Kate Moore’s Space Junk opens Minimal Music Festival 2019

This year’s Minimal Music Festival in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ Amsterdam opens with Space Junk that Kate Moore composed for Asko|Schönberg. The piece addresses the huge amount of debris floating through space.

Key concepts in the work of the Australian-Dutch composer are movement, pulse, direction and commitment to our physical and moral environment. For example, she plays a specially built cello by Saskia Schouten, with an inlaid peace sign in memory of the Bataclan attack in France. In 2017 she composed the large-scale oratorio Sacred Environment for the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Choir, a tribute to the sacred places of the original inhabitants of Australia.

Moore is not only a composer but also a visual artist and performer. She sings, plays the cello and is the founder and leader of the ensemble Herz, in which she plays the bass guitar. She often works with (sound) artists, and builds artful instruments of ceramics and other materials herself. Her ensemble piece The Dam (2015) is based on the sounds of crickets, frogs, birds, insects and other creatures living in a waterhole in the bush. She was the first woman ever to win the prestigious Matthijs Vermeulen Prize in 2017. The following year she was composer in focus at the November Music festival, for which she composed the Bosch Requiem, Lux Aeterna.

This season she is soul mate of Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, because of her ‘elegant, driving and colourful post-minimal music’. In this capacity she was given carte blanche to programme five concerts at her own discretion. It is typical for Moore that she devoted one of these concerts entirely to the work of fellow composers.

Like father, like daughter

In Space Junk she again testifies of her deep concern for the world in which we live. The composition is inspired by the enormous amount of waste floating through space. Millions of fragments of spacecraft and obsolete satellites collide with each other. The fragments shoot away at great speed and in turn damage satellites that we use for communication, navigation, climate observation and safety.

Moore’s concern about this invisible but life-size problem didn’t come out of the blue. Her father Chris Moore is a physicist at the Mount Stromlo laser tracking station in Australia. For this institute he makes visual models of the data collected about the space waste. Daughter Kate translates this data into music; during the performance of Space Junk, images of the debris floating through space are projected.

‘I have selected fifty pieces of junk, which I have divided into five families’, says Kate Moore. ‘The duration of the notes is based on the time that these pieces are visible on the horizon, but then accelerated 200 times – in proportion, of course. I also calculated the pitches in this way.’

Besides the instrumental music she made a soundtrack in surround sound, also based on the data from the laser research. ‘The soundtrack has four layers, which refer to as many times at which the measurements take place. At night you can sometimes see the objects when they’re caught in the laser beams. You think they are stars, but because they make strange movements, you know that they are pieces of space grit, very scary.’

Miserere

For the recording Moore cut up the famous Miserere by Gregorio Allegri in fragments of 127 syllables, which she recorded herself. In each of the four movements she recites one verse, her voice recording triggered via MIDI. When the waste makes a rising movement, the syllables sound in their normal order, when it falls they are played backwards. The Miserere was very deliberately chosen, says Moore: ‘It refers to Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, in which Adam and God try to touch each other in vain.’

The Minimal Music Festival runs from Wednesday 3 to Sunday 7 April. It also features a new piano concerto that Vladimir Martynov wrote for Ralph van Raat and Noord Nederlands Orkest. This will be premiered in Muziekgebouw on 4 April. On the programme, too is Future Perfect by The America-Dutch composer Vanessa Lann, which she composed for Oranjewoud Festival 2017. ‘It was inspired by Schubert’s 8^th Symphony’, says Lann. ‘It poses the question how this work from 1822 would have sounded had it been written 200 years later, in a modern, minimalistic idiom. Future Perfect lasts 10 minutes, is super rock-and-roll yet winks at the melodies and elegance of Schubert.’

Further concerts are Eklekto’s double bill featuring soundscape artist Ryoji Ikeda alongside deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Terry Riley and son Gyan play music in which Indian raga meets minimalism and jazz; Sinta Wullur presents Gamelan Clock; Cello Octet Amsterdam perform Michael Gordon’s 8; the Horizon Quartet play Incantatie IV of the Dutch minimalist Simeon ten Holt. – And as a matter of course Terry Riley’s groundbreaking In C is performed by the joined forces of Ragazze Quartet, Kapok and Slagwerk Den Haag.

 

 

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