Between October 11 and October 15 in 2023, I co-presented my multimedia work Sky Symphony. The work was presented on the Yarra River, a collaboration with LASERVISION, laser and fountain specialists based in NSW, Melbourne Fringe, and the City of Melbourne’s City Revitalisation Event Support Program (CRESP).
Sky Symphony won Best Visual Art/Film category at the Fringe Awards.
Sky Symphony is based on my PhD project, Creating a Collaborative Symphony. My aim was to compose a symphony in response to photographs of the sky supplied by volunteers. Anyone could take part. I received nearly three hundred photographs. The symphony I composed in response is called Portraits of the Air.
To create the soundtrack, I co-produced a recording of the complete symphony with Melbourne’s magnificent opera and ballet orchestra Orchestra Victoria, then created a twelve minute edit to use in the Sky Symphony event. The recording was conducted by Nicholas Buc.
Portraits of the Air
Portraits of the Air (2020) is a symphony in three movements. The musical material comprises eleven themes that are reformulated and interwoven throughout the work. The eleven themes could be said to correlate to the ten basic cloud types, plus one more: the “cloud absent from every sky,” to paraphrase the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who described the idealised flower of the poet as “the flower absent from every bouquet.”
The orchestration is intended to translate visual phenomena seen in the sky, especially gradual transitions from one colour to another. This is achieved by written crossfades, transitioning from one section to the next, or from one instrument to another. Crossfading is originally a recording studio technique where recorded audio material that is being faded out is gradually replaced by material that gradually increases in intensity. I have adapted this studio technique in the orchestration to create dynamic colours: colours (or timbres) that change gradually, rather than abruptly, which is the usual method. I call the gradual written crossfading of orchestral sections orchestral sfumato, after the name Leonardo da Vinci gave to the painting technique where he creates gradual transitions, as he himself put it, “in the manner of smoke” (think of the background of the Mona Lisa, or indeed the shadows on her cheek and neck). Similarly, I think of the written crossfading of individual instruments as orchestral chiaroscuro, after the painterly technique, so often seen in the works of Caravaggio, where light and dark areas are contrasted for dramatic effect.
The symphony was part of my PhD project. This was a collaboration with 27 volunteer photographers, who sent me photographs of the sky, to which I responded with music, so that we might create a collaborative symphony. That project has in turn given rise to Sky Symphony, where excerpts from the recording of the symphony and the sky photographs of my collaborators are used in a large-scale laser and water screen multimedia event https://www.orchestravictoria.com.au/performances/sky-symphony
The recording was made at ABC Melbourne on August 21 2023, with Orchestra Victoria conducted by Nicholas Buc. The recording was engineered by Alex Stinson, and produced by Alex Stinson and Shaun Rigney.
Shaun Rigney Contemporary Music 