VISITATIONS – COMPOSITION & SCORES

Composer: Jenny Gräf Sheppard

Visitations composition and scores were created with support from Statens Kunstfond

Performed June 15th as part of Klang Festival 2025

An artist statement on composition:

I work with scores, sites, protocols and instruments as elements with which to compose works. Composing for me is considering the sonic experience of the audience by means of sonic and non sonic forces. For Visitations, I applied ideas from poems by US-based writer Stephanie Barber to my compositional strategies. The poems form the libretto for the 2.5 hour performance Visitations. They also inform my approach to the genres and melodies that I worked with (from catchy sing-a-long songs to noise, to composing as frameworks). Barber’s poems titled The Sympathetic Metabolism of an Island prompted me to create long, linear instruments that spanned at scales that dwarf the human body and emphasize the horizon. I see this piece as in dialogue with the poetry, with the artist herself. I respond and elaborate on ideas that arise in these poems with considerations of the complexity of an edge, or how one definitive entity defines itself through a permeable perimeter. How we parse longing and belonging. Some parts of the score indicated tightly scripted song-like sections, while others created certain parameters, instruments, dynamics and conceptual orientations. I chose to combine elements in order to foster a spectrum of encounters between audience and site and performers. I sought to expand visual perspectives conventions of stage or site of a performance by working with on-site topographical elements. I worked with long and horizontal frames of action, and I composed music for the transitional aspects of the audience movements as well. The relational composition between audience and site and performer also forms part of the composition. I think of composition as confection, an alchemy of combined elements which when put together has its own distinctive quality. By working to modulate experience through a changing context for encounters (for example from very intimate in a darkly lit tunnel, to being invited to participate in singing along, or by incorporating site and landscape into the work, I aimed to focus in on how people are positioned in relation to these various formulations of longing and belonging, exchanges, inputs and outputs.

Selected instruments created for project:

Long wire instrument- 7 string, 17 meters in length and

Shelter wire instrument – 2 string, 20 meters in length

Seagrass with contact microphones