Australian composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense control (of breath, of instrument, of composition) and a willingness to allow the music to lead. On Moths & Stars, her second solo work, she charts out a sound world that is equal parts timbre and tone, placing sounds relationship to space as a paramount focus for her pieces.
"Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy - so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth's wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky.
The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other.
Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In 'Nightwork' I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on 'Mirror Signals' or the binaural microphone feedback on 'Moths & Stars' would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story".
Aviva Endean
Aviva Endean is an Melbourne-based artist dedicated to fostering a deep engagement with (and care for) sound and music, with the hope that attentive listening can connect people with each other and their environment. She is active as a clarinetist, composer, improviser, curator, sound artist, performance-maker and collaborator. Aviva Endean regularly works across a range of contexts including experimental and improvised music, new chamber music, creating theatre works which are designed to be listened to, and working on cross-disciplinary collaborations. Her work seeks to work beyond the boundaries of her art form, to reimagine the possibilities of a practice with sound.
