George Maurer's journey as a composer has, in recent years, been propelled on a bicycle, raising funds for cancer research, and capturing sounds and stories inspired by a vulnerability to the elements. A bike-packing journey across Argentina helped him develop new understandings of what it means to be a composer: the open air transport aspects of biking inspires new relationships, and music can be found in the stories that people share.
In Unfrozen, he creates ambient sound and music to underscore Polar explorer Will Steger's 1986 journal of his dogsled trip to the North Pole into a "sound-walk", a set of sound recordings keyed to specific GPS locations. Unfrozen invites an audience to experience fallible humans making a difficult trip with finite resources through a harsh climate; which is applicable as we all adapt to a worsening climate crisis.
"My latest collaborations are all international in nature, by design, due to the focus of my latest vein of work, which is the study of and development of international sound walks based on climate change. I spent a month on an island in Iceland summer of 2021 in residency, and will be returning there this year to work further with local artists. Every summer, I am crossing yet another country, conducting my research and travels via bike-packing/long-distance bicycling, capturing stories and interviewing artists for a podcast I produce. This summer of 2022 I will be meeting soundwalk designers across the UK (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Faroe Islands) while bike-packing there for 2 months. More travels across other parts of Europe are planned for 2023 and beyond, and so a residency at Camargo would be bookended by further bike-packing travels, in a perfect world. Camargo also interests me due to two connections to James J Hill, Jerome Hill's grandfather; first, I developed a music-theater piece several years ago called "Empire Builder" which focused on the legacy of JJ Hill's Great Northern Railroad (one of the compositions from this project was part of my submission when I first won the McKnight in 2014)- by proxy, I learned a lot about Jerome Hill and, second, the Hill Family Foundation helped begin the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library at Saint John's University and Abbey, Collegeville, MN, where I have been in residence recently as an artist scholar, implementing sound-walks in and around the grounds of the HMML and University. All this said, it is a goal of mine to continue to expand as an artist specifically through international collaborations, and Camargo Foundation looks like an excellent opportunity to continue my mission of developing further international compositional collaborations, should the opportunity arise."