Ilparpa Road 2.3 2023 and Arltunga 2023
for violin and pied butcherbird
Composed by Hollis Taylor and Jon Rose (joint work)
Composed for Natalie Mavridis
This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia and the Anthony and Sharon Lee Foundation
Program Note:
"Ilparpa Road 2.3, 2023 and Arltunga 2023 summon audiences to the sound world of another species. Thirteen million years ago, pied butcherbirds separated from the common Corvid ancestor and evolved a preference for song. In spring, birds perform nocturnal long songs of up to seven hours in duration. No two individuals sing alike, and their songs transform annually. Our task is not to “improve” on a bird’s song but to celebrate their musical achievements. In our (re)compositions, human musicians play a detailed transcription of a bird’s song, as well as complement the recorded birdsong with various sonic strategies like melodic inversion, augmentation, transposition, and counterpoint. Recorded in Central Australia in 2023, they are performed here without pause." —Hollis Taylor and Jon Rose
About the composer:
Jon Rose's primary life's work is The Relative Violin: the development of a total artform based around the one instrument. It includes innovation in the fields of new instrument design, environmental performance, new instrumental techniques, radiophonic works, and the development of inter-active electronics.
He is featured regularly in the main festivals of New Music, Jazz, Performance and Sound Art such as Ars Elektronica, Festival D’Automne, Maerzmusik, Dokumenta, North Sea Jazz Fest, New Music America, the Vienna Festival, the Berlin Jazz Festival, Moers Festival, The Melbourne Festival, and The Sydney Festival.
Rose has appeared on over 100 albums and CD's; he has worked with many of the innovators and mavericks in contemporary music such as Kronos String Quartet, Derek Bailey, Alvin Curran, Otomo Yoshihide, Ilan Volkov, Christian Marclay, and John Zorn.
In 2012 Jon was honoured with The Music Board of The Australia Council's senior prize – the Don Banks Award for lifetime achievement and contribution to Australian music. His book about the state of music today, Music of Place: Reclaiming a Practice", was published by Currency House Press (2013). He curates his own violin museum of 1,000+ artefacts: The Rosenberg Museum.
For more about Jon, visit www.jonroseweb.com.
For more about co-composer Hollis Taylor, visit here.
Commissioned by the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) as part The ANAM Set 2024 and written for Natalie Mavridis, with its world premiere during ANAM’s 2024 recital season at the Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne. The ANAM Set 2024 has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, and ANAM.