Her Land, Expanded

Duration:

15'

Her Land, Expanded is composer Tonia Ko’s second collaboration with filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta. In their respective mediums, the artists share interests in the experimentation of form and the poetic fragmentation of materials. Despite being inspired by ideals and techniques of the European avant-garde, this piece presents an outsider’s perspective in multiple ways. For both artists, the concepts behind Her Land, Expanded feel autobiographical. Cuesta’s Ecuadorian background and Ko’s roots in Hong Kong and Hawai‘i give them unique vantage points on the loss of nature and the complex effects of colonization.

Both music and visuals contain the rhetoric of a litany, a repetitive prayer for lost landscapes. the piece is a lament on the expansion of human settlement over nature and indigenous ways of life. Cuesta’s film evokes a feeling of displacement where nowhere is truly home: a woman’s face is isolated and overwhelmed equally by thick rainforest undergrowth and unforgiving cityscapes. Ko’s score is similarly a ‘lost’ soundscape, inspired by a field recording of tolling church bells in an eerie minor key. These plaintive sounds were subjected to a digital process of spectral freezing before being transcribed intricately for orchestra.

Her Land, Expanded was co-commissioned by American Composers Orchestra and Carnegie Hall.