Constellations
Big Ears Festival · March 24, 2017 · Knoxville
Constellations is an evening-length work for solo percussion by Christopher Burns, written for me and premiered at the Big Ears Festival in 2017.
Constellations are stories in the night sky — the tales we tell to turn the abstract patterns of distant stars into comprehensible shapes. Constellations explores that human urge to make narrative, and the ways abstract sonic and visual material intersects with storytelling. Its fifteen movements are seeded with a multiplicity of relationships, inviting every listener to construct their own chronicle of the evening.
The music ranges from subtle studies in the variation of snare drum rolls, through meditative contemplations of the resonance of gongs and almglocken, to driving polyrhythmic grooves built from vibraphone and woodblocks. Thunderous drumming, delicate keyboard textures, and investigations of nontraditional instruments — glass tiles, whiskey bottles — all sit inside the same piece.
It is not only a music piece. Triangles, gongs, and crotales become tools for shadow puppetry. Choreography carries the movements for rainsticks and for multi-percussion. Projected animations grow more elaborate across the evening, evolving from simple triangular forms into darting organic figures and complex patterned mosaics, and computer-controlled lighting makes color and shadow structural rather than decorative.
The room
Photographs · Fistful of Tigers Photography
