Breathing Space

About the composer

Genevieve Lacey is an Australian composer and recorder virtuoso who connects people and ideas through sound. Her poetic, musical works and performances are experienced worldwide in concert halls and theatres, as public art and in the digital realm.

Instruments

The composition features over 40 instruments ranging from pipe organ, voice and harp, through kora, theorbo and Chinese gongs, to chickpeas, pebbles and even sticky tape.

Some of the field recordings integrated into Breathing Space capture the sounds of crickets, frogs, possums, koalas and whooshing and popping recorded deep inside living trees.

A musical scaffold of four pitches: B, C, D and F are used throughout and the whole piece is built on recurring forms of drone and tremolo sounds. Wave-like phrases emerge from silence, gradually build and peak, and then disappear.

Composition

Once all the recordings were made, composer Genevieve Lacey spent months conceiving and refining the vast compositional structure, weaving together all the elements. Recordings were fractured into tiny phrases, or extended in long loops, or both. They were layered and abstracted, often with up to 60 sound elements running simultaneously in one composition.

The architecture of the Garden of Australian Dreams influenced the sound of Breathing Space with each of the six long-form compositions created in response to and in the context of six sites. The specific acoustic of the built environment is also suited to higher-frequency instruments and sounds reflected in the composition.

The compositions are ‘planted’ and emerge from 31 speakers embedded in paths and walls across the Garden.

The Breathing Space soundtrack is available via ABC Classic. Buy the CD at the Museum Shop.