Year: 2024

Instrumentation:

Flute
Bass Clarinet
Violin
Cello
Piano
Percussion: Marimba & Guiro
Live Electronics (Delay Patches – in premiere run from Logic Mainstage)

Duration: 5:00″

Performance History: Premiere on 31/01/25 and 01/02/25 by HRSE in University of Ulster, Magee and Queen’s University Belfast.

About: Commissioned by Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble with funding from PRSf Talent Development Network.

The title is a play on the word Ectosymbiont, which is an organism that attaches itself to the outer surface of another living being in a symbiotic relationship. A delay effect is somewhat parasitic in nature, as it requires sounds to be fed into it before it can mimic and closely shadow its ‘living’ acoustic source. Usually, my chamber writing consists of many individual layers, but this idea of a delay/echo as a parasite led me to a different approach: the acoustic ensemble is treated as one singular organism, playing a duet with its own shadow. I feel this intertwining of live and processed sound reflects the increasingly symbiotic nature of the relationship between the digital and the physical in our own lives.

A play on the word Ectosymbiont, that refers to a parasitic organism that attaches itself to another to form a symbiotic relationship “Anselm McDonnell’s ‘Echosymbiont‘ saw the composer acting as the ‘outside’ force, processing some of the sounds of the live performance on computer and playing it back through an on-stage speaker as an echoing response. It was a little unsettling initially to hear pauses where Alex Petcu’s percussion continued in soft fading delays of electronic reverberations, but aside from perhaps recognising that there is a symbiotic (but hopefully not parasitic) relationship between composer and performers, it also reminded me that music doesn’t stop when the playing finishes. It resonates in the room and – hopefully – has made a deeper connection with the listener and perhaps stays with them even longer than that. This one certainly did. 

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