Trevor Wishart ‘Globalalia/Imago’ CD ICR DISTRIBUTION

Globalalia is a 29 minute piece using syllables taken from 26 different languages, to create a series of elaborate variations on the sounds of language itself. Commissioned by Folkmar Hein and premiered at Inventionen 2004 in Berlin, June 2004, the piece was originally available on the DVD ’50 Years Studio TU Berlin’. Voices in 26 languages were collected from the airwaves, and cut into over 8300 spoken syllables. These were organized in a database and then used to create a series of 20+ short movements each exploring the possibilities of one (or two) syllabic types. Formally, a musical abstraction of the (literary) frame-tale (a story in which other stories are told). Each syllabic type is derived from the sequence of events in the ‘frame-tale’ which begins the piece and recurs from time to time, and at the end. Imago …’the universe in a grain of sand…’ “Imago is a piece of magical sound metamorphosis in which the single ‘clink’ of two whisky glasses gradually metamorphoses into a multitude of other sounds, eventually alluding to the sounds of birdsong, a junkyard gamelan, the ocean and the human voice, but never entirely abandoning its links to this minimal source. The piece was made using sound transformation software written by the composer, available through the Composers Desktop Project, and the original source sound was taken from Jonty Harrison’s ‘et ainsi de suite’.” Trevor Wishart is an English composer, based in York. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. He has been very active since the early 1970s in the area of electro-acoustic music (first with tape manipulation, later with computer pieces) and musical theatre pieces. Not only has he composed many significant pieces, but he has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art,” and contributed to the design and implementation of many software tools used in the creation of digital music. His compositional interests deal mainly with the human voice. He has also written three major books, On Sonic Art, Audible Design & Sound Composition.