Betsey Biggs

For Max/MSP, laptop and stereo speakers; premiered as part of the Pendulum New Music Series at Grusin Music Hall at the University of Colorado Boulder; 8 minutes.

For the Eastern Elk, an exploration of the mating cry of the Rocky Mountain elk, is an elegy for the last eastern elk. The Eastern Elk (Cervus canadensis canadensis) was one of six subspecies of elk that inhabited the northern and eastern United States, and southern Canada. The last eastern elk was shot in Pennsylvania on September 1, 1877. The subspecies was declared extinct by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1880. Another subspecies of elk, the Merriam's elk, also became extinct at roughly the same time.

This work is a meditation on archival sound and memory; specifically, the differences between the immediate acoustic presence of sound and the archival reuse of sound, and how the musicality and recontextualization of sounds can give them a non-diegetic and emotional quality even without any further musical material.

Although For the Eastern Elk was a short-lived project, the ideas I worked through while composing it became influential for my my more major works, particularly Souf: For Isabelle, We Are Here FM, The Conduction Series, Sing Broken Ice: For Pauline, and especially MELT: The Memory of Ice.

CREDITS

composer and performer: Betsey Biggs

PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS

2016: “Pendulum New Music Series,” Grusin Music Hall, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.