Composers & WorksCat Hope

The Long Now
for bass trombone and electronics
Composed for James Littlewood
First performance: 4 Dec 2021

Performed at the ANAM Set Festival by
James Littlewood (bass trombone)

The ANAM Set · Cat Hope's ‘The Long Now’ performed by James Littlewood | The ANAM Set


This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative


Program note:
The ‘Long Now’ is a Foundation that aims to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture by encouraging long-term thinking, fostering responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. A short piece of text that opens the work, spoken by the composer, is a typical ‘Long Now’ provocation: “How Long is Now?” Music provides complex answers to this question, and in this work, a slow descent into very low sound, where pitch is either uncontrollable or almost inaudible, reflects the limits of human action in and perception of sound as it passes through time, highlighting that there may be other ways to listen, and other ways to experience our passing through time.

About the composer:
Cat  Hope’s  music  is  characterised  by  a  focus  on  low  frequency  sound,  extended  forms  and experimental timbres. Her music has been performed at festivals and broadcast internationally. She is a recipient of a Churchill Fellowship, and composer residencies at the Visby International Composers Centre, Sweden; Civitella Ranieri, Italy and the Peggy Glanville Hicks House in Sydney in 2014. Her first opera Speechless premiered at the Perth Festival in 2019, and won the 2020 APRA AMC Art Music  Award  for  best  new dramatic  work,  and  her  major  orchestral  commission  from  the  BBC Scottish  Symphony  Orchestra  will  premiere  in  2022  at  the  Tectonics  Festival,  Glasgow.  Her  music has  been  discussed  in  books  such  as  Score  Writing  (Thor  Magnusson,  2019)  and  Hidden  Alliances (Schimmana, 2019), as well as periodicals such as Gramophone, Tempo, The Wire, Limelight, Corrie e Reverie and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft. She writes for dance, installation, visual art and poetry collaborating with artists such as Kate McMillan, Tracey Moffat, Ross Gibson, Martin Del Amo and Erin  Coates,  and  directs  the  award-winning  Decibel  New  Music  Ensemble.  Her  monograph  CD, Ephemeral Rivers, on Swiss label Hat [now] ART was awarded the German Critics Prize in 2017, and  she  has  been  named  “one  of Australia’s  most  exciting  and  individual  creative  voices.” (Gramophone UK, 2017). Cat is Professor of Music at Monash University.

More info: https://www.cathope.com/ 

 

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