Casting was written in August 2005 for violin and tape based on the painting It's Not Black or White III by Leemour Pelli. Designed with Protools and Kontact II using akg 381 blue line mics and a Marantz PDM 660 hard disk field recorder.
Casting a line, casting a die, casting a mold. Leemour Pelli's extraordinary painting It's Not Black or White III has in its way done all three. In the circle of the waltz and the silent passing of the female through the static moment, there burns a truth that set the sounds I heard in Orient, NY into place. For except three, and the voices, all the sounds were found there: Organ, Hook and Hastings 1900, wind, with crickets, wine glasses, old doors and violin harmonics. Each sound plays a part in this soliloquy that is an attempt to understand the pople that live and have lived there, some together and some apart.
And then too language. Placing the words so explicit from our most powerful leaders in context. They resonate in ways of which we must take account. And the whale, here long before man. "Inarticulate but expressive." Like music.
By placing her work in the Icehouse Gallery, Pelli cast in the matrix of place and history here for those who cared to see. The World War II veteran, the whaling ship, the immigrant worker, then and now, the wind and wave as background to spirit and the mechanics and the inexpressible, unutterable solitude of being and the place and time between cultures.
And with it hope. In mystery, in faith, in irreducible diversity.