A Confluence of Birds started with our field recordings of birds made over the last two years across the UK: corvids in Dorset, starlings on the Isle of Lewis, buzzards and finches in Aberdeenshire, gulls and kittiwakes on the easternmost tip of Scotland and curlews in the North Pennines. Their songs manifest themselves in dense choruses and individual calls across riverbanks, precipitous cliffs, plains and valleys. The piece is a playful kaleidoscopic counterpoint of these original recordings and their transformations.

A Confluence Of Birds (Nicholas Virgo & Alistair MacDonald)

version for 6 trombones and tuba

Friction is the force that resists motion in materials in contact. The piece explores many sounds and motions that act as a metaphor for various aspects surrounding friction such as a sense of kinetic energy and the resulting release of heat. In particular the piece references internal friction, the force resisting motion in solids which are undergoing deformation.

I imagine this process in the sliding trombone sounds which seem to push against some kind of imaginary sonic barrier. The materials become less and less stable as the musical atoms making up the piece distort and split up. Once separated the material reforms into new but related shapes. It is as though the new material shows us inside the original.

Friction is dedicated to Richard Greer and was composed as part of a cultural exchange between the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Paris Conservatoire and waspremiered by De Profundis in February in Paris. 

commissioned by Diaphonique, Franco-British Fund for Contemporary Music

De Profundis, trombone, tuba and percussion ensemble
Clément Carpentier, conducting

recorded at Saint-Louis des Invalides, Paris, February, 2. 2012
sound engineer : Alice Legros

A Confluence Of Birds (Nicholas Virgo & Alistair MacDonald)

alistair_macdonald

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