James Saunders

I’ve just finished a new piece commissioned by James Weeks and CoMA for the CoMA Partsong Book. It’s the first time I’ve made a piece directly for CoMA, and am looking forward to hearing how it goes this year. It’s a group behaviour piece, and the title – constant interchange of the most various kinds – is drawn from A. G. Tansley’s 1935 definition of an ecosystem (the first use of the term). I’m starting to extend the use of group behaviours at the moment to create little ecosystems where the interaction is conditioned by both the interaction of people and the sonic environment that emerges from this interaction. Although the piece is nominally for voices, with some speaking, breathing and singing required, it also uses objects and field recordings played back independently through ear buds. Most of the material deals with peripheral sounds, and there are cross relations between the field recordings and spoken texts.