{"id":505,"date":"2015-04-04T15:49:32","date_gmt":"2015-04-04T15:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/?p=505"},"modified":"2016-10-03T13:37:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T12:37:45","slug":"hyperboles-4-the-extremities-of-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/?p=505","title":{"rendered":"hyperboles 4 – the extremities of cold, Montreal"},"content":{"rendered":"

My hyperboles<\/em> project<\/a>\u00a0saw a new iteration in Quebec last month. Performances of \u00a0hyperboles 4\u00a0(“insomniac rain”)<\/em> took place in Canada, on February 25th courtesy of the festival\u00a0Mois Multi 2015 \u2013 Spectacles<\/a>\u00a0in Quebec City, and on March 1st at the Montreal Nouvelles Musiques<\/a> festival.<\/p>\n

Programme Note<\/h2>\n

Humans exaggerate on a regular basis. Typical hyperboles might be “this bag weighs a ton”, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse”, or any of the invariably (!) hilarious “Yo’ mama so fat…” jokes. Perhaps even worse than footballers (“I hit the post. I was gutted”) are artists. Have you ever sat silently suffering (“dying”, anyone?) at a contemporary poetry reading, as the reciter over-emotes their way through a litany of subtexts we can summarise by “me, me, me! I’m so deep and clever!”? Such occasions often merely reinforce the popular perception of artistic outputs as being expressive of the creator’s emotions. But that is less interesting than artworks’ invitation to be social, communal, and at the same time to introspect and inspect our personal, perhaps emotional reactions to intrinsically neutral objects.<\/p>\n

This is the fourth version in a series of works for live instrument(s) and computer. The beautiful hyperbola relevant here comes from Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez’s Living to Tell the Tale<\/em>, from 2003: “At that time Bogota was a remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the 16th century.” As I write this, the rain is pouring in Edinburgh, in typical November fashion. I’m dreaming of the sun. I note that, although it has more sunshine, Montreal has 50% more precipitation than Edinburgh. Let’s keep our heads above the cats and dogs out there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"lair-du-temps-l\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

<\/h2>\n

It was really cold in Quebec: down to -31C on one day at least. We were working so hard I didn’t get to do much sight-seeing but I did take a walk one day in Quebec City. This photo, taken from Chateau Frontenac<\/a>, gives you an idea of the kind of temperatures we were dealing with there.<\/p>\n

\"Picture\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The instruments<\/h2>\n

This version of hyperboles<\/em> is for an orchestra of Jean-Francois Laporte’s compressed air instruments. These are robotically controlled hand-built instruments which use compressed air to generate sound. This might be as in a flute, by blowing air into a tube, or in the case of the ‘membranes’, the ‘telescopiques’, and the ‘pipes’, by combining this with a vibrating membrane, such as a simple air balloon.<\/p>\n

In each venue we hung 18 flutes<\/em>\u00a0(transparent plastic pipes), ten membranes<\/em> (simple pipes with a balloon over one end), and four telescopique<\/em>\u00a0pairs (similar to the membranes but with longer and telescopically controllable transparent plastic pipes). We also had two larger suspended pipes<\/em> which had a number of controls, as evident in this video:<\/p>\n