Transient Landscapes
A monumental performative art project creating a sonic experiential glacier
People have this misconception that glaciers are silent expanses, landscapes frozen in time. But they’re not, at all. They’re a species of incredibly noisy animals, and they’re facing extinction. - Matthew Burtner, Composer
Transient Landscapes is a fully immersive sound art project creating the experience of traversing a tidal glacier.
The performance begins with field recordings captured from every perspective of the glacier. The glacier is the soloist. Performers transmute the sounds of the glacier. There is no division between performers and audience. All are enveloped by this realized environment. Glaciers calve. Tides ebb pulling icebergs into the ocean. Ice melts. Compressed air expands. Tides flow their return pushing icebergs again to the glacier face.
Through creative sound art, data modeling, and ecoacoustics, Transient Landscapes makes data emotive and connects the human imagination to the environment. Through their actions, performers connect to one another and the work itself by joining nodes of glacier field recordings. The totality of these recordings is the Sonic Glacier Cast. As if traversing the glacier, the public illuminates the experience of the singular and collective body, the relationship between the glacier and the human connected across the world.
Climate change is transformed into glacier acoustics by drums, chimes, tuned planks and pipes, amplified field recordings, and movement. These layers collectively track, interpret, and remap climate change into sound art. Fossil fuels deep in the earth become atmosphere, a glacier becomes the floodwater in a basement on the other side of the world, and the coasts become the ocean.
We live in a time of extraordinary global change.
This is an era of transient landscapes, the frequency and intensity of our eroding environment amplified by humans through compounding impacts we barely understand. Fossil fuels deep in the earth become atmosphere, a glacier becomes the floodwater in a basement on the other side of the world, and the coasts become the ocean. We live in a time of extraordinary global change. The performance begins with field recordings captured from every perspective of the glacier. The glacier is the soloist. Performers transmute the sounds of the glacier. There is no division between performers and audience. All are enveloped by this realized environment. Glaciers calve. Tides ebb pulling icebergs into the ocean. Ice melts. Compressed air expands. Tides flow their return pushing icebergs again to the glacier face Through creative sound art, data modeling, and ecoacoustics, Transient Landscapes makes data emotive and connects the human imagination to the environment.
Transient Landscapes is created With 5 groups of Performers
1. Glacier
Performers create the profound calving sound of ice breaking from the terminus of the glacier and falling into the ocean. They play a transcription of an actual glacier. They also perform the ice deformations in the field recording which have been mapped into the glacier percussion parts.
2. Tide
Performers create the motion of tides ebbing and flooding across the performance area, pulling ice into the ocean and pushing ice back again to the face of the glacier. The performers create hiss and pop sounds like ice jostling and releasing compressed air, matching the sound of the ice drifting with the tide in open water.
3. Melt
Performers change the pitch of tuned pipes and sonify (transform data into sound) the annual melt and refreezing of the glacier. They perform this aspect of the annual summer/winter cycle, coupled with the gradual melt of the glacier over decades as the glacier as a whole melts more than it refreezes.
4. Introspection
The Introspection performers represent an internalized reflection upon the glacier as an earth animal whose health anticipates our own future. Long, slowly shifting chords alternate with Melt events, layering human dimension and imagination, eventually centering all of the performers with 13 closing chords, each a moment for contemplation.
5. Transience
Performers connect the nodes of the sonic glacier cast. They create the interconnectedness of a constantly shifting environment and a reflection on the global effects of human interaction with the natural world.
Matthew Duvall is the Artistic Director, Percussionist, and Co-Founder of Eighth Blackbird Performing Arts.
Accolades include: Four GRAMMY Awards for Chamber Music Performance | The MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions | The Concert Artists Guild Competition Grand Prize | The Musical America Ensemble of the Year | The Chamber Music America Visionary Award | The APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards Performance of the Year.
Creatives Includes: Commissions and World Premieres of hundreds of works | Fully Produced Theatrical Chamber Music Productions | Chamber Ensemble Concertos with both orchestras and bands | An Extensive Recording Catalog with Cedille Records. Eighth Blackbird now represents multiple mission-driven initiatives: Eighth Blackbird | Blackbird IV | The Blackbird Creative Lab | The Chicago Artists Workshop | Blackbird Productions.
Matthew Burtner is an Alaskan-born composer, sound artist and eco-acoustician whose work explores embodiment, ecology, polytemporality and noise. His music has been featured by NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), BBC, U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic. He received an Emmy Award for “Composing Music with Snow and Glaciers” by Alaska Public Media, and honors and awards from Musica Nova, Bourges, Gaudeamus, Darmstadt, and The Russolo international music competitions. He is the recipient of an NEA Award for The Ceiling Floats Away, a collaborative work with US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Rita Dove. Burtner holds the position of Eleanor Shea Professor of Music at the University of Virginia where he Co-Directs the Coastal Future Conservatory, and is the founder/director of the environmental music organization EcoSono.