Nasca Lines

The Dalhousie University Archives holds the conductor’s score and the instrumental and vocal parts used for the premiere performance of Nasca Lines by Barry Guy. Nasca Lines is a one-hour, seven-part work that was commissioned by the Upstream Ensemble, a part of the Upstream Music Association. The composition is named after and inspired by the geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert, Peru, which include outlines of animals and various geometric shapes. Graphical representations of a selection of these geoglyphs are used in the graphic notation of this score, particularly in parts 3 and 7. Nasca Lines is an atonal work that uses a combination of composed material, based on tone rows and pitch class sets, and guided improvisation. There are twenty instrumental parts and one vocal part, which uses texts by Alan Davie.