Motion+Form (2003)

COMPOSER Dominik Karski

PERCUSSION Peter Neville

HARP Marshall McGuire

CONTRABASS Kathryn Schulmeister

SOUND Alistair McLean

VIDEOGRAPHY Agatha Yim at Polyphonic Pictures

LIGHTING TECHNICIAN Charis Rajamani

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Daryl Buckley

Filmed at the Primrose Potter Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre 08.09.2023

“20 years ago, I wrote motion+form in response
to the first double-commission from ELISION
(the other work was open cluster M45). At that
time, I was reading James Gleick’s Chaos, a
popular science book on chaos theory, and I
came across a sentence that I thought captured
the essence of the complexity of chaos theory
in a beautifully simple way: motion plus form
equals flow. For example, a tree looks like a
tree because it has a form of a tree, but no two
trees are identical – the form is in motion. This
idea has become very inspiring, and not just for
this piece. The work on the score progressed
with this idea in mind and as a completely
intuitive process of searching, which is my
approach to this day.”

— Dominik Karski

I stumbled upon this reflection written by composer Dominik Karski on his website. It’s well worth a read if you’d like to learn more about this fascinating composition. You can read the full article here.