NIGHT MUSIC: The Galvanic Measure

The titles refer to Selim Lemström’s 1883 experiments with galvanometric recordings of the aurora borealis in Lapland. It is therefore appropriate that The Galvanic Measure began life as an excavation of Wagner’s Parsifal, as the German composer’s Musikdrama was premiered only the year before, in the summer of 1882, in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The genesis of The Galvanic Measure centres around musical elements from Act III, and specifically the moments when the protagonist is overwhelmed by the beauty of the natural world. Ultimately, however, these found elements were removed during the compositional process to reveal a series of stark, low-voltage transmissions. Wagner’s last stage work can therefore be seen as an analogue to the phenomena that Lemström was attempting to document in the far north; a patterning of ghostly impulses that, over a century later, stimulated a series of auditory ‘deflexions’ in Acoxaca’s recording apparatus.