Transformations

Hildegard Westerkamp - Transformations

Background of Hildegard Westerkamp from the liner notes:

The majority of her compositions deal with aspects of the acoustic environment: with urban, rural or wilderness soundscapes, with the voices of children, men and women, with noise or silence, music and media sounds, or with the sounds of different cultures, and so on. She has composed film soundtracks, sound documents for radio and has produced and hosted radio programs such as Soundwalking and Musica Nova on Vancouver Co-operative Radio.

In a number of compositions she has combined her treatment of environmental sounds extensively with the poetry of Canadian writer Norbert Ruebsaat. More recently she has written her own texts for a series of performance pieces for spoken text and tape.

A testimonial from Pauline Oliveros:

Sound surrounds us. We are sound inside and we resonate with the soundscape even if we are not listening. Hildegard Westerkamp is sensitive to soundscape. She ably shapes fanciful, imaginative music from her recordings, mixing and transformations of the soundscape. Westerkamp creates new possibilities for listening. One can journey with her sound to inner landscapes and find unexplored openings in our sound souls. The experience of her music vibrates the potential for change. Her compositions invite interaction - a chance to awaken to one's own creativity. One can transform through listening as she has. In the music and soundscapes of Westerkamp we feel memory and imagination as we hear through to the future.

Notes and anecdotes from Hildegard Westerkamp:

I feel that sounds have their own integrity and need to be treated with a great deal of care and respect. Why would I process a cricket's voice but not my daughter's? If the cricket had come from my own garden, had a name and would talk to me every day, would I still be able to transform it in the studio? Would I need to?

The moment of recording the cricket in the Zone of Silence (a desert region in North Eastern Mexico) had been a magical moment. So, studio 'manipulation' of the sound seemed somehow inappropriate. Its transformation into a composition had to become a new sonic journey of discovery to retain the level of magic first experienced. I remember when I had to say 'Stop' to electroacoustic experimentation: the cricket was in danger of being obliterated.

...

I hear the soundscape as a language with which places and societies express themselves. In the face of rampant noise pollution, I want to be understanding and caring of this 'language' and how it is 'spoken.'

I compose with any sound that the environment offers to the microphone, just as a writer works with all the words that a language provides. It is in the specific ways in which the language is selected, organized and processed that composition occurs.

I like to use the microphone the way photographers often use the camera, searching for images, using the zoom to discover what the human eye alone cannot see. I like to position the microphone very close to the tiny, quiet and complex sounds of nature, then amplify and highlight them for radio or any other electroacoustic medium : to make them audible to the numbed urban ear. Perhaps in that way these natural sounds can be understood as occupying an important place in the soundscape and warrant respect and protection.

...

These compositions are now on this disc, an altogether abstract place, far away from the places in which the sounds originated. They now may have to put up with bad playback equipment and noisy living rooms, with car radios or distracted ears. A forest piece in an apartment by a freeway...can it draw the listener back into the forest? An urban piece in quiet country living...is it necessary?

Other credits:

Norbert Ruebsaat - poetry and reading (track 1)

Brian G'Froerer - French horn (track 2)

Tracklisting:

1. A Walk Through the City {16:05}

2. Fantasie for Horns II {13:07}

3. Kits Beach Soundwalk {9:48}

4. Cricket Voice {11:02}

5. Beneath the Forest Floor {17:23}

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