World Premiere Performance

Angus Wilson / Percussion

Alex Raineri / Piano

Live performance from the 2020 Brisbane Music Festival 'Streamed Series'.

Jai Farrell / Audio Engineer & Videographer

'three questions of scale' explores some experiences of mirroring between events in the world at large and events in my own personal and emotional life. For myself and for many around me, the world-altering events of 2019 and 2020 came with the added bonus of shifts, changes, upsets, and uprootings in personal relationships, living situations, work-life, travel plans, bodies and physical-mental-emotional health. Grappling with personal crises when there are bigger, more significant events taking place in the world may itself elicit guilt and shame. Maybe this piece might be seen as an invitation to slow down for a second, and view supposedly smaller happenings as a lens through which we might experience world events with a greater sense of connection—the micro and the macro as fractal relationships necessary to make up the whole.

The work is in three movements, and each seeds ideas for the performers to unravel, which in turn become an invitation to the listener to construct their own meanings. These are titled: 1) three ants carry a dead wasp|east coast — west coast fires, 2) the continuous trickle of my cat’s drinking fountain| the port of beirut explosion, 3) mould growing inside an unopened tub of coconut yoghurt|we have all run out of medicare-supported therapy sessions. - Hannah Reardon-Smith