I have completed The Hum—a piece of music based on my hyperacusis and tinnitus symptoms. It’s just over 11 minutes long, and is a calm, ambient, and somewhat minimalist piece. Here is a 1 minute, 20 second taste of the recording:
You can buy the entire 11 minute recording on my Ko-fi page as an mp3.
Read on for more information about my long and gentle music reintegration and composition process for this piece.
Continue readingIt’s been a challenging three months. Winter is always hard on my system and I’ve been getting all my vaccines up to date which has required a fair bit of recovery time. I also found out my cyborg part (an iliac vein stent) needs an adjustment so I’m waiting for a date for day surgery. But, because creative work is what makes me flourish, I’ve done a surprising amount of work in that time.
In December I realized that my routines weren’t working well and were causing me a lot of unnecessary internal urgency so I totally scrapped them and rebuilt them from scratch. It took about a month of trial and error but I now have routines that work so much better for where I’m at cognitively, physically, and with my current projects. My music work is a bit more spaced out now, as is my journaling, but the internal striving and pressure I felt with my old routines is gone.
I do think the impetus for such a large shift is due to my continuing research on the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory. Urgency activates the sympathetic (stress, fight, flight) system, and reducing that means I can come back to ventral vagal (calm and engaged) much more readily which is very good for my entire system.
Note: This has been cross-posted on my ko-fi. There are a few other monthly updates there if you would like to read back a few months.
Webinar Report
Another monthly-ish update and another very full month. The main creative work on my plate was teaching a webinar for CHASE Medical Humanities about the visualization process I use to create my symptomatology pieces as well as how to use the poetic technique of homophonic translation to re-vision and re-own dense scientific texts.
It felt good to stretch my teaching muscles again. I’ve been teaching in some capacity since my late teens—music, yoga, and meditation—but had to stop when I got sick in 2015. Despite an ME/CFS crash the day before, I was well enough to present my webinar and the participants seemed to enjoy and get a lot out of the work. A few people even shared their symptomatology image/test pieces on social media. Here are a few:
Gillian Blekkenhorst started with a trachea and expanded their piece from there.
website: https://blekkenhorst.ca/
Twitter: @gblekkenhorst
My contributor copies of Sharp Notions arrived and it is a stunningly gorgeous book. It’s hefty and printed on full colour glossy stock.
I’m still catching up with posting about all my activities, so here’s what I’ve been up to since January 2022. More interviews and some exciting forthcoming work.
La Caravan Performs Fihi Ma Fihi at the Tabestoon Festival
2 pm Aug. 13, 2016
Theatre Junction Grand Calgary
La Caravan is thrilled to announce that we will be performing in this year’s Tabestoon Festival.
Performance will be Saturday, August 13 @ 2pm at Theatre Junction Grand.
This dance opera is a project I was still hard at work on when I became ill in August 2015. I’m pleased to say that La Caravan Dance Theatre continued the process despite me needing to attend to my health.
If you or anyone you know is in Calgary, please pass this information on to them.
A lovely article in the Calgary Herald.
Kindred spirits Lewandowsky met the production’s composer, Lia Pas, in a workshop at the Banff Centre. The two discovered that they both were fans of Rumi’s work. Pas composed the music to fit the poetry. “It’s not Middle Eastern, it’s not a Far-East kind of sound,” says Lewandowsky. Instead, it’s contemporary, blending the classical with electronic music. “(Lia) can breach between the two worlds unbelievably.”
Another great article on GetDown.ca:
Lia Pas has taken 13 poems by Rumi and created a musical composition and libretto. The company then “experimented in the studio with the lyrics,” Lewandowsky explains. “We saw what sounds would come and we performed different exercises.” The company improvised as well as they worked through the poetry and created a narrative around the poetry. Some poetry was expressed purely through movement and some through singing and musical composition.
La Caravan Dance Theatre Presents World Premiere of Fihi Ma Fihi (It Is What It Is)
New artistic work draws inspiration from 13th century Sufi mystic and philosopher Rumi
Calgary AB – La Caravan Dance Theatre presents the world premiere of Fihi Ma Fihi (It Is What It Is) at Theatre Junction Grand, June 8-11, 2016. Tickets range from $40 – $75 and can be purchased at lacaravan.com.
I’m excited to announce that my composition a small piece of sky will be performed at the Ritornello Chamber Music Festival in Saskatoon on 30 May 2015.
The festival runs from 29-31 May at three different venues. Carissa Kolopoushak and Jaqueline Woods have been producing this festival for seven years and always have an exciting lineup featuring a number of local musicians as well as musicians who have grown up in Saskatchewan and studied and worked around the world.
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For the past few months I’ve been working with the University of Saskatchewan Drama Department as Musical Director for their upcoming production of Coram Boy.
The action takes place in the 18th century. The benevolent Thomas Coram has recently opened a Foundling Hospital in London called the “Coram Hospital for Deserted Children”. Unscrupulous men, known as “Coram men”, take advantage of the situation by promising desperate mothers to take their unwanted children to the hospital for a fee. The story follows a range of characters, focusing on two orphans: Toby, saved from an African slave ship; and Aaron, the deserted son of the heir to an estate, as their lives become closely involved with this true and tragic episode of British social history (from Wikipedia)
I’m very proud of the cast and choir learning a number of very difficult pieces of music for this play and want to thank Robert Grier for being an excellent assistant music director and conductor and Natasha Martina for her directing and holding it all together.
Coram Boy previews on March 18, opens on March 19, and runs until March 28 (no performance on Sunday, March 22).
There are several ways to buy tickets:
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I’ve been working on a collaborative piece with new media artist Ellen Moffat for the past number of months and am very excited to announce the premiere this November 7 & 8.
Book. Chair. Table. is a three-movement work based on three poems from Gertrude Stein‘s Tender Buttons. I’ve been calling it a new media chamber music theatre piece. I’ve written the music for voice, oboe, double bass, and new electronic instruments. Ellen Moffat has created new electronic instruments which integrate amplified sound, recorded texts, and video projection.
Book. Chair. Table. will be performed by Lia Pas on voice, Erin Brophey on oboe, Richard Carnegie on double bass, and Ellen Moffat on electronic instruments.
Book. Chair. Table. was composed with the support of a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
PERFORMANCE:
CORE Series V – In Transformation
Friday, 7 November 2014 – 7-11pm – buy tickets here
Saturday, 8 November 2014 – 7-11pm – buy tickets here
Tickets $15.00
at PAVED Arts (424 20th Street West, Saskatoon)
***These performances consistently sell out so please get your tickets quickly!***
A bit more about the piece: Continue reading