GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
 
 

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On Kinship and Listening     I have long felt a quiet but powerful kinship with certain forms of Australian Indigenous art in my music - above all through the paintings of Kathleen Petyarre, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Dorothy Napangardi and Kathleen Ngale. In their dotted fields and drifting constellations, these artists seem to evoke not only the visible landscape, but a vast, unseen one: ancestral, rhythmic, cosmic and grounded in Country. As someone who did not grow up here in Australia, I am deeply conscious of the distances involved - not just geographical but, far more importantly, cultural. It would be absolute nonsense for me to claim in any way to represent or speak for these traditions. I simply revere their art and the ethos it embodies, and I feel continually and directly inspired to translate its spirit into music, as something in these paintings speaks to me on a very personal level and with unusual clarity. Their visual language - meticulous, radiant - echoes how I've come to think about music: not so much as narrative, but more as a kind of presence in silence and luminous vibration. Shimmering note patterns in my music might be akin to dots across a canvas or a desert floor. They might be stars, footsteps, marks of time and space. I have long seen in these visual patterns something with a very natural parallel in sound, and to be perfectly honest I am a bit surprised not more composers have used this in their music. This is in no way meant as appropriation, and I do hope it is not received as such. It is meant as an act of deep reverence, a form of listening across vast differences: cultural, temporal, ontological. And perhaps, in this act of listening, a kind of kinship becomes possible. Fragile for sure, yet in my view deeply necessary.       G. L.