Liza Lim
Sex Magic (2020) for contrabass flute with live electronics and installation of kinetic instruments
Density 2036: part vii
​Premiered May 12-14, 2020 on
Sex Magic for contrabass flute with live electronics and installation of kinetic instruments
Density 2036: part vii (2020)
Sex Magic (2020) is a work about the sacred erotic in women’s history.
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This is a work about an alternative cultural logic of women’s power as connected to cycles of the womb – the life-making powers of childbirth, the ‘skin-changing’, world-synchronizing temporalities of the body, and the womb centre as a site of divinatory wisdom and utterance.
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Pythoness
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Oracles
i. Salutations to the cowrie shellsii. Womb-bell
iii. Vermillion - on Rage (for contrabass flute, pedal bass drum, Aztec ‘death whistle’)
iv. Throat Song (for ocarina & voice)
v. Moss - on the Sacred Erotic
vi. Telepathy (silent meditation)
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Skin Changing
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The Slow Moon Climbs
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GLOSSARY
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Pythoness
Relates to the Pythia, Ancient Greek name for the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, also known as the Oracle of Delphi. At this seat of prophecy, the pythoness or priestess entered a trance in order to channel the voice of the Divinity. More generally, a ‘woman with the power of prophecy.’
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Oracles
Oracle, (Latin oraculum from orare, ‘to pray’, or ‘to speak); divine communication delivered in response to a petitioner’s request. Oracles were a branch of divination but differed from the casual pronouncements of augurs by being associated with a definite person or place.
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Cowrie shells
Cowrie shells have been widely circulated as a form of currency, particularly in the Arabic and African worlds taking on a raft of symbolic meanings including associations with fertility and pregnancy. Amongst their many uses, cowries have been employed in rituals for increase, for divination and healing, as amulets to ward off the evil eye, to pay for the passage of the dead, in dowries and love magic.
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Womb-bell
The womb chakra – creation energy of the Divine Mother.
Vermillion (usually spelled ‘vermilion’ but this more uncommon spelling is used to emphasise a sense of an outpouring of innumerable forces)
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Deep scarlet-orange colour originally made from the powdered mineral cinnabar (mercury sulphide). Costly and highly toxic due to the mercury content, it has been widely used in the decorative arts in Ancient Rome and in India, in European mediaeval illuminated manuscripts and Renaissance paintings and in the art and lacquerware of China. In Chinese culture, this intense red is associated with blood, life force and eternity.
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Rage
Connected to the pure primal power of the great destroyer Goddess, Kali.
Aztec ‘death whistle’
Double-chambered skull-shaped clay whistle that produces a howling or screaming sound. Archaeological studies associate the instrument with Aztec sacrificial, death and war rituals.
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Throat
Seat of communication, creativity and truth-telling.
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Ocarina
‘Vessel flute’ often made of clay used in both Mesoamerican and Chinese cultures.
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Moss
The ‘amphibians of the plant world’, ‘mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception’. True intimacy involves an intertwining cross-modal sensory exchange.
See: Robin Wall Kimmerer. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Oregon State Uni. Press, 2003.
Sacred Erotic
Connected to Tantric practice in which sexual energy is cultivated as a pathway to the Sacred.
Telepathy
Direct communication between people involving extrasensory perception.
Metta
Taught as a component of Vipassana (‘insight’) mediation, Metta is a practice of opening up a capacity for loving kindness, directing this love to ourselves and radiating it to others. Instructions for this meditation can be found HERE.
Skin Changing
I was intrigued to read various ‘myths of matriarchy’ which tell of the original usurpation of women’s power by men. Women’s power in these stories is not primarily focussed on their life-giving role as mothers but rather, on menstruation and women’s ability to synchronise their cycles with each other and with the moon. Stephen Hugh-Jones in his ethnography of the Barasana of northwest Amazonia says, ‘women are semi-immortal: through menstruation, they continually renew their bodies by an internal shedding of skin’ (1979). During menstruation and childbirth, women come into the most intimate contact with the mysterious ‘skin-changing’, season-changing, rain-making and life-making cosmic powers.​ See: article by Camilla Power
The Slow Moon Climbs
A line from Tennyson’s Ulysses and the title of a book which looks at the science, history and cultural meanings of menopause. The book examines the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ which asserts the importance of post-reproductive women and female wisdom to human evolution. See: Susan Mattern. The Slow Moon Climbs. Princeton Uni. Press, 2019.
Liza Lim (b. 1966, Perth, Australia) is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focuses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as Sex Magic (2020) for Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle, Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019-22), and the piano concerto World as Lover, World as Self (2021). Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights ecological listening to beyond-the-human realms.
Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC, SWR and WDR Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and JACK Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and 2006. Her music has been featured at the Berliner Festspiele, Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, and at all the major Australian festivals. Awards recognizing her wide-ranging career and depth of compositional practice include the Australia Council’s Don Banks Award (2018), the ‘Happy New Ears Prize’ of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation (2021), and the 2022 APRA AMCOS National Luminary Award. She was DAAD Artist-in-Berlin (2007-08) and Composer-in-Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2021-22). She was a founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2012-16) and was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2022.
Lim is currently Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
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The contrabass flute also calls to mind ancient big flute traditions around the world such as the giant flutes of Papua New Guinea or the Yidaki (Didjeridu) of Northern Australia. The Yidaki tradition in particular, with its virtuosic overblowing and multiphonics, makes the wind instrument sound like a deep, throbbing drum with many rhythms, colors, and harmonic worlds contained within its sound.
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These big flutes also have a social, ritual power in their societies. In many cases, it is forbidden for women to hear or see them, much less to play them or take part in their rituals. Lim’s decision to imagine Sex Magic as a ritual centered around a giant flute and make it about “the sacred erotic in women’s history” seems in this context both daring and utterly logical. In a live performance of Sex Magic the audience enters an opulent and richly colored ritual space, set up with three altars. Two of these altars are low tables on which are laid cowrie shells, pebbles, bells, tambourines, beans, flowers, and other offerings. Each of these altars vibrates with transducers tuned to octaves below the pitch material of the flute. Moving into the subfrequencies below human hearing, these altars physicalize the music into a ritualistic offering. The third, central altar is a shimmering, garlanded stage on which Claire and Bertha stand together. They are surrounded by an array of percussion instruments, most of which are triggered, via a system of contact microphones and transducers, by Claire playing certain keys on Bertha. Part of the magic in Sex Magic lies in how Claire and Bertha are at the center of a world of sound which appears to be activated by the pure energy of their performance together.
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In the first of the ensuing Oracle sections, the flute sings a salutation song to the Cowrie shells on the altars. The bongos and bass drum join in and eventually the altars respond, vibrating. In the second Oracle, Womb-bell, the flute intones deep, glowing, resonant belllike sounds and the altars shimmer in response. In Oracles iii, deep red rage is voiced by a duet between Bertha and the thunderous bass drum and builds to a bloodcurdling scream from the Aztec death whistle. Bertha is silenced in Oracles iv, Throat Song, while Claire plays and sings into an alto ocarina. If the Aztec whistle sounded unnervingly like a real woman screaming in terror, the ocarina sounds exactly like a woman singing a stratospherically high, gentle melody in duet with Claire’s voice. Bertha’s voice returns, entirely alone, in Oracles v, Moss—on the Sacred Erotic, to sing a long, sensual song in which melody and breath sounds and overtones combine. The Oracles section ends with a silent meditation, framed by two strokes of a prayer bowl. Liza Lim describes Skin Changing as a drumming ritual. The percussive power of the entire installation is unleashed in overlapping patterns, with bass drums, bongos, percussive breathing, loud key sounds on Bertha and the vibrating altars. Only at the end of the section does melody emerge in a low, slow, solo for Bertha in counterpoint with the rhythm of Claire’s breath as the voice of the flute slowly disappears into the deep.
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The gestation of the work happened on Zoom and WhatsApp during lockdowns. The premiere took place with only three people present in a large venue in Queens, New York, broadcast online to a global audience, including the composer watching on the other side of the world. Subsequent live performances have, gradually, brought more people physically into the ritual. This recording provides an invitation to connect in a particularly intimate way with the power of this remarkable work.
An idea for a new piece of music by Liza Lim usually begins with a connection to aparticular performer and with a desire to understand that musician’s relationship to their instrument. In the case of Claire Chase, it was when Lim was brought into the impressive presence of Claire’s contrabass flute, nicknamed Bertha, that the world of Sex Magic opened up. Bertha stands a full head higher than Claire onstage and is, indeed, an almost human presence in performance. The relationship between huge flute and performer is an intimate one: Bertha seems to dance with Claire, to sing duets with her, to breathe with her, to embrace her, at times to merge with her.​
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It is surprising how powerfully this sense of ritual communicates in a purely audio recording. In the gloriously seductive opening section, Pythoness, deep notes on the flute, rich with overtones, are in counterpoint with a keening melody created by feedback from the skin of the floor drum on which the bottom of Bertha is resting. Claire makes the melody by pressing and moving Bertha on the drum skin as she plays. This is the voice of the prophetess, full of beauty and strength and wisdom.
The final movement, The Slow Moon Climbs, opens with a lyrical and reflective long melody for Bertha. A low sound sets the two altars vibrating. The drum feedback melodies join again, echoing the opening of the piece, this time making slow, beautiful harmonies with multiphonic chords voiced by Bertha. The last sounds we hear are altars buzzing and vibrating. They have heard, absorbed, and perhaps accepted everything that has gone before.​
Vibration, says Lim, is about connectedness. It’s remarkable that Sex Magic, a work that so powerfully connects a performer, her instrument, the sounds beyond it, the present, and the ancient past had its beginnings in a world utterly broken apart by the Covid-19 pandemic.