For SATB saxophone quartet with household objects.
Animated score; 8 mins duration.
Awarded the 2020 Monash Composition Prize.
Program Notes
Velutha (2020) is a multimedia chamber work for four performers with SATB saxophone and (in order of appearance): bowls of water, radio + speaker, voice, nuts, stomping feet, potato + peeler, sponge, toy cars, sheets of paper, body percussion, laughter, and metal bowl + hammer.
Fundamentally, the piece is built around the aim of dismantling opaque and elitist art-music traditions. Both the score and the modes of sound production are designed to foreground transparency; the text-speech describes sounds, and the theatrical performance of these sounds is easily recognisable for audiences. The work's theatricality provides an engaging visual component to complement the animated score, challenging the concert-hall paradigm of unadorned orchestras dressed in penguin suits and remaining seated and serious throughout a performance. The animated score itself is designed to be both an object of aesthetic beauty and communicative efficiency. Colour, animation and written instruction are used to emphasise and delineate various gestures throughout the piece, aiming for readability both for performers and audience members.
The text itself is derived from passages in The God of Small Things, the 1997 novel by Arundhati Roy. Roy's writing is characterised by the juxtaposition of solemn poignancy with childlike humour and irreverence. In reflecting both the novel's seriousness and absurdism, Velutha conceptually engages with the dichotomy between programmatic and absolutist aesthetic music. The work aims simultaneously to depict elements of the text, which still existing as a standalone composition that can be enjoyed without having read the novel.