Louise Devenish
COSMIC TIME
Louise Devenish
Leah Scholes
Kaylie Melville
Niki Johnson
Amanda Cole – Composer
Michaela Gleave – Visual Artist
Cosmic Time is a performance work co-created by visual artist Michaela Gleave, composer Amanda Cole and percussionist Louise Devenish. The work takes concepts of time on a cosmological scale as a point of departure. Unfolding over 40 minutes, Cosmic Time explores representations of time ranging from the endless circling of planetary forms, to measures of time on Earth such as human breath and the fluttering heartbeats of desert mice, as well as abstractions of dissolving consciousness. It is presented as a sequence of eight overlapping movements representing forms of cosmic time: Big Bang, Cosmic Soup, Galactic, Stellar, Planetary, Chemical, Biological, and Esoteric.
Performed by four spatialised percussionists, listeners embark on a sonic journey through explorations of time and space informed by historic scientific and musical concepts such as orbital resonance and harmonic sequencing. Centered around gentle metallic percussion instruments, sparkling clusters of bells and triangles, ultra low drums, gongs, cymbals, and a wide range of singing bowls, microtonal tubes and chimes. Together, these instruments pulse, blend and resonate together, to evoke sonic representations of atmospheres, sensations, and rhythms through time and space.
Dr Louise Devenish is a contemporary percussionist whose creative practice blends performance, collaboration and artistic research. As a soloist and with ensembles including acclaimed electroacoustic sextet Decibel and percussive studio-lab The Sound Collectors Lab, she develops new works exploring performance, notation and collaborative creativity, performing around Australasia, Europe, North America and UK, at festivals including MONA FOMA, Nagoya and Shanghai World Expos, Ojai Music Festival, Tage für Neue Musik, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Perth Festival, and Tongyeong International Music Festival. Louise has commissioned over 50 works, and her performances are acknowledged for ‘interpretive flair and technical brilliance’. She has collaborated on internationally distributed recordings with ensembles including Decibel, Intercurrent, Speak Percussion and Synergy Percussion, released on Hat Art, Listen/Hear, Immediata, Innova and room40, as well as her debut album music for percussion and electronics on Tall Poppies.
Most recently, at the 2020 APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards, she won Performance of the Year Award for solo project Sheets of Sound, and the WA Luminary Award. Louise is a Churchill Fellow, Senior Research Fellow and Percussion Coordinator at Monash University, where she is undertaking a prestigious Australian Research Council Fellowship (DECRA) in artistic research, creating five new works with collaborators working across music, visual arts, digital arts and spatial design. Her writing on music focuses on music and gender, Australian music, and notation, and is published widely including her book Global Percussion Innovations:
The Australian Perspective(2019) and academic journals Contemporary Music Review, Tempo and Musicology Australia and Percussive Notes. Additionally, Louise regularly convenes and directs events designed to draw communities together through music making, including the annual Day of Percussion (est. 2012). In 2019 she convened the Gender Diversity in Music and Art conference. Previously, Louise founded and directed Piñata Percussion at The University of Western Australia, where she was Senior Lecturer and Chair of Percussion (2013-2019).
