Yellowstone/winter NYCEMF

As earlier announced announced in my blog post about my presentation at AR@K Artistic Research Forum, I have had an ongoing collaboration with New York City-based cellist Madeleine Shapiro over a number of years that has now resulted in a premiere at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, NYCEMF. According to the organizers NYCEMF is the largest showcase of electroacoustic music in New York City, and one of the largest festivals of its kind in the world. Our joint piece, Yellowstone/winter, was presented at the Loreto Theater at the Sheen Center June 19 along with 9 other pieces. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to attend in person, but my presence wasn’t strictly needed either, thus Madeleine performed the piece on her own.

Our piece has developed over the last few years through a form of composition I have termed “slow telematics”, a version of telematic music I described in an earlier post as “allowing for slowness, time for reflection and afterthought, since it was based on iterative cycles of recording (me in the forest/mountain area of Bymarka, Trondheim and Madeleine in her upper Manhattan working room), sending, listening and commenting (on email) over years, going back and forth between Trondheim and New York”.

The recordings have been structured around a spoken anecdote of a cherished memory of Madeleine carrying both delight and worry for the future. The anecdote recounts a beatiful day of skiing in Yellowstone National Park. Here is a short excerpt:

Just the rhythm of the skis, the occasional rustle, the occasional little sound, little creak, creak of a tree.

However, the story ends with the worry about a future where such experiences are no longer possible.

The piece features this anecdote, which was originally recorded without the intention to end up in a piece of music, embedded into a fixed media track additionaly featuring the mentioned recordings of snow and skiing along with Madeleine’s cello improvisation responding to those recordings. The live version features Madeleine improvising on her cello in an interplay with the fixed track containing all these layers of sound and meaning. Luckily, the event was streamed and the video with the performance is still available.

Madeleine Shapiro performing Yellowstone/winter at NYCEMF June 19 2024