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Since 2003, I have been concerned with
reciprocal revelations of landscapes and sounds, a concern
necessarily implicating human perception, engagement, use and
understanding, as well as the artifacts of interacting nature
and culture any landscape presents. My exhibit at Selby
Gallery -- encompassing installations on the Ringling College
campus as well as a listening trail at Crowley Nature Center --
presented past and present evidence of my grappling with these
matters. I met Richard Festinger in autumn of 2004 when
we were artists-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in
Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was there figuring out and
building one of my first landscape and sound projects -- two
complimentary listening trails. Conversations with Richard on
sound, hearing, listening and music were important in
clarifying and shaping my thinking in this then new realm of
endeavor. He also found time to lend his refined ear and
sensibilities to listen with me in the landscape -- especially
to the various changing insect choruses. It must be then
that the idea for Insect Voices began to form. A couple
years later, when I began discussions with Kevin Dean about an
exhibit at Selby Gallery, I encouraged a concurrent commission
and performance of a related composition by Richard, one in
which insect voices would act as one or more of the
instruments. Richard and I worked together to find and
refine texts and select instruments; most of the original
recordings of insect sounds came from Dr. Thomas J. Walker at
the University of Florida, a pioneer in such work; otherwise
the music is all Richard's.
Brenda Brown
Always, in composing vocal music, the
greatest challenge is in capturing the emotional tone and
climate of the text. There is, in the first song, the
singer's adult, and somewhat philosophical reminiscence of a
sound familiar to her from childhood; in the second, her
wistful and poignant meditation on the latter stages of life's
journey; while in the final song she is somewhat amusingly
driven to distraction by the endless and maddening droning song
of cicadas in the summer heat. But in these poems there
is the additional challenge of insect sounds as a central,
sonic image. It was inevitable that the instruments
should, here and there, evoke, and even adopt outright the
personae of insects. It was perhaps equally inevitable
that the insects' actual songs should find their way into this
work. Here insect choruses provide a frame for the human
performers, and participate significantly in the work's
dramatic shape as well. These insect choruses are not
what one would expect to hear sitting outside on a summer
evening, though: their sounds are arranged and organized in
ways to make them suit my very human musical purposes.
Richard Festinger
