Composer, clarinetist, improviser and performance artist Aviva Endean is Artist in Residence during Music Meeting 2024. This extraordinary Australian musician dedicates her artistic life to connecting people and their environment by making them listen attentively to the still unknown between sound and music.
Endean creates remarkable sonic landscapes in which she also actively engages the listener in order to discover new sounds, as, for example, during the projects A Face Like Yours and Hear Muffs that she presents at Music Meeting. Her solo debut cinder : ember : ashes was nominated for the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Music 2019. Her latest album is called Moths and Stars.
Fun facts are that Endean's mother is Dutch and her grandfather was born in Nijmegen. This also makes Aviva's visit to Music Meeting a return to her roots.
With the Hear Muffs, you will hear sounds that are at the outer limits of your perception. Come to the information desk and seize the opportunity to explore the festival grounds while undergoing an extraordinary auditory experience.
A Face Like Yours invites the audience to a sonic exploration of their own face; the experience is "enhanced" by inserting foam earplugs into their ears. By following the artist's on-screen visual instructions, the audience is guided through a series of actions to create a soundscape that only they can hear.
The piece guides the player through a series of pops, flickers, buzzes, tingles, powerful bass and miniature sounds as they explore the varied textures and sonic landscapes of their own heads. A Face Like Yours uses the medium of silent film to create a visual score, requiring the active participation and imagination of the viewer to make the work resonate.
Aviva Endean's 15-minute solo performance for one blindfolded listener offers a uniquely personal aural experience. Listeners are transported to the depths of their own imaginations in a work that straddles the line between experimental performance and immersive sound therapy. By foregrounding the fragile sounds of everyday objects alongside the elusive, shadowy tones of the bass clarinet, the work teases and massages the ears of the solitary listener, whose temporal and sensory awareness will be challenged and disrupted in an intensely intimate sonic experience.
Tickets are unfortunately no longer available for this unique 1-on-1 concert.
