Commissioned by This Sonic Life for the Sonic Hugs project.

Instrumentation: Stephen Adams – voice, 0-Coast synthesizer, flute, bass-guitar, bubble wrap, microphone and field recordings (bowerbirds calling in a Katoomba garden; a stream near Glenorchie, NZ South Island; Wyong River birdlife at dawn)

Close To Your Ears

2003 studio song for multi-tracked voice, mandolin and piano. 
All instruments by Stephen Adams. 
Featured on ABC RN's The Night Air #143 'Not Spain'

It's a difficult (strut)

2004 studio piece for multi-tracked flute and family dinner field recording.
Flutes played by Stephen Adams.
Track featured on ABC RN's The Night Air program 'Father's Night'

Dad's flute loops

2002 studio piece for waterphone (water tuned glasses played with chopsticks by my daughter Zerrin), clavinova sound and beat samnples. 
Featured on ABC RN's The Night Air program 'Stars'

tinkle tinkle little star

2002 studio track for multi-tracked voice with pitch-shifting. 
All voices by Stephen Adams.
Featured on ABC RN's The Night Air program 'Night Voices', broadcast live from Federation Square as part of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival. 
Also featured in Madeleine  Flynn and Tim Humphrey's 'Music for Imagine Dances', Dance Massive, Dancehouse Melbourne  15-27 March 2011

evening call

For six solo voices and radio.
Commissioned by The Song Company for Cage Uncaged, 2007
Musical parts by Stephen Adams incorporating borrowings from hymn tunes, texts by John Cage, Thomas Mace, C. Wesley, Isaac Watts, and an anonymous hymn writer. John Cage anecdote from A Year From Monday (1985 reprint of 1976 Marion Boyars publication, republishing Calder & Boyars 1968), set and reproduced with kind permission of the publishers.

This work for the Song company takes as its point of departure the above-mentioned Cage anecdote which concerns a brief interaction between Cage and his grandmother. The anecdote touches upon a variety of Cage concerns: hearing and deafness; loud and soft sounds; sounds in space and the mediations of technology (the radio); the piano as a cultural object (entirely silent yet significant in this narrative); and Cage’s religious heritage, a low-church evangelical style Protestantism whose asceticism, work ethic and pursuit of transcendence through the everyday all seem to fuse with his Buddhist and other philosophical influences to inform the curious secular spirituality of Cage. 
And then, of course, there is his characteristic sense of humour. 

So here is a short service in the spirit of Cage: 

the Hymns,
in this case my own hymnal heritage as revealed in an early C20th family publication of 
Evangelic Hymns (With Tunes) (The Central Press, Printers and Publishers, 309 Castlereagh Street, Sydney) - the hymn tunes and words fragmented and diffused, through the vagaries of memory or the radio dial; 

the ‘Verse for the Day’, 
a favourite Cage saying originating out of the English non-conformist protestantism of C17th lutenist Thomas Mace’s writings on music and spirituality, refracted through an Indian musician’s accumulated wisdom: "The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." (Thomas Mace, quoted Cage as quoted by Gita Sarabhai) 

and ‘The Lesson’ 
Cage’s anecdote. 

In my imaginary service, the place of honour is given to the radio, represented by the interfering drone's shifting overtones and “noise” through which the other sounds appear as though a haze created by the radio dial’s misplacement.

And the whole, aspiring to a calm acceptance of its incompleteness, an everyday, quiet transcendence.  

Recording by ABC Classic FM, Carriageworks, Sydney 15/8/2007

A Short Service (for John Cage)

Scene 4 from The Opera Project's 2004 production 'The Audience and Other Psychopaths'. Stereo mixdown of the 4-speaker surround vocal score composed by Stephen Adams, featuring the voice of soprano Karen Cummings, and text by Amanda Stewart. Additional voices, Katia Molino, Nigel Kellaway, Stephen Adams.
Commissioned by The Opera Project with funding from the New Media and Hybrid Arts Board, Australia Council. Production supported by Performance Space and the 2004 Sydney Mardi Gras Arts Festival. Premiere season, Performance Space Redfern, Sydney 10-21/2/2004.

Karen's internal world

An unedited live improvised internet sound performance as part of the 2015 ToBeContinued 24-hour online performance marathon to mark World Tuberculosis Day - http://www.stazioneditopolo.it/24h-2015/

TO BE CONTINUED Performance

A fragment of an old cassette recording of the traditional Noh play 'Kyotsune' is the raw material for this little studio piece.

saying Noh - dry

'Afterwards' for choir, radios and percussion soloist (2014).

I think of this piece, Afterwards, as a kind of post-apocalyptic oceanic fantasy - a dream that holds together a collection of contradictory feelings about the world as it is. 

On the one hand there is the sense of release of the joyous cataclysm: looking back from beyond some unknown catastrophic event to see all the greed and inequality, the cruelty, the stupidity, and the building social, political and environmental tensions of our age, swept aside in one fell stroke; and that this sweeping away of human civilisation has left the rest of creation free of human meddling to roam and play across the airs and waters of this planet.  

On the other hand, there is the sense of loss. Where are we in this ecstatic post-human landscape?  The fragility of human lives and culture - all the richness of music, art and all forms of thought - now only detritus, ruins beneath the waters, with all manner of dangerous rubbish left behind, adrift on the waterways of the world. This cataclysm has set us free from the present troubles, but to what and where in a post-human landscape? 

Holding all these feelings together is the community of musicians who sing, play and propel us forward, continuing to celebrate the richness of this life. And there is a collection of analogue radios, a superseded domestic technology that to me perfectly symbolises the charming and fragile cacophony of our humanity. The sounds of radio transmissions still adrift on the airwaves provide random and improbable ghosts of our passing. 

Afterwards was commissioned by the Sydney Chamber Choir for the Cloudburst program. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Stephen Adams, 8 June 2014

Premiere performance by Sydney Chamber Choir and Claire Edwardes (percussion), conducted by Elizabeth Scott. 
22 June 2014. The Great Hall, University of Sydney
Recording by 2MBS Radio
Commissioned with support from The Music Board, Australia Council.

Afterwards

Composer and improviser. Interested in voice and incorporating field recordings and other sounds into music performance and radio. Also busy recording, talking about and writing about other people's music as a radio and web producer. 

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