This recording documents the live performance given at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland on January 10th, 2020.
The performance was commissioned by Scottish National Galleries to commemorate the NOW exhibition, featuring the work of Katie Paterson, Darren Almond, Shona Macnaughton and Lucy Raven.
A Moon That Lights Itself – Totality Redux was performed during the first of four penumbral lunar eclipses occurring in 2020. The ‘Wolf Moon’ eclipse reached its peak at 7.10pm, local time - ten minutes into the performance.
Programme Notes
A Moon That Lights Itself was originally commissioned by National Galleries of Scotland in 2016 in response to our Inspiring Impressionism: Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh exhibition. Begg’s work took its lead from the nocturnal experiments of nineteenth-century French artist Charles-François Daubigny to paint moonlight en plein air (trans: to paint outdoors). At almost exactly the same point in time, composer Claude Debussy, whose revolutionary approach to composition is broadly regarded as a key trigger to the modernist movement in music, wrote Clair de Lune (trans: moonlight).
Not only this, but elsewhere in France, the bookseller and printer, Edouard-Lean Scott de Martinville built the first ever sound recording device (over a decade before Edison patented the phonograph in the US). Researchers at Berkley University managed to recover the sound, in 2008, from de Martinville’s original lamp black phonautographs. The recordings revealed what is assumed to be the voice of the inventor himself, singing Au Clair de la Lune – by the light of the moon.
Given the broadly nocturnal sensibility of Begg’s work, and these multiple references to moonlight feeding into the composition of A Moon That Lights Itself, this present occasion, TOTALITY REDUX, arose as something of a gift. Begg is a longstanding admirer of Katie Paterson’s work and, by co-incidence, when the proposal for this performance was mooted, he was working on a new software instrument that generated music from a data stream detailing lunar and solar eclipses – the same data informing Paterson’s work, Totality (2016). A true case of celestial alignment, perhaps?
Tonight’s performance includes the sounds of de Martinville’s phonautographs, supplemented by Begg's experimental musical trreatment of data, solar eclipses 1500-1512.
Acknowledgements and thanks
Michael would like to thank Gráinne Rice and all at National Galleries Scotland, and acknowledges, with gratitude, the support of his work by the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Creative Scotland, Help Musicians UK, and the Hope Scott Trust.
credits
released March 14, 2020
Michael Begg: composition, data, field recordings, kayboards, electronics, treatments
Clea Friend: cello, music box, looper
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