Duo Gillis Cunningham – A Twenty-Year Musical Journey

The DGC performance at the Florida Atlantic University Theater on the Boca Raton campus, featured their explorations of
electro-acoustic and multi-media
avenues of musical expression.

It was presented as a celebration of the two-decade-long collaborative partnership of Glen Gillis and James E. Cunningham. Since 1999, Drs. Gillis and Cunningham have challenged the nuances of contemporary composition via an avant garde approach to duets that texturally combine the expressiveness of the alto saxophone with the exotic timbres of the ancient Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo. Their original experimental approach has been well-received via a multitude of premier performances throughout the United States, Canada, and the European Continent.

Duo Gillis Cunningham

The concert consisted of a smorgasbord of original pieces, most of them composed within the past three years.


Each live composition was processed live with Altiverb 7 convolution reverb, which gives one the capacity to recreate the acoustics of ambient sites throughout the world, including the Sydney Opera House, the famous Ft. Worden cistern in Washington State, and the Gol Gumbaz mausoleum in India. All instruments utilized DPA supercardioid d:vote CORE 4099 clip-on  small diaphragm condenser microphones and computer-processed sound amplified by a Bose L1 sound-reinforcement system, with sub-woofer.


The concert kicked off with “Fanfare,” a short composition for alto saxophone and conch trumpet, with an edited backing track from the classic 1997 Didgeri Dudes’ Under the Earth Tones album.

The live instrumentals in “Fanfare” were processed utilizing an Altiverb 7 impulse response [IR] captured at the Mozart-Sall, a
740-seat chamber music venue in Vienna, Austria.

Mozart-Sall (Mozart Hall) Vienna

Secondly, we presented another new composition “Walkabout” for alto sax, didgeridoo, and bilma (Australian Aboriginal clapsticks), which utilized IRs from both the Mozart-Sall (sax) and Sainte Etienne Cathedral in Caen, France (didge), as well as several meter and tempo changes.


A highlight of the concert was the premier of an electro-acoustic collaborative composition “Whales in a Mechanical Ocean” co-composed by the DGC and Jamie’s FAU colleague Matt Baltrucki.

 

While the stratospheric sax and wailphone provided the whale songs, the mechanical ocean bed was composed by Matt utilizing digitally-processed samples collected from the David Kaplan instrument collection during a 2018 summer research residency at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon.


The DGC respectfully performed “Shaker Song” dedicated to those effected by the tragedy of nearby Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School, featuring the eight-foot-long ‘great white’ didgeridoo,

and a self-made IR captured in the Pilgrim Monument, in P-Town (aka Provincetown, Mass).

Inside the Pilgrim Monument

The concert concluded with another new tune “Bleu Genes,” a quirky piece featuring a double-sewerphone didge in Eb and Gb, and a written score!


The encore premiered a brand new piece “Idus Martiae” (Ides of March), which was composed spontaneously
the day before the March 16th concert.

For a viewing of the entire concert
click the link below.