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Hildegard Westerkamp - “Cricket Voice” (Track of the Day)

Canadian Music Centre pays tribute to composer/sound ecologist tonight
Hildegard Westerkamp
The Canadian Music Centre celebrates the birthday of composer/sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp tonight with a sold out concert in the Murray Adaskin Salon.

Hildegard Westerkamp says: "Cricket Voice is a musical exploration of a cricket, whose song I recorded in the stillness of a Mexican desert region called the "Zone of Silence.” The quiet of the desert allowed for such acoustic clarity that this cricket's night song - sung coincidentally very near my microphone - became the ideal "sound object" for this tape composition. Slowed down, it sounds like the heartbeat of the desert, in its original speed it sings of the stars.

The quiet of the desert also encouraged soundmaking. The percussive sounds in Cricket Voice were created by "playing" on desert plants: on the spikes of various cacti, on dried up roots and palm leaves, and by exploring the resonances in the ruins of an old water reservoir.

The composition is dedicated to Norbert Ruebsaat, who wrote:
"It's hard to be a night in the desert
without the crickets.
You make it with stars.
You make it with the skin
of the desert night.
You stitch those two together
sky and earth.
You find it with your cricket voice."

Cricket Voice for two-channel tape (1987) is available on the 1996 album Transformations.

Westerkamp is a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. In the early 1970s she joined the World Soundscape Project under the direction of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University. She is a founding member of the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and a co-founder of Vancouver Co-op Radio.

The Canadian Music Centre celebrates the birthday of Westerkamp tonight at 7 p.m. in the Murray Adaskin Salon at CMC.