On 19 April Crash Ensemble gave the Irish premiere of Tansy Davies’ Lost Science at New Music Dublin, conducted by Ryan McAdams. The 23-minute work for chamber ensemble and electronics was commissioned by Red Note Ensemble, sound, Crash Ensemble and Ensemble Offspring. The latter give the Australian premiere of the work on 3 June 2026, as part of the ACO on the Pier recital series in Sydney Harbour; the work received its world premiere from Red Note Ensemble in October 2025 at Sound Scotland.
Lost Science is an imaginary journey into the Earth’s interior, dwelling in a space between the Earth’s surface as we know it and older geophysical layers. These interior spaces speak to us in moans, groans, echoes and whispers; the voice of Earth: secrets of her ‘deep time’ structure, and of the pains of the transformation she is undertaking now. Davies calls the electronics “an ancient landscape”, traversed by the instrumentalists.
The work proceeds through eleven cycles – visions of the “Divine Feminine” manifested in a host of figures: Joan of Arc, Green Tara, Mary Magdalene, Hathor, Isis, and Quan Yin. They act as guides through this geological interior. Delving into the earth’s interior has been a longstanding source of creative fascination in Davies’ work, providing the framework her 2018 chamber opera created for Mark Padmore, Elaine Mitchener, and the London Sinfonietta.
In 2017 Crash Ensemble premiered and toured Davies’ Antenoux. The 5-minute work is also preoccupied with overlapping and interlocking processes, fluctuating between two kinds of energy, represented by highly rhythmical cycles and more ethereal linear phrases and moments. These materials coil and uncoil around each other, following the principle of the underground water phenomena known as geospirals.
Earthworks, a geologically-inspired percussion concerto for Colin Currie, will premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Kevin John Edusei on 19 June. The 25-minute work takes inspiration from vast geoglyphs like the Uffington White Horse and the Acre structures of the Amazon rainforest, revealed by deforestation. The concerto imagines these massive glyphs as ancient language – a communication, perhaps, from our ancestors to the future. It recalls an earlier percussion work – the ritualistic, rhythmic Dark Ground, recently recorded by Currie – from which opens a new landscape of signs and symbols.