Abstract:
Premiere performance by Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, with Conductor Eric Dudley. Friday 7 September 2018, Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo.
As part of “Tranquil Abiding”, the opening night concert of the 6th Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Friday 7 September 2018, Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo.
...and I am but an echo, a ghost, is a shadow work, beginning out of barely audible materials which gradually find weight only to dissipate once again. It is like waking up from a dream within a dream, unsure of where to situate reality. The mirror of your flower is a revisionist-Romantic work, a meta-commentary on the orchestra as an organism, so full of memory of music that has passed through it. The binary work is triggered by the Narcissus/Echo myth, where the latter fades away to nothing but a whisper chasing someone else’s voice. It is a work that digests the pain of the love that leaves you, and the part of you they take away with them forever, but the importance that forgetting plays in the progress of grief and the constant traps that nostalgia tries to cast across ideas of future. Working with both the Adelaide AND Bendigo Symphony Orchestras in the evolution of these two mirrored works has been a wonderful. To make music and spend time with two amazing groups of people, and their skill and generosity represents a luxury denied most composers and yet so essential to the exploration of colour, and the creation of the new. My gratitude to the players and the conductors, first Rohan Phillips and now Eric Dudley for bringing it to life.
