This is the 1st movement of a larger piece for my electronic, hand-played, e-percussion orchestra. The text of the poem is below, in English, together with the German original.

RILKE & MUSIC? I should say here, that I very much dislike hearing the amazingly sonorous, resonant verse of Rilke set to music. [I get requests all the time for my English translations, and I always, in a hopefully gentle way, try to discourage people.] This is because the music is already very powerfully THERE, in the music of the poem itself. So the original natural music of the poem is what is lost once the music is added. With this soundpoem cycle, however, I'm trying something else. I do the poems as I hear them as a poem, not as song, and then, I've composed a space--a kind of landscape, really--around them. This seems to complement the movement of meaning of the poems that leaves the spirit of the urtext intact.

Title Page 

It's easy for the rich and fortunate to be silent, 
nobody wants to know who they are. 
That is why the destitute must show themselves, 
must say: I am blind, 
or: that is what I'm about to become, 
or: it's not going very well with me here on Earth, 
or: I have a sick child, 
or: this is where I'm kind of all stuck together . . . 

And perhaps even that is not enough. 

Despite everything, as if they were things, 
people walk right by, and so they must sing. 

And one hears good music there. 

Truly, people are strange; They'd 
rather hear castrati in boys' choirs. 

But God himself comes and remains a long time 
when these disfigured ones begin to disturb him.

Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. CLIFF CREGO)

Titelblatt

Die Reichen und Glücklichen haben gut schweigen,
niemand will wissen, was sie sind.
Aber die Dürftigen müßen sich zeigen,
müßen sagen: ich bin blind,
oder: ich bin im Begriff es zu werden
oder: es geht mir nicht gut auf Erden,
oder: ich habe ein krankes Kind,
oder: da bin ich zusammengefügt . . .

Und vielleicht, daß das gar nicht genügt.

Und weil alle sonst, wie an Dingen,
an ihen vorbeigehen, müßen sie singen.

Und da hört man noch guten Gesang.

Freilich die Menchen sind seltsam; sie hören
lieber Kastraten in Knabenchören.

Aber Gott selber kommt und bleibt lang,
wenn ihn diese Beschnittenen stören.

DOWNLOAD: #FreeFriday RILKE IN THE WALLOWAS 80 new tr. & 120 photos, by CLIFF CREGO pdf 212 p/ 208 Mb http://bit.ly/mA3Ly7


from THE VOICES: "Title Page" (after RILKE)

MOONLIGHT - (TOVAH EDIT)

In the Arctic region of Raudfjorden, on a pebble strewn beach stands a small, crude wooden cabin. It’s said that on the same site stood an earlier cabin once inhabited by a lone trapper seeking refuge in the fjord after a terrible mining accident left him disfigured. As I stood in the hut, peering out through one of the many cracks that made-up a wall, I wondered what it must have been like, both for the trapper and others like him who chose to live in such climatically extreme isolation. 
I tried to imagine living in concert with such an unrelenting, yet singularly wondrous place; a home amidst the striking duality of extreme elements, harsh winds and frozen ice, and the many fragile, delicate and captivating sounds produced therein.  
Within this reactive terrain of sound and light was a world so finely tuned it responded to every nuance in temperature, no matter how slight. As the sun arced across the mountain tops, ice fragments in the fjord dissolved, gently hissing and cracking. Occasionally, two fragments collided, producing strangely resonant harmonies refracting off the pebble strewn shore, creating a prismatic soundscape of colour and motion. 
The majority of recordings found in ‘frostbYte - red sound’ are taken from a day at the hut and its surrounds. The two exceptions are a triangle, which is introduced to provide resonance within the piece (augmenting the resonance that was unexpectedly found within the ice and stones that populated the shoreline so prolifically) and a small dinghy as it slews through an icefield. This second recording occurs toward the end of the composition, and is used to express the rugged motions of the boats rise and fall as it pounded through the frozen fields of ice collecting in dense masses around glaciers. The omni present glissandi throughout the work represents the vertical nature of the surrounding mountains, glaciers and cliff’s that form the contours of the fjord enveloping the cabin.   
The title itself refers to the name given to the region in the early 17th Century by the English explorer and whaler Robert Fotherby, who referred to the fjord as ‘Red-cliff Sound’. 


FrostbYte - Redsound_ For Triangle And Hornbækpollen Iceberg Fragment_16bit 44.1KHz

First I would like to thank Daniel Blinkhorn (Please have a look at https://soundcloud.com/danielblinkhorn for more wonderful field recordings) for this collaboration.

You hear a fusion of arctic field recording, piano and some electronic sounds. 

I had the topics of overproduction/-consumption, climate change and melting ice as well as emotional numbing and defreecing in my mind when I composed the track. 

I hope you will feel it!

Clara

Inside.WOMEN.Four (collabo with Daniel Blinkhorn)

@Piecey is a young artist from Sydney with a penchant for organic textures and field recordings. This lust for realness translates into emotive, pulsating, captivating and hypnotic sounds.

Woman are beautiful takes you through a fantastic soundscape of recorded noises combined with an insatiably forward thinking percussion driven melody.

Free Download

Piecey - Women Are Beautiful (Radio Edit)

Elements and minerals lay buried in the landscape tracing diagrams of human activity. Specks of alluvial Gold washed down to the flood plain from worked-out mountain mine shafts; the mineral auras that reveal the long-vanished outlines of farm-buildings and the tell-tale chemical fallout from workplaces.

Boyd painted this (mineralised) landscape with colours which were themselves formulated from earthy compounds and exotic metals, milled to a fine paste in linseed oil and turpentine.

"Heavy Metal" invites us to interact with one of Arthur Boyd’s painting in his old studio at the Bundanon Homestead to discover a hidden world of elements and minerals in an experience that is simultaneously chemical, visual and musical.

Heavy Metal 01

Hydrophone recording on iceberg_Position 81° north, 10° East_Spitsbergen/ Svalbard_Arctic Circle__(Monophonic Recording)

Hydrophone recording on iceberg_(Monophonic Recording)

Field recordings made in Tulum at Ontopo 2017.

Ontopo 2017 Sounds

C. 1950 acetate recording of Dylan Thomas reading at Harvard during his visit to America. There is a portion on Side 2 where Mr. Thomas tells the producers to strike the recording. Then it begins again on the Side 3. Mixed down with Anne Delaney playing mbira while looking out a second story window.

FrostbYte - Redsound_ For Triangle And Hornbækpollen Iceberg Fragment_16bit 44.1KHz

danielblinkhorn

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