Aquatic – Tansy Davies
from Violent, Violent Sea by Aventa Ensemble
about
Tansy Davies (b. 1973) is a musician whose boundary crossing curiosity makes her one of the most distinctive voices in British music today. With a background as a horn player, electric guitarist and vocalist, Davies studied composition with Simon Bainbridge at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and with Simon Holt at Royal Holloway. Brilliantly imaginative, Davies’s work has taken its inspiration from sources as diverse as the architectures of Zaha Hadid (the 2004 trumpet concerto Spiral House) and the work of Anselm Kiefer (Falling Angel). Davies is an Associate Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London and for the 2018/19 season is Composer in Residence at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
“Aquatic (2011) was born of a fascination for the amazing creatures, preserved as fossils, in the Burgess Shale Formation – located in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia. Many of the animals had bizarre anatomical features and only the slightest resemblance to other known animals. One example is Opabinia, which has five eyes and a snout like a vacuum cleaner hose, probably lived on the seafloor, had no legs but crawled on lobes, and could also have swum slowly by flapping the lobes, especially if it timed the movements to create "Mexican waves". Aquatic is perhaps a ‘day in the life of an Opabinia’. There’s an exotic elegance and grace about this strange animal, for which the English horn seems the perfect counterpart. The percussion pallet surrounds and echoes the English horn, imagining the submerged environment of the early-Cambrian seafloor.” – Tansy Davies
tansydavies.com
“Aquatic (2011) was born of a fascination for the amazing creatures, preserved as fossils, in the Burgess Shale Formation – located in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia. Many of the animals had bizarre anatomical features and only the slightest resemblance to other known animals. One example is Opabinia, which has five eyes and a snout like a vacuum cleaner hose, probably lived on the seafloor, had no legs but crawled on lobes, and could also have swum slowly by flapping the lobes, especially if it timed the movements to create "Mexican waves". Aquatic is perhaps a ‘day in the life of an Opabinia’. There’s an exotic elegance and grace about this strange animal, for which the English horn seems the perfect counterpart. The percussion pallet surrounds and echoes the English horn, imagining the submerged environment of the early-Cambrian seafloor.” – Tansy Davies
tansydavies.com
credits
from Violent, Violent Sea,
released October 1, 2021
license
all rights reserved
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Redshift Music Vancouver, British Columbia
Redshift was founded in Vancouver, Canada with a focus on championing the music of contemporary composers.
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Apr 2024 -
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