Destructive Interference
for flute
Composed for Lily Bryant
First performance: 8 Dec 2021
Performed at the ANAM Set Festival by
Lily Bryant (flute)
This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative
Program note:
This piece is a portrait of a meeting point between the self that you know, and the selves that went and made different decisions, did other things. The experience of lockdowns these past 18 months has been a period of forced self-reflections, and to me it’s been interesting to think about how we share these experiences with the people around us, but also the lives we might have led, in the sense that the pandemic experience has been so overwhelming it implies a cancelling out; whether everything went great or terrible before, you’re in lockdown now and you're brought closer to those lives you left behind, even if they’re completely unrelatable.
The title takes its name after the phenomenon created when two audio waves superimpose and cancel each other out leading to a lower amplitude. Naming it this implies a nihilism on this process of reflection but the intended sentiment of the work is ambivalence through a process of reckoning.
About the composer:
Matt has been writing music since he started university, sketching ideas whilst training to be a viola player, and completing a Bachelor of Music/Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Melbourne. Following a successful participation in the Flinders Quartet’s 2017 composer workshop, his first big commission Out of Hibernation was premiered by the Quartet in 2019 through which he was awarded an Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant to work on the quartet with mentoring from Brett Dean in London and Berlin. Having participated in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 2020 Young Composer program, he was subsequently selected as the Orchestra’s Young Composer in Residence for 2021, and will write three works for the orchestra. Matt is a recipient of a 2021 Prelude Residency at Collingrove Homestead in Angaston, with thanks to the South Australian National Trust and the Peggy Glanville-Hicks House Trust. Matt’s first work premiered overseas, Portrait of Blood, was performed in London on a tour by Affinity Quartet and Lotte Betts-Dean in February 2020. Further compositional engagements for 2021 include works for the Australian String Quartet, ANAM, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, Ossicle Duo, Melbourne Chamber Players and Katie Yap.
More info: https://www.mattlaing.com/