Crow Stone Tone Poem

Crow Stone Tone Poem (2016-2020)

by Julie Andreyev and a crow

Interpreted and performed by Giorgio Magnanensi

And here’s a recent performance of the piece at Emily Carr University:

A collaboration with a free-living crow who lives in the territory that includes my home. This project is based on interspecies play using stones, initiated by the adult crow who gifted me a pebble as acknowledgement for water I left for his family. The ten stone arrangements that we created are adapted into a score. – Julie Andreyev

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In approaching Julie’s score I was thinking again and reconsidering the idea of matter as passive, raw or inert material. Stones, in spite of their apparent static and inanimate presence, have powerful sonic and affective qualities that resonate through their material agency in full and tactile viscerality. These are qualities I’m extremely attracted by, both as forms of activating creative energy and as poetics of engagement.

The stones and the images to which Julie’s story associates them, become here actants within a score morphed into a polydimensional instrument. As such, the score displays itself sonically while inviting us to engage and play with an enhanced creative agency: an invitation to move, be moved and imagine, while discovering beauty beyond any aesthetic discourse.

– Giorgio Magnanensi

The sounds produced in this recording are both sounds of the stones moving, touching and resonating, and pre-recorded sounds of the same stones, triggered while touching/moving them on the plywood board used as a touch-sensor device. A piezo microphone attached underneath the board triggers various audio processing of the stones’ sounds, while toward the end, a highly filtered crow song appears as an eerie and shadowy presence that reveals only the higher frequencies of the bird’s voice.

Julie Andreyev, Crow Stone Tone Poem