Requiem for Ducks

Live multimedia piece for offstage performer and onstage stuffed dog

Background

Requiem for Ducks is a kind of greeting, a kind of dream, a kind of radio play, a kind of soundscape, and a kind of admonition of what strangers or the wealthy might do with their free time—up to and including causing ducks to explode.

Toy keyboards, vocoder, field recordings,radio scanning, homemade cassette playback, and chance samples from around the internet weave into a meandering "story" about what it's like being here, who you're sitting next to, and ability of the human imagination to project meaning and mystery onto any thing, person, etc. Eventually, the table fan next to the dog turns on, feeding the breeze into a backstage vocoder, and the human voice, unchanged, begins to speak as the dog—who is *someone else* to say who was talking in the first place, anyway?

Premiered 11 April 2023
Kungliga Musikhögskolan, Stockholm, Sweden

Credits

Wilson Tanner Smith (voice, electronics, creation)
Fuzzy (soloist)