We Have Become Kin

We Have Become Kin

For piano, dancer and subtone, 2019

For Alex Raineri and Katina Olsen.
Premiered at the Brisbane Music Festival, Decemember 2019.

The title of this work comes from a speech
by Richard Flanagan. in 2018. It argues that
settler and aboriginal Australians have to
come to come together and acknowledge
a joint future that we invent together,
because we are all linked in some way this
far into Australia’s nationhood. He argues
for the adoption of the Uluru Statement as

a way forward in this plight.

When my father retired, he began to
assemble his family tree. He was
determined to discover his family came to
Australia, generations before him, by their
own free will, not as convicts. At a certain
point, he found a gap in this tree: a birth
certificate with no name on it, and also
found out that it was a common practice to
do this if the mother was aboriginal at that
time and place in history. He stopped the
search and did not resume it before his
death. Perhaps when I ‘retire’, I will resume
the search he could not complete, because
I would be proud to discover I had even
just a little bit of Indigenous Australian in me.

CH March 2019
The piano part is the colour is designed as ‘action notation’: the blue themed colours are for one hand, the red themed colours and for the other. Read the score proportionally: the coloured bars indicate the amount of time the key is depressed. You may use the pedal at all times, except where there are no keys depressed.The dance part is indicated by the opaque lines and should be read by rotating the score so it can be read vertically. Each colour represents a body part (eg, arms and hands, legs and feet, head and neck etc) and the lines should be read as choreography. When the line is static and straight, that indicates to remain in that position. When there is movement, try to reflect this in your choreography. Grey dashed lines indicate where your movement should cue with the sound (usually, stopping and starting). This choreography should be memorized.The pink bar at the bottom of the score indicates the sub tone part. This should be played to a single sub-woofer (that can reproduce 38 Hz) from the mini jack out of the ipad, which should be playing the scoreon the Decibel ScorePlayer application.