Stephen Upshaw viola
Tonia Ko (USA/ Hong Kong, 1988)
Soothe a Tooth World Premiere (2020) 5’
With a playful and questioning approach, Tonia Ko’s music challenges ideas of momentum and memory, manipulating sounds, stages and performers into new shapes. Pieces such as Simple Fuel and Flock ask their performers to interact in strange, ambiguous ways that speak to the emotions and sensations we go through, often unknowingly, every day. Her new piece, Soothe a Tooth, takes Stephen Upshaw’s viola playing to stressful new pieces, imagining a soundtrack for ‘clenched jaws, cracked teeth and dry tongues’. The strings of the viola become teeth, hands, feet, anything that we use as a crutch every day; through repetitive melodic patterns, Ko’s piece suggests both the physical motions that manifest our stress, and the ‘techniques we might try in order to sooth them’. Pressure and relaxation run through Soothe a Toothe, with acceptance at the centre, as Ko invites her performer to ‘attempt to tolerate his own distress’.
Co-commissioned by the Riot Ensemble and hcmf// in partnership with Zeitgeist Online Gallery