A Shadow that Falls

A Shadow that Falls is composed for the French percussionist Thierry Miroglio. It is for specified unpitched percussion and an electroacoustic fixed media part built from transformed unpitched percussion recordings of Miroglio. There is no conventional written score to perform, instead there is a ‘listening score’. The percussionist improvises responding both to the fixed media and to the ‘listening’ track, which only they can hear on an earpiece. The listening track is spoken text extracted from the poem ‘Shadow’ by the English contemporary poet Alice Oswald. These words are a musical catalyst for the player to intuit their performance. There is a sense of revealing and unfolding, of emptiness, of mindfulness in the performance. The work requires no music stand and, where possible, asks for special low lighting to generate silhouettes (shadows) behind the performer.