récital commenté/lecture-recital : « LANDTIMESCAPE COLLABORATIONS »
Thursday, Feb 23, 2023
9:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Terri Hron proposes a lecture-recital juxtaposing and contextualizing the live/documented performance of excerpts three of collaborative creations – Nesting (2017, with Adam Kinner & Hannah Fischer), Beads of Time Sounding (2017, with Hildegard Westerkamp) and Music for Other Lives (2022, with Paula Matthusen) – with ideas and quotes from Marcia Björnerud, Karen Barad, Suzanne Kite, Eduardo Kohn and Marshall Sahlins. Hron’s works have iterative, spiraling, forms encouraging mis-remembering and distant hearing. Each tries to propagate over time and space through the ritual of listening and sounding; each stretches to grasp at the life of the forest and the force of water beyond the performance space, beyond human lifetime.
With the interweaving of performance, readings, musings and questionings, Hron performs the results of her and her collaborators’ fascination with connecting to and creating in nature through the documentation of moments of listening, presence and dreaming. Hron questions the hubris of agency in composition in favor of a connectedness where there are no lost or found objects, but rather many “species of metapersons [that] may have their own habitats, from the heavens to under the ground or the sea, but they are co-present, visibly or invisibly, with human beings in the one great cosmic polity”, (Sahlins 2022). Nesting plays on the building of a human-sized nest for an invisible enchanted being. Beads of Time Sounding tries to allow a place to create a form for memory and sound that can propagate through shared experience. Meanwhile, flow and interruption are the human and geological experiences of Music for Other Lives, reminding us that “Memory is not merely a subjective capacity of the human mind; rather, ‘human’ and ‘mind’ are part of the landtimescape–spacetimemattering–of the world. Memory is written into the worlding of the world in its specificity, the ineliminable trace of the sedimenting historicity of its iterative reconfiguring” (Barad 2018). Scores for listening to the forests and the rivers again and against the roar of human-centered everything is a form of healing and awakening.
Barad, Karen. “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable.” In Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, edited by Matthias Fritsch, Phillipe Lynes, and David Wood, 1st ed., 206-48. Fordham University Press, 2018.
Sahlins, Marshall. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: an anthropology of most of humanity. Princeton University Press, 2022.
Terri Hron
Terri Hron is a musician, a performer and a multimedia artist. Her work explores historical performance practice, field recording, invented ceramic instruments and videoscores. She often works in close collaboration with others and produces performances, gatherings and events. Terri studied musicology and art history at the University of Alberta, historical and contemporary performance at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on collaborative practice and scoring in multimedia performance art. She is Executive Director of the Canadian New Music Network, where she has developed programs focusing on pluralism and sustainability. Recent collaborators include Monty Adkins, Charlotte Hug, Paula Matthusen, Helen Pridmore and Jennifer Beattie (Out Loud), Katelyn Clark, Jennifer Thiessen and Myriam Boucher (Medusa Selfie). Latest commissions include Ensemble Paramirabó, GreyWing Ensemble, Dead of Night, Splinter Reeds and Ensemble Supermusique.