Thinking about our upcoming concert

8:13pm, Friday, September 10, 2010.

Exactly two weeks from right now we will have just begun our season-opening concert, DRAMA: music and its double. I think in many ways that this will be counter)induction’s most ambitious performance to date. Aperghis, Globokar, Saariaho, Schnittke… all works both intriguing and complex, asking questions that seem too tempting not to reflect upon. I’ve chosen these pieces because they all either explicitly or implicitly suggest a presence outside themselves. To me the idea of a “presence” assumes some content of being, some quality, maybe even an identity or a character. All these works engage with characters, either by their “presence” in the piece or in the tension of their absence.

This engagement is the “drama” of DRAMA: music and its double. It was important to me to create some dialogue between these compositions, to lean into the idea, present in our concerts from the beginning, that by placing one musical work alongside another creates a meaningful relationship that enriches both. We are going to dwell in those in-between spaces through improvisation stemming from these works, creating music that can only exist by the physicality of combining elements from different pieces, different stories, bringing them fleetingly into each other’s gravity. That’s the double.

Braided into this, words- letters, essays, poems- will “un-explain” obvious associations and add another layer of connection and potential meaning. Very nice, but what is the audience supposed to think of all this? I really value this idea from the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky,

“The method whereby the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception of the film. And indeed from the point of view of mutual respect only that kind of reciprocity is worthy of artistic practice.”

I am sure that this holds for music as well, and for performance, and for creating relationships between performances and music. I hope everyone will come to the concert on the 24^th, slightly less than two weeks from now, and help us create this unusual, and special, musical event.