Foundry

With the help of neighbours and a precarious arrangement of plywood and castors, we hauled an old cast iron bath tub from the back garden to the curb. Within hours it had vanished. Scooped up by scrap metal scavengers the tub was on its way to a new life as...girder, park bench, pipe, rebar, nail, hammer...who knows. This piece is a musical foundry. My focus is on metal: sawn, hammered, melted, poured, moulded, cast, polished... The melodic material is based on pitch analyses of the sounds of drilling, hammering and sawing. I want to melt the material down to a metallic gleam.

Juliet Palmer moved from New Zealand to New York in 1990 to work with composer-performer Meredith Monk, completing her PhD at Princeton University in 1999. Based in Toronto, her music has been featured around the world, from New York's Bang On A Can Festival to Italy's Angelica Festival and Australia's Adelaide Festival. Performers of her music include the Penderecki String Quartet, Trio Fibonacci, the Gryphon Trio, Toca Loca, Continuum, l'Orchestre Metropolitain conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Tapestry New Opera Works (Canada); Les Percussions de Strasbourg (France); Fontanamix (Italy); Piano Circus (UK); California EAR Unit and the Bang on a Can All-Stars (USA); and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Juliet co-founded the interdisciplinary collective urbanvessel in 2006. Their new work Voice-Box, for four women vocalists who box, is a Harbourfront Fresh Ground commission and premieres in November. Palmer co-directed and scored the animated short Soaring, Roaring, Diving - "Best Experimental Film" in the 2009 Brooklyn International Film Festival.