Verdant: A Sound Tasting on Swale
Verdant: A Sound Tasting on Swale was a chamber concert of new/experimental music presented by Biome Arts and Tenth Intervention, curated by Sally Bozzuto. The evening featured works by Eve Beglarian, Sally Bozzuto, Nathan Hall, Hajnal Pivnick and Dorian Wallace, performed by members of the Tenth Intervention Ensemble. The evening also featured Data Bell, a sound installation by Brian House and Archive of the Ecological Future, a multimedia installation by Biome Arts, both powered by weather data collected aboard Swale.
Each musical selection was either commissioned for this event, or involves the idea of community, collaboration, sustainability, and/or our ecosystem.
This concert was presented by Biome Arts and Tenth Intervention as part of Eco_Hack 2016 in collaboration with Mary Mattingly's Swale.
A Brief excerpt of Verdant is featured in this video by Craig Seeman.
Music for Seven Players
Music for Seven Players is a musical exploration that is part traditional written score, part aleatoric score, part written instruction, part fluxus event. The piece was influenced by artists such as John Cage, George Crumb, Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Marcel Duchamp and the Broadway smash hit STOMP. It was also inspired by the Interactive Keyboard Project by Abraham Avnisan (with David and Tara Gladden) which plays a key role in the piece.
This project was created at the July 2013 session of The School of Making Thinking's summer residency program. Another motivation for the piece was the theme for that session: "Playing with Structure and Not Structure." This piece calls for a lot of improvisation and creativity from the players while basing it around more structured elements such as chord progressions, timing of entries and certain rhythmic elements.
Scored for flute/piccolo, accordion, Interactive Keyboard Simulator, and household objects such as typewriter, rotary telephone, ripped paper, broom, billiard balls and plastic and paper bags it also features spoken work in the form of poetry fragments from the Interactive Keyboard as well as spoken excerpts from selected texts that are read aloud by the players during the performance.
The first movement is slow and plaintive and largely improvised based around
G minor mode as established by the vocal texture from the Interactive Keyboard.
The second movement is more upbeat and features a jaunty ostinato in the accordion.
This video features excerpts from a 20 minute performance created at the School of Making Thinking in July 2013 in Delhi NY.