Cikada: We left her in a sack for fairies to reclaim

Cikada present a swarm of intricate new music from three challenging composers. 

Based in Berlin, Clara Iannotta is an Italian composer and curator. We left her in a sack for fairies to reclaim (2021) is the latest of several works responding to the poetry of Dorothy Molloy.

Australian composer Liza Lim’s The Turning Dance of the Bee takes its form from the dance performed by honey bees inside the hive to communicate knowledge to fellow bees about sources of flowers rich in nectar and pollen. 

They perform a ‘waggle’ dance that traces circles or a looping figure eight, angling their movements against the direction of the sun as navigational information. That figure eight is also known as the infinity symbol: a mathematical concept and also a pathway of ecstasy traced by the bees.

…fließend… (2020), a recent work by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, is constructed from long, sustained notes with the goal of expressing a sense of acceleration over a long duration.

The concert offers a rare opportunity to hear a work by Karim Haddad, a Beirut-born composer who studied at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Paris and the Sorbonne. His piece for string trio takes its title from a line in Ezra Pound’s Canto XIII.