Music / chamber / KUSAMA’S GARDEN
Kusama’s Garden
for two pianos and electronics
Kusama’s Garden was written in 2017 as a site-specific commission to be performed at the Queensland Art Gallery by Liam Viney and Anna Grinberg. The two pianos were situated at either end of an indoor lake which at the time was home to Yayoi Kusama’s seminal installation piece “Narcissus Garden.” Kusama’s themes of reflection, distortion and the infinite permeate the work. The duelling pianos are set against each other in a musical conversation, communicating ideas back and forth across the wide distance and filling up the space with sound. As the pianos weave in and out of tempo with one another, musical ideas are fragmented, reflected and refracted, intertwining to create a sound world that is at once simply derived but also dense and messy. The music on each side is at first quite similar, yet as the piece progresses, the pianos diverge further apart into seperate worlds, each exploring its own unique territory before combining together once more to end the work
