Walls and Bridges
Walls and Bridges is a 10-day series of performances and critical explorations uniting French and American thinkers and artists from social sciences, philosophy, literature and live arts.
"I contain multitudes" — An evening of music, performance and storytelling
51 Bergen Street (between Smith & Court Streets)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Series of performances. Co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center, Les Subsistances and Time Out New York
“I is Another,” said Rimbaud. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” claimed Walt Whitman. “Each one of us believes himself to be a single person. But
it’s not true... Each one of us is many persons, “ wrote Luigi Pirandello in his Six Characters In Search of an Author. A menagerie of French and America writers, artists, thinkers and performers will share stories, screen clips, stage protests, play musical selections and perform dramatic pieces to mine the multiple and contradictory facets of their identities. This series of five-minute performances will be preceded by Unisson, a twenty-minute collaborative piece by the dance collective Loge 22 ( Marie Goudot, Julien Monty and Michaël Pomero ) and the music collective ensemble mise-en [ with Patti Kilroy (1st violin), Sabina Torosjan (2nd violin), Trevor New (viola) and Alexandra Jones (violoncello) They will be led by Moon Young HA.]
Program
For this collaboration with Loge 22, ensemble mise-en will perform two pieces:
- wisprs (2012) for string quartet and electroacoustic sound by Elizabeth Hoffman
- nabi (2012) for violoncello solo by Moon Young HA
wisprs (2012) for string quartet and tape was written for ensemble mise-en : this piece is largely about recursion, that is, sounds feeding back on themselves. I composed an initial electroacoustic part using noise derived from close-up scratching near the violin bridge. The quartet rehearsed a preliminary version of the work, with headphones, enabling me to record the string parts in isolation. I then used bits of that rehearsal as added material for a revised electroacoustic part. At all stages, I also created abstract musical material using digital signal processing to alter the spectra of still exclusively string-based starting materials. Thus, three layers of sampled sounds and degrees of magnification co-exist. The noise in this piece impacts the technical domain (the information content at the timbral level is non-repeating); the affective domain (the players must listen carefully into their own noise patterns as they strive to generate a range of nuanced but non-pure tones); and the metaphoric domain (the materials fold into and build upon one another sequentially in terms of their history, but they ultimately combine and co-exist in a radically non-linear way). The piece is mostly quiet, striving to explore a delicate and intricate textural sound world.
