ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Cat Hope is the artistic director of Decibel new music ensemble, the Australian Bass Orchestra and the Low Tone Orchestra. She has also directed opera, performance art as well as music and dance collaborations.

DECIBEL New music ensemble

Decibel are a new music ensemble that focus on the integration of acoustic and electronic instruments in chamber music performance, founded by Cat in 2009. They are world leading interpreters of graphic notations and pioneer digital score formats for composition and performance. This includes the ongoing development of their successful Decibel ScorePlayer App for iPad, enabling coordinated performance of graphic notations. Whilst rooted in western art music tradition, Decibel aim to remove stylistic boundaries in their commissioning and performance approaches. 

The ensemble has collaborated with composers such as Eliane Radigue, Werner Dafeldecker, Agostino Di Scipio, Alvin Curran, David Toop, Marina Rosenfeld, Lionel Marchetti, Andreas Weixler and Johannes S. Sistermanns and worked with iconic Australian composers Jon Rose, Alan Lamb, Ross Bolleter, Warren Burt, Eric Griswold and Anthony Pateras. Decibel have contributed the Australian premieres of works by Fausto Romitelli, Tristan Murail, Alvin Lucier, Peter Ablinger, Mauricio Kagel and have toured and recorded monograph concerts dedicated to Roger Smalley, Alvin Lucier, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi.

Decibel have commissioned over 80 new works since their foundation, toured Europe, Japan and Australia, recorded for ABC Classic FM and SWR German Radio, and released five albums to date on Australian and international labels. More on thier website.

Australian Bass Orchestra

The Australian Bass Orchestra is a project the follows this manifesto:

The Australian Bass Orchestra is a group of bass range instrumentalists from any instrumental group or family, with a minimum of 15 players. No pitch above Middle C (262 Hz) may be played in an Australian Bass Orchestra performance. Instruments can be established, invented, electronic or acoustic. (Cat Hope, 2014).

The Australian Bass Orchestra has performed at the Now Now Festival (2014), The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2014) and as part of Hope’s opera, Speechless (2019) at the Perth Festival

The group developed out of the Abe Sada project (2007-2014) whose main aim is to manipulate the lower end of the sound spectrum through live shows that combine installation with performance. In groups of 3 to 30 bass players from all different genres of music, Abe Sada played under or around stages, car parks, in multi-story buildings, on soccer fields or in shop fronts to vibrate audiences with the extreme bass they produce. The Abe Sada project had a constantly evolving line up of bass players and scenarios, each epitomised in a text score in the Abe Sada Songbook, which you can download below.

THE LOW TONE ORCHESTRA

This is a solo project with multiple sine tone generators. Often featuring in the fixed media parts of Hope’s notated scores, they have featured alongside Decibel and the DarkWater Choir on this track, and have completed a film soundtrack for UNTV.

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