MIGRATIONS (2019, rev. 2024)

With admiration and thanks to the busking community of the Métro de Paris.

For electronics (tape, 4-channel), string quintet, piccolo, four flutes, and conductor. 
Commissioned by the Perth Orchestra Project under the direction of Izaak Wesson. Premiered 22nd November, 2019, at the Callaway Auditorium, The University of Western Australia.
Full duration: 9 minutes 30 seconds.

Migrations explores movement, transience, unrest, and the unfamiliar: commonplace sounds become disconnected from their sources and drift in patterns of migration within the performance space. Field recordings—which document various journeys in the Paris metropolitan rapid transit system—have been assembled into a lyrical montage, paying homage to Pierre Schaffer’s work in musique concrète and acousmatic listening. Two sine tone drones surface ominously and gradually from the depths of the human hearing range throughout the work.

Migrations offers the listener space to reflect on one of the defining elements of the contemporary zeitgeist: displacement, and its effect on the human condition. In a world where the global has, in many ways, become the local, what does it mean to feel at home?