Apocrypha - for violin, viola, and spatialized electronics (2017)

Apocrypha - for violin, viola, and electronic sounds, composed by David Bird, performed by andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo)

From "playlist" by andPlay, available on New Focus Recordings, September 27, 2019
https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/andplay-playlist

"Apocrypha" is written for violin, viola, and electronics, and is loosely inspired by Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel "Solaris". Lem's work follows a team of scientists stationed on a distant planet covered by a vast and gelatinous ocean. In the novel, the ocean demonstrates a bizarre ability to manipulate the emotions and memories of the scientists. "Apocrypha", exploits a similar process, where the enveloping presence of the electronic sounds prompt turmoil and sensation within the duo's intimate performance. “Apocrypha" was written for andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), and was developed in the summer of 2016 at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute.

“In the budding, growth, and spread of this living formation, in each of its movements separately and in all taken together, there was something one was tempted to call a cautious yet not timid naivety, as it strove frantically and rapidly to know, to take in, an unexpectedly encountered new shape. Then, in mid-journey, it had to withdraw when it was in danger of transgressing certain boundaries established by a mysterious law. This agile inquisitiveness was so utterly at odds with the immensity that stretched to every bright horizon. I had never before been so aware of its vast presence, its powerful, inexorable silence breathing evenly through its waves. Staring in wonderment, I was descending to regions of inertia that might have seemed inaccessible, and in the gathering intensity of engrossment I was becoming one with this fluid unseeing colossus, as if—without the slightest effort, without words, without a single thought—I was forgiving it for everything.”