
The Listening Snail
for the Pines String Ensemble (2021)
A text score based in syntax rhythms, listening and sound re-creating. First realised by The Pines String Ensemble in August 2021.
The Ginkgo's of Hiroshima (2021)
A programmatic text score for any mixed ensemble with 4 or more players. First realised by Glenunga International High School String Orchestra in 2021.