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nebulae Stephen Andrew Taylor, 2005 video based on paintings by Hua
Nian |
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video excerpt (3:19,
4.9 MB; images controlled in real-time by the harpist's performance;
compressed for the web) |
Program Note
One of my goals in Nebulae is to enable the harp to do things it can't do in the real world--long sustaining sounds and slow, sliding glissandos. A computer processes the harp's sound (sometimes with a cavernous reverb) and also accompanies it with a choir of glass harmonicas gliding slowly from pitch to pitch. The long, drifting sounds I was imagining reminded me of photographs of nebulas, giant dust clouds in deep space--so vivid and luminous, but impossibly distant and vast at the same time. When I was planning the work I knew there would be a video component based on paintings by Hua Nian; we have chosen her images for their abstractions, rather than straightforward depictions of the real thing. The drifting, changing shapes on the screen are controlled in real time by the movement of the harpist's hands playing the piece.
Nebulae is dedicated to Hua Nian and Ann Yeung, who collaborated with me for the premiere at the World Harp Congress in Dublin, July 2005.