Jennifer Walshe
​THE GREATER NOISE

Performance

Two white space suit gloves reaching toward a reddish-brown planet against a starry background

Image: Ragnar Árni Ólafsson

Irish composer and performer Jennifer Walshe has explored Mars and space in depth. Her research has taken her from the Great Equatorial Telescope in Greenwich to audio recordings from Mars. Now she is combining her “space archive” with new material. The result is a composition for Walshe’s voice, three musicians, live electronics, and video.

The piece reimagines the concert hall on a cosmic scale: The live electronics track—recorded on stage with hydrophones—makes solar wind, cosmic background radiation, and chemical reactions audible. The video projection spans vast spaces, from live images captured by a microscope to distant stars.

The title playfully alludes to what astronomy calls “the great silence,” the fact that telescopes and space probes have so far found no evidence of life beyond Earth. THE GREATER NOISE revels in the abundance of energy and information that surrounds the Earth and which Walshe can access using scientific instruments.

THE GREATER NOISE is a commission of Radio Österreich 1 in cooperation with ORF musikprotokoll.
With the kind support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation