Recycle; Remix; Renew

In this paper, I will describe the process of using an existing composition to explore the practice of ‘remixing’ - in this case, a solo violin piece written with fixed media. I am fascinated by the practice of recycling and remixing existing songs/tracks in the wide range of commercial and dance music in our era. 

In 2021, I was invited to put together a 45-minutes concert of my work for the Bowed Electrons Festival Online at Capetown University. As one of three pieces, I chose to use ‘Streamlines I’ REMIX (2011/2021) for violin solo and fixed-media. ‘Streamlines I’ (2011) was written for violinist Jellantsje de Vries, who performed it at a portrait concert in the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. 

There was no suitable performance video, and listening/viewing a black background online was not an option for me. Therefore, the second new medium to explore became creating what I call ‘experimental imagery’ – using colorations of a single image of ‘glitch notes’ made in a notation program. The goal of the video was not to mimic the music but to provide a backdrop of gradual color changes and transitions. These coincide at times randomly with signal moments in the piece, but more often, they don’t. 

Christina Viola Oorebeek
To keep an open mind, maintain a stance of curiosity about what is happening in the world, and constantly evolve and renew her personal aesthetic are the motivations forChristina Viola Oorebeek’s work. An American-Dutch composer with no adherence to convention, but at the same time cherishing histories and traditions, she recorded one-arm bandits in Las Vegas for ‘... and god invented dice’, and developed new instruments like the sound wheel, plexiphone, and wind-twirler. She has been inspired by visual sources, twentieth-century modernism, and patterns she found in many cultures. She included video as a medium in her work ‘Period Point Blank’, and continued to use experimental imagery for her concert and presentation at the Bowed Electrons festival of 2021. 

Christina left the USA in 1969 after singing in the band Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks. She was a singer-songwriter in London and worked as a dance musician and ‘rhythm for dance’ teacher at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. In this period, she studied piano with Willem Brons at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where she truly ‘heard’ new music for the first time. At age 50, she embarked on a career in composition, studying with Klaas de Vries at Codarts Rotterdam, and graduated with the Composition Prize. She has been composing ever since. She took masterclasses with Richard Rijnvos, Toshio Hosokawa, and others. Her work has been performed in festivals/concerts in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Finland, China, Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, the USA, and Canada.

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