Hildegard Westerkamp

Transformations gathers five works by Hildegard Westerkamp composed between 1979 and 1992, all built from recordings of real places: Vancouver’s Skid Row, the city’s beach, the Zone of Silence in north-eastern Mexico, the old-growth Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island. This 2010 edition is a reissue; the composer’s note on the disc is dated 1995, and the booklet opens with a short text by Pauline Oliveros. In it Westerkamp explains where she draws the line in processing: she shaped truck brakes into chords without scruple, but stopped when a cricket or a raven risked being lost.

A Walk Through the City (1981), commissioned by CBC Radio’s Two New Hours, sets the poem of the same name by Norbert Ruebsaat, read by the author, among traffic, sirens, pinball machines and voices, partly taken from the World Soundscape Project collection at Simon Fraser University. In Fantasie for Horns II a live horn, played here by Brian G’froerer in a 1996 recording, meets a tape of train horns, foghorns from both Canadian coasts, factory and boat horns. Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), with the composer’s own voice, grew from her radio programme Soundwalking and moves from the city to the tiny sounds of feeding barnacles.

Cricket Voice (1987), dedicated to Ruebsaat, slows down a cricket recorded in the desert and adds percussion played on cacti, dried roots and an old water reservoir. Beneath the Forest Floor (1992), also made for CBC, was recorded in summer 1991 and received a special mention at Prix Italia 1994.

Born in Osnabrück in 1946, Westerkamp emigrated to Canada in 1968. She taught Acoustic Communication at Simon Fraser University from 1981 to 1991 and is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 1031, 2010.