[LAND] & OTHER HAZARDS

THE RIOT ENSEMBLE / ZEITGEIST COMMISSION FOR SOLO BASS CLARINET (AusiÀs garrigÓs), JULY 2020

The piece is formed of three parts.
A text, photographs, and a score.

The themes of the piece emerged in parallel as I was looking into the history of Lanzarote - the landscape, changes in ownership and its deep connections to slavery - when protests broke out in Georgia following the modern day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery on 23 February 2020.

It was impossible for me to ignore this abhorrent act which occurs often in such Southern states where black men have their lives taken from them, while the murderers are protected and often not arrested due to the ‘stand your ground’ law, which is widely believed to protect white on black violence and police brutality.

Researching 17th -18th Century Lanzarote I found that a similar minority group oppression took place, leading me to look into how slave burials were conducted on the island, and on American plantations, the latter always took place shrouded in darkness in the dead of night, under trees or bushes and often on Sundays, attracting large slave gatherings from neighbouring plantations. Such communal mournings in Lanzarote led to a phrase emerging to honour the dead: 'Black but Human’.

This led me to find the article “What bullets do to bodies” by Jason Fagone who spoke to Dr Goldberg, a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, along with gun shot victims about what actually happens to the body when it is violated by a bullet.

As I was writing the text counterpart, I thought about the connection between the air breathed into and out of the musician’s body through the body / cavity of the bass clarinet, burning bullets released to damage all that they come into contact with and volcanic activity rupturing the earth to propel red molten rock.

SCORE

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