still life

Talea Ensemble (New York, US) co-commission

UK Premiere: https://www.bcmg.org.uk/still-life

Instrumentation: large ensemble, field recordings, fixed media & video

Duration: c. 15-18 minutes

BCMG first performed Katherine Balch's music in 2022. New Geometry was part of our American Dream concert, alongside the world premiere of George Lewis' Sound Investment piece Breaking. 

We're delighted to be a commissioning partner in this new piece from Katherine, described best by the composer herself.

“still life, will be a multi-movement, c.15-18 minute work for 10-member ensemble, fixed media, and video by Ted Moore, a collaborator on this project. still life will explore themes related to an increasingly large part of my life: growing and raising animal/vegetable sustenance on my in-progress homestead in rural Connecticut. During the past year of laying the foundational framework of my long-term goal of ethically cultivating my own food and sharing it with my community, I’ve collected many field recordings of the land and my process: dawn and dusk choruses of insects and birds, spring deluges, chicks in the brooder, ruminants chewing cud, and frogs caroling to name a few. These field recordings have increasingly informed my music, but have not yet been directly integrated into a piece I’ve written, a gap between my personal livelihood and creative practice I hope to bridge with this collaboration.

In still life, I want to create a sound-world in which instrumental and found sounds are blended into a hybrid ensemble, creating a new sonic ecosystem. 

Video projections behind the performers (min. 3) will also serve to immerse the performers into the sonic environment. The video projections will not be literal depictions of the landscape, but rather, engage in a similar process of augmentation and hybridization of image as the instrumental ensemble does vis-a-vis audio. Each movement will focus on a particular “level” of the ecosystem around me, all essential ingredients to my own farming and animal rearing: I. dirt, II. water, III. sky. 

In writing this piece, I want to harvest the archive of field recordings I’ve accumulated and find a way to connect my identity as a composer to my passion for learning about land, animals, the environment around me, and the space I occupy within it.” Katherine Balch, 2024

Watch a short interview with Katherine here: https://youtube.com/shorts/Offmcb8YW58?si=EyBGy1FCSF_U9fOi

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