Composer Mira Calix Creates a New Musical Experience for London 2012 Olympic Celebrations
aaamusic | On 29, May 2012
Secrets: Hidden London – Nothing Is Set In Stone
from 21st June until 9th September 2012
Composer Mira Calix Creates a New Musical Experience for London 2012 Olympic Celebrations
In advance of her nothing Set In Stone musical sculpture, Mira Calix has made a small stone sculpture in South Africa http://vimeo.com/40895218
Mira Calix will be performing a new surround sound piece related to, but not the same as the sonic material for Nothing Is Set In Stone on Friday 22 June at The Gallery Space at The Science Museum. There is also a lunch time panel discussion on June 23rd with Mira Calix, the mineralogists from the museum, a Fairlop representative and the architect / engineer talking about the making of the Olympic sound sculpture work at the main lecture theatre at the V&A. For more information http://www.exhibitionroad.com/supersonix
‘With this musical sculpture Mira Calix has managed to wrest not blood, but music from a stone, putting the music into rock and creating an exciting new cultural attraction.’ Mayor of London, Boris Johnson
Nothing is Set in Stone is a musical composition set in a standing stone sculpture at Fairlop Waters, a nature reserve and country park in the London Borough of Redbridge. The multi award-winning composer and artist (including a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and British Composers Award) has created her first ever musical sculpture from a metamorphic rock known as Angel Stone (or Gneiss).
Mira Calix has worked in consultation with mineralogists from the Natural History Museum in order to create a physical experience of music.
“I’m composing a piece of music as an object, a song you can stand in the shadows of” Mira Calix
Though the composition is conceived as continuous piece of music, the piece is never heard in it’s entirety. Different melodic elements are activated by the audiences approach and movement. It’s interactivity is subtle, both mysterious and playful, each listener constructing a unique version of the song as they explore the monolithic structure.
Calix has drawn on the rock itself, its location, and sounds related to stones and the environments in which they are found – pastoral and ancient. Creating both the music and the sculptural form together, the sculpture, with stones in unusually upright positions, and the piece of music are expressions of one another. Like the ever-changing dawn chorus of birds or the rushing of a river, it is embedded in the landscape. Calix has commented that the words of Heraclitus have been important to her in the conception of the piece:
“Everything changes and nothing remains still… you cannot step twice into the same stream”
This work can be understood within a rich history of experimental artists, such as Steve Reich, Bruce Nauman and Florian Hecker, all of whom have explored the relationship between sound and form. This piece is also related to a recent interest of Mira Calix in process-based sound sculpture, in which sculptural form and sound are intrinsically linked.
On 23 June Mira Calix will be doing a performance version of Nothing is Set in Stone at the Supersonix festival just before NISIS opens. Supersonix is a festival exploring the arts and science – here’s the micro-site: http://www.exhibitionroad.com/supersonix. The Supersonix festival is produced by the Exhibition Road Cultural Group – the NHM put in a successful bid for some money from PRS Foundation for Music to put towards Mira’s performance in the festival. The performance will be a surround sound piece in an exhibition space at the Science Museum and will use all the component parts of the installation but reworked for a special performance. There will also be a panel discussion with some of the NISIS project collaborators later in the festival.
Nothing is Set In Stone is commissioned by Oxford Contemporary Music and is part of a programme of free events commissioned by the Mayor of London called Secrets: Hidden London, which aims to make Londoners as well as visitors look at and experience the city in a new way.
