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Sheet Music
The digital score and electroacoustic track for the solo cello work, When We Speak is now available for purchase. The sheet music and track will be provided via email.
“Lisa Cheney’s music breathes, shimmers and flows. Sensitive gestures unfold into larger textures as well as seeping into the spaces between, beckoning the listener to savour musical shapes and colours.” Peggy Polias
When We Speak presents an album of beguiling contemporary art music that seeks beauty and magic in imperfection, in the grey and in-between. It represents music of Cheney’s developing “dirty-beautiful” aesthetic, reflecting both a poetic worldview and preferences that shape a compositional language and sound world. When We Speak is a celebration of beauty in the ambiguous, impermanent, fragile nature of creating binary distinctions such as lightness and darkness to explore the process of dissolving the space between them. From warped harp strings prepared with Blu Tack and honey dippers, to bright floating metallic timbres and expressive and plaintive clarinet melodies, this album showcases some of Cheney’s recent chamber works.
The 2016 title track (2018 Finalist for Instrumental Work of the Year at the Art Music Awards) uses the voice of Kaija Saariaho and an electroacoustic track to explore messages relating to gender and identity. It examines how the notion of vulnerability might inform musical ideas and composition through textural, sonic forms and personal experience relating to identity, gender, and the notion of giving voice.
credits
released September 29, 2023
Music of LISA CHENEY, featuring Melina Van Leeuwen (prepared harp), Plexus, Philip Arkinstall (clarinets), Monica Curro (violin) and Stefan Cassomenos (piano), Chris Salvito (percussion), Nicoletta Favari (piano), Joe Rebman (harp), Lili Sarayrah (violin), Alfonso Noriega (viola), Anne Wybenga (cello), Sam Bobinski (double bass), Julian Pellicano (conductor) and Gemma Kneale (cello).
Strange Charisma and When We Speak were recorded and mixed by Kevan Atkins.
Everything is Illuminated was recorded by at the 2016 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and mixed by Kevan Atkins.
No Distant Place was recorded by Plexus at Federation Square.
Mastered by Adam Dempsey.
Artwork by Caterina Leone.
Graphic Design by Lisa Cheney.
Lastly, special thanks to the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and Plexus ensemble for granting permission to release their recordings. Thank you to the commissioners of the works: Joseph Rebman, Samantha Wolf, Plexus and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.
Thank you to Caterina Leone for the beautiful original artwork in response to the music.
Lisa Cheney is an Australian composer of acoustic and acousmatic music.
Her music
communicates through varied styles which explore a fascination with seeking"dirty-beautiful" sounds in places "in-between". Her work has been described as "atmospheres of unfathomable spaciousness"(Partial Durations) and "melodic slivers with plaintive intensity" (The Australian). She also holds a PhD from UniMelb....more
Argentine composer and guitarist Francisco del Pino achieves a stunning art-song hybrid on the first album to be released under his own name. Bandcamp Album of the Day May 19, 2021