Gordon Monahan (1956) creates works for piano, speakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-generated sound environments that span various genres – from avant-garde concert music to multimedia installations and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he contrasts the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustic phenomena with elements of media technologies, the natural environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance. In addition to sound installations and performances in the field of sound art, he also composes concert music for traditional instruments. John Cage once said of him: “At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven’t heard before.”
Since 1978, Monahan has performed and exhibited in numerous public spaces, museums, galleries, and festivals, including Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), the Venice Biennale, the Secession (Vienna), the Ultima Festival (Oslo), the Hebbel Theater (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Merkin Hall (New York), and Massey Hall (Toronto).

Performance Speaker Swinging is a live experiment – a presentation of an electroacoustic composition in which three performers swing speakers back and forth, creating a Doppler effect. The soundscape of live acoustic phenomena reflects the architecture of the concert space, while the performers sweat and struggle to maintain a continuous flow of sound.
The result is a captivating and, at times, suspenseful acoustic meditation that is, in fact, an enlarged, physical manifestation of a miniature electronic circuit – one that is key to sound modulation – and perhaps also a metaphor for the circular movements of celestial bodies.

Performers: Silvia Buranovská, Tomáš Janypka, Simone Lorenzo Benini

30 min
1982