The Gliss anglais
Designed and made by Henry Dagg, the gliss anglais is a de/reconstruction the cor anglais. This injects instability and precarity into the new instrument’s response to gesture, breath and touch. It frees me from the oboe’s restrictive keywork and extends the sonic landscape available to me.
You can hear me playing the gliss anglais with other improvisers in Sulaymaniah, Iraq as part of Space 21 Festival in the videos I've created below. Carceral Scrivings is a powerful, improvised response, to the torture endured by women held in The Red Prison when Saddam Hussein was in power. The Saray Building, the oldest in Sulaymaniah, has been completely renovated but remains uninhabited. The Lost Place was performed in Canterbury when we returned home. My writing on the thinking behind and development of this instrument is published by The Orpheus Instituut. Read it here; Instrument de/reconstruction as a feminist practice.