Crosstalk (2020)

for flute and violin

Commissioned by Crash Ensemble as part of the REACTIONS project. Recorded by Larissa O’Grady and Susan Doyle, with a film by Laura Sheeran.

Performances:
2021: Musictown Festival, Dublin – Crash Ensemble (perf)/Sheeran (film) installation
April 2022: New Music Dublin – Crash Ensemble (perf)/Sheeran (film) installation
May 2022: An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny – Crash Ensemble (perf)
June 2022: Cork Chamber Music Festival, Cork – Crash Ensemble (perf)
September 2022: Everyman Theatre – Crash Ensemble (perf)
November 2022: Irish Film Institute – Crash Ensemble (perf)/Sheeran (film) screening

Releases:
Crash Ensemble – [Reactions]
Crash Records, 25 November 2022
Performed by Larissa O’Grady and Susan Doyle. Recorded and produced by Adrian Hart

Programme Note:
Crosstalk attempts to capture the feeling of trying to communicate across distance, both physical and experiential.

As an Irish person living in Japan, my experience of the Covid19 pandemic is one of feeling split and pulled between two worlds: that of my own real lived experience of the reality in Japan, and that of my friends and family in Europe. While staying indoors during the State of Emergency, the online world became sometimes more real, and venturing out led to sensations of extreme cognitive dissonance. Communication between these two worlds was sometimes easy, oiled by the shared stresses and cares of the situation, and sometimes jagged, broken by the different on-the-ground experiences of it in different places. Imagine the now-ubiquitous problems of digital conferencing, with crosstalk, connection difficulties and misunderstanding, but applied to the process of communication itself.

The piece takes the form of a kind of conversation, moving between these broken fragments and smooth easy chatting, punctuated by moments of an agonising pull between two places.