Wherever water flows or pools, it collects colours, tastes, and textures from its physical environment. Similarly, music reflects nuances of its cultural milieu. Thus, the network of rivers that flows across India seems an apt metaphor for that nation’s richly diverse web of musical practices, instruments, and sounds.

Rivers merges distinct traditions into new pools of musical practice that might never exist. With that fabricated narrative, it is also clearly a work of sonic fiction. My hope is simply that — like any other work of fiction — it will resonate distinctively with the imagination of each listener.

Rivers is the 7th in a series of works concerned with the interplay between memory and imagination where the pieces merge soundscape, radiophonic, and acousmatic elements into abstracted musical portraits of times and places.

All source materials are from the sound archive recorded by Manuella Blackburn for the Instruments INDIA project — a unique cultural partnership of Milapfest UK and Liverpool Hope University (UK).

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Rivers was commissioned by the Instruments INDIA project and premiered on January 20, 2017 at The Capstone Theatre in Liverpool (UK).

Premiere

• January 20, 2017, Instruments INDIA Commission Project Showcase, The Capstone Theatre — Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool (England, UK)