MY CREATIVE ADVENTURES IN AUDIO ART, POETRY, AND MUSIC COMPOSITION
Here I share my work and play. Please browse freely and enjoy.
Full of great plans to comprehensively chronicle all my original work, but the improvisational nature of a creative’s daily life, means that items will gradually appear when the time is right among the warp and weft of other tasks.
*Links to places that sell my scores and recordings can be found in My Music Shop.
Shelf Life and For a Fine and Dear Friend are two independent short pieces for Solo Flute composed on separate occasions some years ago. However, as they complement each other, together these short pieces make a notable contribution to the Melbourne Composer’s League Elbow Room Spring Concert. Johanna Selleck, a remarkable Melbourne-based composer and flute-player, has kindly agreed to perform my music in this concert.
Shelf Life was inspired by a poem by Sandra Powley written in 2010.
In this poem Sandra recalls weekly childhood excursions to the local library with her father.
Warm memories of the shared experience are revealed alongside her excited anticipation of
being transported to other worlds by the books yet to be borrowed and read.
For a Fine and Dear Friend was written for a long-time partner who wanted her guests to be the entertainment for her 50th birthday celebration.
I took the opportunity to write this music in respect of some-one who clearly supported and encouraged my passion for participating in music-making, and to follow my long-abiding and continuing interest in understanding the means by which music is so connected with emotion.
Every piece of music I compose and most of my academic work, beyond the initial BMus study I undertook as a result of her enthusiasm, continues to investigate this linkage. Here is yet another example.
Concert Details: Saturday 15 October 2022
St Stephen’s Church
360 Church St, Richmond, Victoria.
Tickets available at the door : $20 full/$15 Concession
Progress?? is a quick piece of narrative Audio Art is made from a selection of the Found Sounds around Whittlesea, Victoria supplied by composer colleague, Gary McKie, during a residency he calls The Whittlesea Sound Project.
Whittlesea, Australia, has been swallowed up by the growing outskirts of Melbourne, Victoria. Gary’s Found Sounds were recorded both in the natural environment, a major shopping shopping centre, and the ordinary daily sounds heard in a typical Aussie suburban backyard.
“The Whittlesea Sound Project is about discovering, or reconnecting to, the diverse sounds around us, as COVID-19 restrictions continue to ease, and we venture back into our communities throughout the City of Whittlesea and beyond.
Consider how being aware of the sounds around you effects your connection to place and ask yourself, “is there anything in my environment that could be changed to improve the quality of sounds and the way we are living?”
This project is supported by the Whittlesea Creative Community Fund.
Waiting, a setting of text by Sue Woolfe, for live performance by Hamish Gould (counter-tenor) in concert at St James Old Cathedral, West Melbourne on April 24th 2021.
The lyrics reveal the thoughts of a handyman with chronic social anxiety, who is somewhat creepily voyeuristic, as he longs to interact with the woman he loves.
Waiting was jointly commissioned by Panoramic Music and the Melbourne Composer’s League with funding provided by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
The song is composed for counter-tenor, accompanied by alto recorder, and digital samplers, all originally designed to be played live by human performers.
However, the virus times have affected the presentation of Waiting as much as anything else, in that the vocalist, Hamish Gould, wanted the concert to go ahead in any circumstances. Because of the pandemic, rehearsing and performing with other players could be problematic (given that currently Australian residents are still being infected with Covid-19).
So Hamish is live in performance and everything else is digital.
The concert begins at 4.30pm.
Ticket prices: $35 full or $20 concession.
The concert will also be live-streamed for free.
A celebratory realisation in prose poetry of the process of exploration and affirmation of self-identity among the myriads of possibilities open to those of us who choose to live outside the usually proscribed social norms. Even in 21st century Australia, the process of arriving at an openly-declared internal life as a same-sex female-attracted Lesbian remains fraught.
This creative excursion into text, is brought to life through reading out loud, for the enjoyment of the rhythm and flow of the sounds of the words as the playful narrative unfolds as a metaphor for a deeply personal process.
INTERSECTIONS was specifically composed for a new anthology of lesbian travel writing, Walking to the Edge, to be launched on 21 March 2021, at the Jika Jika Community Centre, Melbourne, Australia.
*36 words arranged on a single page so that reading the lines from left to right in the ordinary way presents the essential ideas driving the man-made moves on the planet’s ecology in the 20/21st centuries.
Reading the bold text vertically spells out three words which encapsulate the
changing existential relationship between human and planet.
The first two name the two geological eras that concretely inscribe evidence of man’s
existence within the Earth itself as human impact becomes more extreme. The terminal
letter of each line represents a dawning era of hope, through spelling out the collective
name for ‘rare earths’ in the periodic table of chemical elements. Curiously, far from
being scarce, these essential molecules are found in multiple combinations in many
locations on Earth; their rarity lies in the way they hide in and among each other.
Recently, individual elements have been re-badged as ‘bio-minerals’ since they were
‘discovered’ to be useful in curing human cancer. Given that cancer is caused by the
over-production of one single type of cell, my naming of a new era for our ‘rare Earth’
suggests we can use our growing knowledge with regard to the total ‘footprint’ of the
human race to judiciously remedy the outcome of past practices.
The theme for the debut Earthwords Anthology is Voices of Nature.
This conceptual audio piece addresses women’s visual artistic contributions for International Women’s Day 2017, on the theme: Be Bold for Change.
Sue Bessell invited 21 local women artists to contribute to a group exhibition at Project Contemporary Artspace, Keira Street, Wollongong, Australia, on the theme of Be Bold for Change. As a an audio artist, I have sought to raise consciousness of the ephemeral intangible nature of sound, while seeking to encourage women artists everywhere to be conscious of using their artwork to voice their feminist awareness.
My contribution to this exhibition lives entirely in the conceptual world. There is no particular audio for you to engage with here, except for the internal dialogue in your head about the place of art as political statement, and the boldness required of women as artists who make an explicit public addition to our culture.
The next step for you is to engage in conversation with, and encourage, women to speak out in their artwork about our gendered life experiences: to paint, sculpt, film, photograph, compose, record, and sketch their thoughts and responses, and then be bold enough to present their visual, musical, and actual voices in public places both in real life and virtual spaces such as this website.
Frances Burnham (artist) and I (Ceridwen Suiter – composer) have been in constructive conversation since 2008 on contemporary social and economic topics. We have formalised this into an ongoing collaborative arts-based project both in the physical and the virtual worlds, to extend the conversation between citizens, arts workers, and business, regarding culture and art practice, economics and social values.
For International Women’s Day 2016, our goal is to stimulate conversation about current Feminist issues as part of our ongoing project. Our installation “Flagged for Conversation” aims to stimulate conversation on 21st century issues facing women.
The conversation will begin with a performance at the exhibition opening on March 4, 2016.
Visitors are welcome to participate in our online conversation by logging into our website forum: ‘ethec’ (extending the conversation) and express their thoughts. Please note all comments will be moderated and responded to appropriately.
Prayer Pocket Place gained permanent residency in the Mt Kembla Heritage Centre on 17 December 2014.
The Mt Kembla Heritage Centre is the keeping place of historical records and memories of the hardships faced by miners who worked in Mt Kembla coal mine, and their wives and families who lived in the Mt Kembla village. The Heritage Centre contains records of the mining disaster of 1902 which killed 94 miners and two rescuers in Australia’s largest ever industrial accident.
The impact on the women of Mt Kembla inspired Flossie Peitsch to design and co-ordinate the construction of the quilted fabric house and the individually sewn pockets. Many local women made their own prayer pockets to contain their personal thoughts and prayers.
A collaborative installation of the fabric house created by Flossie Peitsch and audio art composed by Ceridwen Suiter, Prayer Pocket Place, was short listed for Meroogal Women’s Art Prize and selected for exhibition in Shoalhaven Art Gallery, Nowra; Lady Denman Museum in Huskisson NSW; as well as the Belconnen Arts Centre, ACT.
The installation was welcomed to it’s permanent home at the Mt Kembla Heritage Centre by the chairperson Elizabeth Roberts in a small informal ceremony followed by lunch in the museum. We were delighted to be entertained by well-known Mt Kembla playwright Wendy Richardson who has written about the close-knit Mt Kembla community and effects of the mining disaster.
Click below to hear a one minute segment of the CD length audio art composed by Ceridwen Suiter, from on-site recordings collected from the social and mechanical sounds of the makers constructing their individual pockets during a communal lunch and workshop..
Is the growing city really progress or is it closing the door on old ways which might still be of value?
This 1 minute question mark premiered at Federation Hall, Melbourne, 9th July 2014…. as part of the 60*60 project curated by Susan Frykberg & Warren Burt for Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC2014).
Fine Hand-made Field Recordings carefully selected for piquancy.
Recorded and Composed by Ceridwen Suiter
* * * DR WENDY (CERIDWEN) SUITER * * * 