All composers are ecologies. They make music out of sets of relationships between instruments, people, spaces, listenings and readings. The ecology that is Liza Lim is distinctively tangled: less monocrop field than unruly rainforest or crowded coral reef. It is a place where everything is both individual and co-dependent, intimately bound but fiercely wild; a place where birth, death and desire are simultaneously present at every point. It is also extraordinarily productive. Following Lim’s career is a little like being an Amazonian botanist. Whenever you think you have a grasp on the diversity of your site, a new species of fern or flower appears that somehow both fits perfectly into an existing niche and turns your previous conceptions upside down.
For more than a decade now, ecological thought has been less a metaphor for Lim than a working practice. Born in Perth, Australia, to Chinese-Bruneian parents, she has long been fascinated by ways in which cultural knowledge is encoded and transferred. In the 1990s and 2000s, her work explored different knowledge systems, from the calligraphic notation of Japanese koto music, to the flexible storytelling of Chinese mythology, to the ‘shimmer’ of Aboriginal Australian art, to transcendental Sufi poetry. Inspired by the writings of the British anthropologist Tim Ingold – and particularly his metaphor of ‘mycelial’ collaboration – Lim began in the 2010s to investigate similar ‘cultural’ structures within the natural world: structures of desire, communication and collaboration between human and more-than-human species. Her concerto for sheng and ensemble How Forests Think (2016) is named after Eduardo Kohn’s extra-human anthropology of the Ecuadorian rainforest; Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018), written for Klangforum Wien, imagines a post-anthropogenic world through a dawn chorus of coral reef fish.
Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time, which will be given its UK premiere in Huddersfield by the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, is Lim’s latest discovery in this particular jungle. It takes the form of a temporary shrine to the Eigenthal-Rümlig river near Lucerne (close to where the work was first performed), and this space enters the music both in the ritual invocations that take place on stage and in videos and sound recorded in and beside the river. On film the gestural performer Winnie Huang plays a violin by dipping it in the river’s flow (an idea developed by the sound artist Bennet Hogg and the artist and writer Merrie Snell); on stage, she uses wearable MIDI controllers to cue and shape video and audio recordings with her movements, playing the river and being played by it.
The work’s title is shared with an article by the Australian anthropologist and ecological philosopher Deborah Bird Rose, whose themes of collaboration, desire, birth and entanglement echo the ecology of Lim’s own music. Life depends, Bird Rose writes, ‘both on the sequential processes of generational time/gift and on the synchronous processes of multispecies nourishment’. To live is ‘to continue to “draw order out of disorder,” which is to say: to keep the gift moving’; conversely, the decline and death of a species is a form of ‘double death’: in which not only that creature dies but also the gift of future life it gives to subsequent generations and other species that depend upon it. By opening up the polyphonic voices of the river and the interactions of its more-than-human subjectivities (from rocks to plants, fish, birds, insects, and to the guardian spirits of the river itself), Lim introduces what she calls ‘a radical imagination of otherness and an expanded sense of selfhood’ that is attentive to Bird Rose’s conception. The Anthropocene has arrived, with all the death and double death it brings. Can we surrender ourselves to a de-centring of the human, asks Lim – to our ecology rather than to ourselves? Can we find justice for our multispecies kin, before it is too late?
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 46th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2023, takes place Friday 17 – Sunday 26 November 2023. Tickets for Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra + Winnie Huang are on sale now.