Description

In Adrienne Rich’s poem “Cartographies of Silence” I once read the following lines: The technologies of silence, / the rituals, the etiquette / the blurring of terms / silence not absence / of words or music or even / raw sounds. I immediately imagined a pair of musicians that would silently quarrel and dance around each other, sometimes tightly coordinated, sometimes in opposition. And let us experience various qualities of silence – heavy, glorious, anguished, painful, calm, absent-minded, focused… Like in a quarrel, when we seem to be out of our minds, the musicians, too, cannot control what happens to their music-making – they are almost like puppets in a sonic play, buffeted by commands from a randomly generated audio-score, and by commands from the audience, transmitted to them via the tactile body-suit score. Both scores allow the musicians to focus on their movements, their spatial relationship to each other, their situation. Like we, when we quietly quarrel, they, again and again, say the same things, play the same music, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes blurry, sometimes clearly. They fail to connect, then succeed, then fail again, harder. How will this claustrophobic moment end? In harmony – or in a sonic rift?

Elinor Frey, Violoncello

Felix Del Tredici, Bass Trombone

Joseph A Browne, Live-Audio

Travis West, Live-Scores.

Performance as part of the Tenor Conference 2018

May 25th, 2018

6-7:30pm

Concordia Fine Arts Black Box