Song Of A Japanese White-Eye
for shakuhachi
(-) Premiere performance: 2019, Conservatoire National de Musique et d'Art Chorégraphique de Rabat, Salle Bahnini, Rabat, Morocco; Elizabeth Reian Bennett (shakuhachi)
(-) American premiere: 2022, Annual Haiku Gathering, Wild Graces Studio Garden Gallery, Deerfield, New Hampshire; Elizabeth Reian Bennett (shakuhachi)
Program notes
Both "Songs" - Song of a Japanese White-Eye and Song of a Giant Tortoise - are contemplating expressions of animals which found themselves as so called "taxon substitutes" – species introduced into a, to them, foreign environment in order to replace species, that have vanished, for whatever reasons, from these ecosystems. I learned about this to me in many ways fascinating biological procedure when I was writing the music for Theo Lipfert's short film Invasion of the Giant Tortoises.
(Stefan Hakenberg, 2019)