Composers & WorksNatasha Anderson

Enjambe
for oboe and vibraphone
Composed for Oscar Gillespie
World premiere performance: 18 Jun 2024 at 11:00am, Rosina Auditorium

Performed as part of ANAM 2024 Recitals
by Oscar Gillespie (oboe)

This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia and the Anthony and Sharon Lee Foundation

Program note:
I wanted to write something that had a strange relationship to ‘making sense’; a kind of sonic prose that works through some syntactical or prosodic means, at any given point, but which, in sum, doesn’t quite add up. An odd desire, for sure, to make something that doesn’t quite crystallize, but it came from wanting to play with the corporate language of the classical genre; to fall from one rhetorical register to another, fusing this collectivity within the pure theory of the Fibonacci sequence (this sequence informs all rhythmic and pitch material). Thus, modernism’s material deconstructions collide with coded gestures of the Baroque; the physical alloys with the abstract; death (the Tombeau) with the quotidian (electric toothbrush); and acoustical physics (harmonic series, timbral fingerings) deform the pure theory of a rational tuning system. Not to revive a tired post-modernism, but to play with the instinct to produce sense. What might the patternings drawn from such a constellation - this corporate space within which we all exist – produce? 

About the composer:
Natasha Anderson (she/her) is an Australian musician/composer making primarily electroacoustic and audiovisual work across a variety of contexts. Fascinated by the ways in which sound becomes encultured, recursively collapsing material, into essence, into language and meaning, she plays with how these relationships embed as different interface modes.

Natasha has been commissioned by the Sacrum Profanum Festival (Krakow), the International Contemporary Ensemble (New York), Ensemble Adapter (Berlin), Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), BIFEM, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Brett Dean, Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), AvantWhatever Festival and the Bionics Institute of Australia. Her work has been performed at the Sydney Festival, Roulette (New York), RadialSystemV (Berlin), LSO St Lukes (London), Carriageworks (Sydney), Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Stuttgart), and in the 2015 Mons European Capital of Culture program.

As a founding member of the quintet Thymolphthalein, Natasha has played numerous European festivals, including Musique Action, Festival Météo, Festival de Musiques Innovatrices, Alternativa, Music Unlimited Wels, Südwestrundfunk New Jazz Meeting, as well as the Melbourne International and Jazz Festivals. She has made radiophonic work for the ABC and installations for Liquid Architecture, Linden and NCCA Darwin. She was awarded the inaugural MPAC Sound Gallery Commission in 2020, the Peggy Glanville-Hicks residency in 2016, and a La Becque residency in 2022.