Making Ghosts from Empty Landscapes (2010), for ensemble of erhu, pipa, two violins, uilleann pipes and electronics
Premiered at the La Planatation arts centre, Beijing, 2010, as part of the first Beijing Irish New Music Festival
‘Making Ghosts from Empty Landscapes’ grapples with the issues of connecting traditional instrumental practices from China and Ireland within the framework of contemporary music composition featuring electroacoustic elements.
The project might be best summarised as attempting to create a distributed ‘meta-instrument’ as a unifying structure which is loosely based on the structure and common role of the Irish uilleann pipes as source of instrumental drones with foregrounded melodic materials. In short, the instruments blend or assert their presence within a sonic landscape which allows them to alternately assert their presence or evoke a sense of stasis, or even absence; (perhaps) imaginary flickers of movement in a depopulated landscape.