Fourth Estate (2015) for piano, ebows and a.m. radio.

Commissioned by Zubin Kanga.

Premiered Melbourne Recital Centre, 8 May 2015 by Zubin Kanga.

Performed by Kanga in Sydney and Perth, May 2015. Broadcast on ABC Classic FM.
Dan Thorpe, ABC Adelaide, as part of SoundStream Emerging Composers Forum, 2016. Podcast here.  
Gabriella Smart at Extended Play, City Recital Hall, Sydney, September 2018 and The Intensity of Light, Foundation IHOS, Amsterdam 2018.
" the instrumentation emerges as an elegant metaphor for the ‘unofficial’ yet powerful voices of various media outlets, pulling the stunningly-scored cascading ripples of piano off-course into a sonic landscape outside the one it usually occupies" Lisa MacKinney, Limelight Magazine.

"Like a Debussy Prelude flowing across the different registers of the piano..." Mathew Lorenson, Realtime,125 September15.

The Fourth Estate is a societal, political or institutional force whose influence is not officially recognised, and is a term often used to refer to the press. It’s original use relates to the three estates of the realm: clergy, nobility and commoners. Australia in particular has seen just how powerful ‘unofficail’ voices can be, through monopolisation of the media, editorialised media reporting and political bias. The Fourth Estate is a work that compares the sonoric qualities of the piano with those of small electronic devices that extend and contrast with it. Small voices that have the ability to change everything. As the Fourth Estate is thought to be an element of society ‘outside’ official recognition, here the electronics attempt to pull the piano into a different sound world outside its usual realm.     

An example of the score is on the right. To perform this work you will need the Decibel Score player and the file to put in. Each iteration of the score materials is unique and requires the score player to do this. A digital or hard copy of the score is available from Material Press.