Lines, Threads, Traces, and the Cello as a Shimmering Landscape

This recital features the cello which has been a primary instrument or site for Liza Lim's compositional practice across four decades. French cellist Séverine Ballon has been an essential musical collaborator for Lim through the 2000s and is the dedicatee of the two earlier works on the program. Invisibility (2009) is part of Lim's investigation into an Australian Aboriginal aesthetics of presence in which shimmering effects both reveal and hide the presence of the numinous. These musical expressions of cross-hatched lines and traces are extended into a reconceptualization of the instrument as an installation of strings and threads in an ocean beyond earth (2016). A fascination with ideas of material agency and ecological emergence finds expression in Cello Playing ~ as Meteorology (2021) in which the unpredictable and contingent liveliness of contact between the performer and their instrument becomes the subject of the music.