: Peace
Title:
- Peace
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
Performed by Julia Bentley, soprano, Peace, for soprano and tape, presents a succession of sound-images from the ancient to the modern. The primordial white noise and simple hums are followed by chant-like textures, tribal or primitive societal sounds, ringing bells (perhaps church bells), and violent sounds of war. The piece and the performer are eventually destroyed by this “progress” in a series of brutal explosions. A brief return of the simple hums is quickly destroyed again in a rather pessimistic conclusion.
The tape part for Peace was created using a mixture of old and new technologies from tape splicing of recorded sounds, to Moog and Electrocamp analog synthesizers, to computer sequenced Yamaha and Roland digital synthesizers. The voice parts on the tape are based on processed recordings of the voice of Melanie Mitrano, for whom the piece was written. The center of this?Tumult is struggling to find a voice that the violent rhetoric of the tape finally silences.
