“It is with great sadness that earsay announces the passing of one of our beloved artists. Susan Frykberg passed away peacefully at her home in New Zealand on April 7, surrounded by family and friends.
You can read Susan’s biography in her own words on her web sites: susanfrykberg.com/bio/ and sounz.org.nz/contributors/1043
Susan lived and worked in Canada from 1979 to 1998, was a founding member of both the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, and the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology. As a devout Catholic, she often combined social justice and religious action into her musical practice in recent years.
Susan is perhaps best known for her music composition for voices, violin, and tape called “The Audio Birth Project,” her major release on the earsay label. Described by critics as “an emotional chisel,” “primal, cathartic,” and “a tour de force in both composition and subject,” this landmark work chronicles, in sound art, the process of labour and birth, based on interviews with her sisters and mother. The album title is derived from the major work “Astonishing Sense of Being Taken Over by Something Far Greater Than Me.”
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An obituary for the musical life of Susan Frykberg
“Susan Frykberg was an electronic music composer and sound artist whose music practice became an increasingly spiritual one. A citizen of both New Zealand and Canada, she lived most recently in Melbourne where she was a key part of the music scene over the last 10 years. Frykberg composed more than 80 musical works during her life, including music for acoustic, theatre, and religious settings in addition to many electroacoustic works. For her, music was an expression of her creative, intellectual, and spiritual life, and she was involved in key electroacoustic music scenes wherever she lived. She passed away in Whanganui, New Zealand from a terminal illness, amongst her family.
Born in Hastings, New Zealand, Frykberg undertook her undergraduate music studies with a minor in Theatre at the University of Canterbury, where she focused on computer music. Over time, she studied with composers such as John Rimmer, Barry Vercoe, Barry Conyngham, Barry Truax, and took classes with Iannis Xenakis and John Cage. She moved to Toronto, Canada in 1979 where she worked as a freelance composer, collaborating on the Structured Sound Synthesis Project with Bill Buxton at the University of Toronto, with the Canadian Electronic Ensemble and the composing collective Gang of Three. A key work from this period is Transonances (1984), a 50-minute piece characterised by voices subjected to and augmented by a range of treated and synthesised sounds. These were soundworlds she would return to throughout her life, as she sought a way to address what it meant to be a human continually augmented by technology…”
