REBECCA LLOYD-JONES RECITAL

Wednesday 12 April – Ian Hanger Recital Hall

Peggy Polias | Electro Fractal Gamelan (2011)

Electro Fractal Gamelan was written in 2011 for the Kammerklang development project Worship the Machine, which paired music with trapeze. Worship the Machine visited the idea of androids playing nostalgic music in some kind of wasteland, so Electro Fractal Gamelan was written with this in mind.The electronic backing track to this work is based entirely on sine wave blips revolving around the harmonic series on A. There are 8 lines, each cycling randomly through different octaves at double the rate of the previous, creating the effect of a very simple binary fractal. The binary rhythms and continuity of the notes resembles the effect of kotekan in Balinese Gamelan, where two parts play interlocking patterns to produce a rapid constant line.After a while, one begins to hear phantom rhythms in the electronic track. I devised the track first and wrote the vibraphone part to complement this by selecting a few phantom rhythms and allowing the vibraphone player some choice in the pitches used to explore these rhythmic cells. Reverb and overdrive effects gradually build over the duration of the track, and eventually, to complement this, the Vibraphone player moves to tremolo playing, again given a choice of pitches in their part.

Liza Lim | Ming Qi (Bright Vessel) (2000)

Percussion: Rebecca Lloyd-Jones

Oboe: Vivienne Brook in memoriam of Gerard Grisey

Bright vessels (Chinese): tomb items (e.g.: ritual vessels, musical instruments, weapons, figures) buried for the use of the dead. These objects though seeming to be the same as those used by the living, are made imperfect in some way, and are thus transformed or ‘opened’ into the presence of the spirits.

Frankie Dyson Reilly | Tiny Little Worlds (2023)

Tiny Little Worlds (2023) is an audio-visual exploration of native rock pool environments along the east coast of Australia, created using the Decibel Scoreplayer. The scrolling score incorporates the composer’s stylised drawings of diverse and colourful rock pool critters, inviting both performer and audience to immerse themselves within these tiny underwater worlds.

Melody Eötvös | Antumbra (2022)

The antumbra (from Latin ante, “before”) is the region from which an occluding body appears entirely within the disc of a light source. Most often associated with the sun and moon, an observer in the antumbra region would experience an annular eclipse, in which a bright ring is visible around the eclipsing body. If the observer moves closer to the light source, the apparent size of the occluding body increases until it causes a full umbra.

The three movements (I Suspended, II Canon, III Time) of the composition are a play on this phenomenon, where the percussionists’ part mostly functions as an occluding body and the electronic track drifts and projects around the acoustic percussion like a light source responding to a solid object.

Natasha Anderson | The Snakes are Loose (2014)

This piece was made by recording glass bottles — those that happened to be to hand such as beer, passata and juice bottles. Excised fragments of these were then transformed via various electronic processes, and the resulting material composed into a concrète voice. The live percussion part was then written for the same bottles from which the initial recordings were made. Thus, a whole drama of perception — across modes of simulation — was drawn from a small world of refuse. During the recording the bottles were miked at three positions: internally, externally but close, and from a moderate distance in the room. I wanted to play with creating a strange sense of location and body by moving between different points of audition and sonic transformations of inside/outside. I hoped to render the object — the literal body — strange, merging it with its ever-extending metaphorical self.

What’s happening? Has everything suddenly gone crazy? I don’t mean just this. I mean everything. Or is it just me?

Oh, it’s not just you. The snakes are loose. Anybody can get them. I’d get them myself, but they’re friends of mine.

Crossfire (1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk

Rebecca Lloyd-Jones

Australian-born percussionist Rebecca Lloyd-Jones is a multiform musician, passionate about performance, research, and education.

Having performed professionally across Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, Rebecca has presented as a soloist at several focus days for the Percussive Arts Society International Convention and attended the Roots and Rhizomes program held at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada.

Active across many genres, Rebecca has performed on the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage in conjunction with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Noon to Midnight marathon new-music festival, at the BBC Proms, Concertgebouw Concert Hall, and The National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, with the Australian Youth Orchestra.

Rebecca has participated in the soundSCAPE composition and performance exchange (Italy) and was a guest artist at the VI Semana Internacional de Improvisación and tutor at the Festival de Música Nueva 2019, Ensenada, Baja California (Mexico).

Rebecca is an early career creative development grant recipient from the American Australian Arts Fund and is currently working on a research project that examines the percussion works of Lucia Dlugoszewski, Eleanor Hovda, and Maryanne Amacher. Rebecca presented her research at the Transplanted Roots Research Symposium, 2017-2019, and was the artistic producer of the 2022 edition held in San Diego (USA).

Rebecca graduated from the Victorian College of Arts with the Desma Woolcock award for academic excellence, received a Master of Music Research from the Griffith University Queensland Conservatorium, and is a Doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego with Distinguished Professor Steven Schick and ensemble red fish blue fish.

Rebecca currently holds the position of Lecturer and Coordinator of Percussion at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.