Projects - Cheryl E. Leonard

Current Projects

Music, field recordings, site-specific improvisations, and videos examining interfaces and borderlands between wild and human-constructed realms. Works explore landslides and ruins of military installations at Marin Headlands in Golden Gate National Recreation Area and reflect on the area’s geological, ecological, and human histories.

Antarctica: Music from the Ice

Ten musical compositions about the Antarctic Peninsula’s environments and ecosystems, scientific research in the region, and the effects of climate change. Works intertwine field recordings of Antarctic ice, wildlife, and weather, with sounds from amplified natural objects. Instruments include Adélie penguin bones, limpet shells, rock slabs, and penguin nesting stones from the Peninsula.

Lexicographies

Graphic music scores based on patterns, forms, and gestures in wild landscapes. Scores are “written” in asemic calligraphies and invite performers to consider aspects of the natural world beyond human scales of perception. Included are works derived from glacially-sculpted topographies in Norway and coast live oak trees in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Phantom Limbs

Musical instruments and compositions about extinct and endangered species. 100+ year old bone fragments are assembled into sculptural instruments. Their voices mix with sounds from antique glass, other natural-objects, and field recordings to evoke and elegize our past and imminent losses. The title refers to limbs on the tree of life and the Holocene Extinction. Part of the Ineligible art/archeology project.

Adfreeze Project

Music, videos, performances, and installations that combine sound and form to explore the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Collaboration with Brooklyn-based visual artist Oona Stern.

Past Projects

EPOCH

An 12-hour-long work by Funsch Dance that challenges the glorification of acquisition and excess. Features an original musical score and an installation of found-object musical instruments that is played and dismantled over the duration of the performance.

Confluences

Art installation that combines music composition and audience-activated sculptural musical instruments to explore how multiple factors converge to produce extreme high sea level events along the coast of California.Confluences was developed with research assistance from scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and is part of the La Jolla Historical Society’s Weather on Steroids: the Art of Climate Change Science exhibition. An expanded version of the installation music is included on the album Watershed and can be performed live in concert.

Thalassa, Forest Phrase, Thresholds, Sila

Collaborations with Australian visual artist Genevieve Swifte that interconnect music compositions and audio field recordings with video, photography, and drawing. Thalassa and Forest Phrase grew out of collaborative field work conducted along the coast of New South Wales, Australia. Thresholds and Sila were inspired by Swifte’s experiences in Greenland.

Watershed, Frozen Over

Live video and music investigating California environments and ecosystems. Collaborations with San Francisco-based visual artist Rebecca Haseltine.

Tides: Estuary

Installations and compositions based on tidal flow in estuaries. Musical instruments include sea salt, water, shells, mud, sand, rocks, marsh reeds, and kelp. Collaboration with San Francisco visual artist Rebecca Haseltine.

Music for Rocks and Water

Water and stones are amplified and used as musical instrument in compositions and improvisations inspired by motions and gestures from the natural world.

Ziran

Pinecones, feathers, bones, water, rocks, flowers, ice, and wood are cultivated as instruments in a collection of compositions inspired by Chinese wilderness poetry from the Tang Dynasty.

Instruments in Trees

A composition for arboreal materials (sticks, twigs, leaves, needles, pinecones, bark, and lichen) and upside-down string quartet (two cellos, viola, and violin) investigating cycles and processes inherent to trees.