The premise underlying The Clash of Icicles Against the Stars is the Chinese concept of Qi. Qi means breath, air, or gas, and can be described as an energy-flow that provides the fundamental element of existence in life. The piece explores the various ‘air chambers’ of each instrument, with the accordion compressing and expanding its chamber to manufacture sound, while the sheng, the oldest wind instrument in China and the ancestor of the accordion, uses reed vibration in contrast to the reedless flute, whose embouchure opening provides the basis for timbral experimentation.

As the piece was written for the opening of the 9th Guangdong Modern Dance Festival’s concert titled ‘Duchamp and the I-Ching’, the The Clash of Icicles Against the Stars structurally employs the mirror systems that lie at the heart of the I-Ching. In Lama Anagarika Govinda’s book, the Inner Structure of the I-Ching, the mirror relationships within each of the eight houses of the I-Ching are mapped, showing the connections between various opposing elements. The routes that map these connections also direct the pitch and rhythmic structures of this composition. The I-Ching thus provides a symmetrical structural base, while Rimbaud’s poem Barbarian, with its highly emotional imagery, evokes the spatial range and temporal pace of The Clash of Icicles Against the Stars.

The Clash Of Icicles Against The Stars

The message resounding in this piece is an appeal for equity and inclusivity. 

One of the effects of resistance is an attempt to dissolve barriers of discrimination. The goal is to have walls crumble; the fall of the Berlin Wall is such a poignant memory for the commissioners of this piece – the wall’s dissolution provided much needed harmony. This piece serves to remind us that we humans, in our beautiful diversity, are equally one.

When Apathy is Betrayal_FULL 60 minutes!

The title is from Emily Dickinson’s poem There’s a Slant of Light: “When it comes, the Landscape listens – Shadows – hold their breath” 
A trill is used to conceptualise a shadow. I am perceiving the trill as a sound representing aspects of transience, rotation and vibration. Trills also bring into prominence the primary note. In a similar manner, a shadow, depending on the slant of light, may magnify or compress the shape of the original object, bringing it into prominence.

When Shadows Hold Their Breath

Written at a time when COVID19 and Black Lives Matter occurred simultaneously. Both these currents had an underlying theme – I can’t breathe. A further dimension that multiplied that feeling of suffocation and exhaustion was the loneliness of physical and spatial dislocation. This sample doesn’t show positive liberation that occurs later in the piece – art is a vehicle to escape, not just reflect on the common current.

Extinct Angels

When Apathy is Betrayal begins with the sounds of being in a warzone – missiles flying through the air and fleeing footsteps evoking the human reactions to this bombardment at ground level. The piece builds on Martin Luther King’s statement on the Vietnam war: ‘when silence is betrayal’. For movement one, ‘the cry in the night’, the sounds of warfare dramatise the intent of why one would need to cry into the night. The music then goes ‘inside’ this cry; the emotions belong to the pain of being displaced from one’s home. Throughout the piece, the music negotiates two creative poles: 1) an aspect of what impels the text to its dramatic definition; 2) reactions to the text, taking into account historical and emotional connotations of what one would sense in being in the realisation of those words.

The question that compelled me to write this piece: In the 21st century, is apathy an emotion, even stronger than silence?

In my lifetime I have witnessed great apathy, especially towards refugees. Why do we disconnect from the plight of people? In writing this piece, I believe that apathy is created by borders – the people of one country no longer feel the need to help others because their empathy cannot pass borders. This disconnect is exacerbated by how conflict visually saturates our lives – the media’s portrayal of conflict is relentless to the point that people ‘switch off’.

Saturation and distance are two elements that define some of the sounds of this piece and I believe are hallmark qualities of apathy itself.

When Apathy Is Betrayal_Mov 1 only 10 minutes

When Apathy Is Betrayal_segment of 19 Mins

This audio fragment from Metamorphosis comes from the middle of the piece. Please write to me if you’d like the full music.


The process of metamorphosis is concerned with the transformation of the appearance of form. The most familiar natural paradigm of metamorphosis is the chrysalis: the caterpillar becomes the other, the butterfly.

All the musical material of Metamorphosis is ‘cocooned’ in the initial accordion solo. This material is then split asunder into melodic fragments for the entire ensemble. The ensemble is divided in such a way that the winds are contained by the strings and vice versa. Thus, one instrumental pairing provides the outer enclosure to inner transformations of another pairing, thereby paving the way for the ‘birth’ of the accordion in the extreme opposite register in which it started.

Metamorphosis for flute, clarinet, accordion, 2 violins

The audio sample is of the first half of A High Wire Act. Please write to me if you’d like the full music.


The piano, violin and cello generate sound by way of vibrating strings or vibrating wires (hence, the title of piece). As if stealthily climbing over each other, the instruments in A High-wire Act run the gauntlet of crossing and exploring the extreme regions of their strings.
Some of the musical lines in A High-wire Act effectively create ‘wires’, accompanying an instrument as it does its high wire act, while other lines pull and tug at the ‘wire’ in a hope to destabilize the balancing act. At one point, the violin bends its string to its extreme, requiring it to detune and is simultaneously accompanied by a heavy cello bass adding further weight.

Metaphors such weights and ‘tugging and pulling’ capture the essence of much of the musical motion operating in this piece. However, a high wire act generates its most tension by magnifying the relationship between the wire and the vertical distance. A sense of verticality is created in this piece through very slow violin glissandi that incrementally descend and ascend. With the soaring of these fragile solo violin transitions, A High-wire Act reminds us of the beauty of being on the edge.

A Highwire Act

One distinctive feature of the soundscape of my native country Australia is the call of the bellbird. Their call is a single bell-like sound. This sound rings through the tapestry of this piece. I also want to experience the journey of these sounds in the space of the hall and the tubes designed at the side of the hall funnel the oboe’s notes, replicating the blown echo.

Blown Echoes for Solo oboe, electronics and pipes

Pokój w Pokoju sets ‘peace’ in many different languages in order to end conflict. When the soprano first comes in recalls the Sri Lankan civil war: Samaya, shanti and amaīthi. Other languages used throughout this piece include: Farsi, Arabic, English, Russian, German, Yiddish, Polish amongst others. Please write to me if you’d like the full music.

The soprano is at a tuning lower than the lowest bass voice. Her tuning is A432Hz (the Verdi ‘A’), while the bass is singing at A440Hz.

The number 432 holds symbolic significance for Pokój w Pokoju. The piece was written after I had seen the paintings of Auschwitz survivor Marian Kołodziej, whose prisoner number was 432. This number formed his identity throughout WWII.

Structurally, 432 determines the choice of intervals: 4:3 = the interval of the perf. 4th; 3:2 = the interval of the perf. 5th. Timbrally, a slight microtonal disparity exists by putting tunings A440Hz and A432Hz together – a call to peace is a reaction to tension, no matter how slight.

Pokój w Pokoju - 'Peace in a Room'

Nirmali Fenn is a Sri Lankan-born Australian composer. She received her initial music education in Australia from the universities of New South Wales and Melbourne, graduating with high distinction. With the support of a prestigious Clarendon Fund Scholarship, she later read music at Oxford University, U.K. She has worked on the faculties of the University of Hong Kong, New York University, University of New South Wales, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She currently lives in New York working at University of Stony Brook.

The kinaesthetic qualities of Nirmali's music has attracted the attention of distinguished choreographers such as Pun Siu Fai, Daniel Leung and Jiří  Bartovanec. Her collaboration with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company opened the 9th Guangdong Dance Festival in Guangzhou, China. Her project 'Resistance' with Jiří  Bartovanec from the Sascha Waltz Co. and ensemble united Berlin will be premiering June 06, 2021.

Nirmali has served as composer-in-residence at a number of major European festivals, most notably the Lakes District Summer Music Festival in the U.K. and the Saxophone Habanera Festival in Poitiers, France. Of the first performance of her song cycle Over Exposed at Abbaye Royaumont in Paris, Le Monde praised it as “standing out in the genre of ‘songs’ of today” and La Croix described it as “deeply moving”. Her compositions have been performed by the Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Cairn, Ensemble Linea, the Kuss Quartet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tin Alley String Quartet, Sounds Underground, the Endymion Ensemble, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Concorde, the S.E.M Ensemble and the Eastman Broadband Ensemble. 

Through her music, Nirmali often challenges performers to ‘see’ with their ears and construct spatial ‘views’ of their surroundings. She believes that sound is one tool to give audiences the chance to experience the volume of the space in which they exist.

Nirmali Fenn

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