1960s CARTOGRAPHY AS A BASIS FOR REIMAGINING THE PIANO IN MAPPING AUSTRALIA

Mapping Australia

Short Description

This project, Mapping Australia (2014), presents my recent compositional interests in working with the conceptual, multimedia, presence and the kinesthetic in the development of new music performance and notational systems. It is a political work based on archival footage from 1966. The footage is about Australia's map-making processes but it also advertises Australia for foreign mining interests. I disagreed with what the footage represented and wanted to counter the self-importance and authority of the video. I turned movements from the people in the video into movements by the pianist inside the piano. The piano is conceptually represented as land and so it is mapped and notated in a spatial-choreographical mannerway , fused with my own musical ways of thinking about composition. The resulting sound is gritty, grinding, scraping, brushing and knocking sounds. The performer is asked to mimic silly movements in the video in an attempt to mock the source material – I also created humorous video manipulations to go along with the performance. The notes played on the keyboard are a distilled reworking of the music by the late Australian composer Robert Hughes (the music used in the archival footage). By removing certain notes and phrases I left behind only a trace of the driving lyrical trajectory of the music.

Introduction to the Work

I was invited to write a transmedia piano work for Australian performer Tamara Anna Cislowska and for the Music Now Symposium at the University of Western Sydney. I was interested in exploring ways of interacting with video as a score and devised methods for imitating on-screen actions, turning them into a formalised system of gestures on the piano. I also made video documentation of myself performing these imitations, which became a series of instructional videos for the performer. The details have been published on my website (www.danielportelli.com.au/piano). Mapping Australia has been performed live and recorded in a studio by Cislowska as well as a performance by Australian pianist Gabriella Smart from Soundstream Collective, Adelaide. This information is intended to provide a reflection of the processes behind the work, its practical aspects as well its conceptual underpinning.