Of the Bat

2017

fixed medium - 5.1

4’25”

Commissioned by:

Aberdeen Humanities Fund (funded by University of Aberdeen)

Of the Bat forms part of Aberdeen Bestiary: Sound-Image-Narrative, an artistic research project led by Pete Stollery and Suk-Jun Kim from SERG (www.serg-aberdeen.net) at the University of Aberdeen. The project aims to examine and explore the transformative possibilities of the text-image-narrative structure of the Aberdeen Bestiary by situating (and re-situating) the Aberdeen Bestiary Collection in imaginative aural settings.

In the project, both composers have selected and created electroacoustic music for the image and text of real and imaginative animals from the Bestiary Collection.

The project was supported by the Aberdeen Humanities Fund at the University of Aberdeen.

From The Aberdeen Bestiary:

The bat, a lowly animal, gets its name from vesper, the evening, when it emerges. It is a winged creature but also a four-footed one, and it has teeth, which you would not usually find in birds. It gives birth like a quadruped, not to eggs but to live young. It flies, but not on wings; it supports itself by making a rowing motion with its skin, and, suspended just as on wings, it darts around.

There is one thing which these mean creatures do, however: they cling to each other and hang together from one place looking like a cluster of grapes, and if the last lets go, the whole group disintegrate; it a kind of act of love of a sort which is difficult to find among men.