Chimera’s Garden by Lisa Renée Coons

Chimera’s Garden by Lisa Renée Coons
World Premiere SEAMUS Opening Concert, March 30, 2022
Chimera’s Garden is the newest in a series of works I call ‘narrative environment scores,’ and it was created collaboratively with Shanna Pranaitis. Narrative environment scores are born of a desire to establish a shared aural-visual world for the listener and performer that evolves temporally. The original physical score combined watercolor, ink, and found objects to convey the connections between the protagonist and the natural world. That document was then translated to video and fixed media, to act as both the object that the performer reads/responds to, and the context in which the audience experiences the performance. The protagonist of the piece is never at home with others, always at odds with her surroundings, until she loses herself in the cultivation of her garden. She is eventually both fulfilled and subsumed by her remote sanctuary, as her body transforms through obsession.
Text
She was forged of aberrant pieces
A patchwork of violence and noise
The seams yawned fragile at night
Raw, as she prowled and worried and keened
A carver came to smooth the flaws
sculpting them in metal and glass
She grew brittle and still:
a mirror without breath
But when she arched to view her illusions
Her joints shattered at every bow
A tailor tried to dress the wounds, to veil a fractured plain
But her threads unraveled, more frail when touched,
Spiraling out on currents:
Contrails and clouds lacing her wake
Her filament rooted in bedrock,
Stone seeped up through her rifts
She rounded and slowed: a monument overgrown
weeping dew into the soil
Silver forests erupted, gnarled and broad
Obsidian blooms filled clefts and boughs
And silk orchids burst from the carpet moss
cyclones of light held in translucent seeds
Young vines cleaved the ancient husk
and she emerged on mantis legs,
Glass wings clasping over jeweled green scales
She pried the tempests from their shells
And cradling the small storms to her breast
Sung softly, tending her lucent garden
Lisa Renée Coons is a composer and sound artist with a special affinity to noise composition, collaboration, and experimentation. She is dedicated to progressive art and focuses on partnerships with other artists and musicians as a means of developing innovative new works. Presently an Associate Professor of music composition at Western Michigan University, Lisa Renée received her PhD in Composition from Princeton University, her Master’s from SUNY Stony Brook and studied at the University of Missouri-Kansas City during her undergraduate degree. Before joining WMU she was a Jackie McLean Fellow and visiting professor at the Hartt School in the University of Hartford. Her portfolio includes music for acoustic and electronic instruments, turntables, traditional ensembles, and her own welded sounding sculptures. Recent commissions include an evening-length work for The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and pieces for The American Composers Orchestra, The California E.A.R. Unit, Iktus Percussion Quartet, Dither Electric Guitar Quartet, the Machine Project for the Hammer Museum of Los Angeles, and the Violin Futura Project. She has received awards and support from the Other Minds Festival (a 2011 Composer Fellowship), the MAP Fund, ASCAP (Morton Gould Young Composer Award 2005/Honorable Mention 2009), and Meet the Composer, among others. Lisa Renée is a founding member of the bicoastal composers collective called, simply, The Collected.