Tonewood by Georgia Rodgers

There is an ash tree in the communal garden at the back of my flat in north London. This year from my balcony I have watched its buds swell, unfurl, and come into leaf before turning yellow and brown and falling again, leaving the branches outlined against the sky. I’ve seen in this tree blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, chaffinches, goldfinches, crows, parakeets, green and great spotted woodpeckers, squirrels and jays hiding, nesting, perching and fighting in wind, rain and sun. I recorded the changing sounds of this tree, and cut these various bands of filtered noise and activity together. Into this I mixed samples of my cello and violin, also recorded at home during this time, processed to explore the different voices of resonant wood.
This piece was originally conceived as an installation for hcmf// 2020 but for obvious reasons it was not able to go ahead in that format this year. The gallery it would have been held in, Temporary Contemporary in the Queensgate Market, comprises two rooms with a single large opening between them. The rooms are mostly separate volumes but are acoustically linked. In the installation, the visitor would have been able to move between the rooms, creating changing mixes of the sounds presented across two multi-channel loudspeaker arrays, depending on where they were in the space.
Here, I present the material from the ash tree, cello and violin as a twelve minute stereo version, a different realisation of the same piece, which is called Tonewood.
GR 10.11.20

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