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Stark Devotion – a SpeakEasy for Sarah Michelson

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Eve, seated atop Adam’s shoulders, turned to look at the portraits of Sarah Michelson and Richard Maxwell. The creation gazed upon the images of the creators of her world, influential drivers of the performers’ devotion. This intimate moment occurred near the end of an evening marked by extended solos and duets replete with precise, linear [...]

Eve, seated atop Adam’s shoulders, turned to look at the portraits of Sarah Michelson and Richard Maxwell. The creation gazed upon the images of the creators of her world, influential drivers of the performers’ devotion. This intimate moment occurred near the end of an evening marked by extended solos and duets replete with precise, linear movements supported by minimal preparation. A feat of endurance, focus, and technique requiring intense commitment in preparation and performance, Sarah Michelson’s Devotion was aesthetically austere, yet earnest in execution.

Eve’s interaction was one of multiple moments of self-referentiality scattered throughout the piece. The evening’s narrator was placed prominently in the audience, the paintings of Michelson and Maxwell loomed over the project, and the text directly referenced the choreographer. From the outset, Devotion guided audience members into a pensive state, setting up a series of extended solos and vignettes. This duration was combined with the decision to envelop audience members in light for long sequences, encouraging both an awareness of the act of watching as well as an attention to the passage of time. A few of these audiences members chose to gather after the performance for a SpeakEasy, an informal conversation about the work whose themes are highlighted in this blog.

Devotion was a piece of contrasts. The evening opened with a formal tone as the narrator described Biblical stories. The seeming disinterestedness of this godlike voice stood out against the openness and intense exertion of the performers, as well as the informal, athletic costumes. The meticulous and stilted movements were paired with the music of Philip Glass, whose repetition combined with incremental variation implied growth and progression, pressing the work forward despite the lack of momentum allowed by the choreography. The early and closing texts presented distinct bookends for the evening, beginning with the grandeur of the Bible and ending with a sentimental personal narrative, the magnitude of the object of devotion juxtaposed with the small life and actions of the devotee.

Given the evening’s themes and the endurance required by both performances, Devotion could be compared to last year’s Heaven by local choreographer Morgan Thorson. Whereas Heaven explored the power of community, the dancers of Devotion did not strive to create a sense of seeking through and with a group. Maxwell’s early text described a sense of undifferentiation experienced in the Garden of Eden broken into the establishment of self/other upon departure. This emphasis on the soloist was present throughout the work, with dancers performing together, yet maintaining their separateness as individuals striving each on their own.

Beyond referencing itself as a work by Michelson, the piece referenced a number of Michelson’s influences – great names in modern dance from the latter decades of the 20th century. The costumes were reminiscent of Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room, while the movement vocabulary reminded audience members of Merce Cunningham‘s technique or Lucinda Childs’ Available Light. The usage of Philip Glass’ music, and the repetition of specific compositions, struck some as both appropriate for the piece as well as ironic, given the popularity of Glass among dance makers.

There will be an opportunity to experience one of Michelson’s influences, Lucinda Childs, when her remount of the 1979 piece Dance, also set to music by Philip Glass, visits the Walker the second weekend in April. Join us in the balcony bar following the performance on April 9 for the last SpeakEasy of the season!

Read more responses to Devotion by clicking here

Devotion

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Sarah Michelson’s Devotion opens with a female solo. Initially reminiscent of Merce Cunningham’s super technical vocabulary that displays one non sequitur after another, Michelson’s movement quickly contextualizes itself, setting the scene and physically describing the space. Richard Maxwell’s text is the soundscape, and I admittedly did not capture all of it as the rigor of [...]

Sarah Michelson’s Devotion opens with a female solo. Initially reminiscent of Merce Cunningham’s super technical vocabulary that displays one non sequitur after another, Michelson’s movement quickly contextualizes itself, setting the scene and physically describing the space. Richard Maxwell’s text is the soundscape, and I admittedly did not capture all of it as the rigor of the dance (and virtuosity of the dancer, Rebecca Warner) had me mesmerized.

Devotion ruminates on Christianity, its archetypal characters and scenarios, and brings it right up to the present moment. It questions, quests, re-imagines, sheds light upon and makes light of the human need for something to devote oneself to.

The first solo went on and on, and I wanted it to. Unlike the monotone yet eloquent text, the movement had dynamic surprises and unforeseen charted depths. The dancer was one moment erect on one foot, her other leg extended high then instantly contracted into a deep lunge, legs spread with knees poking out like an insect’s, fingers splayed like wings.

The movements do not literally match the words and yet there is relationship like when Michelson smartly pauses the dancer just in time for us to absorb a deadpan joke. Words and movement flow together and apart, allowing ample room for meanings to be extrapolated and invented by us.

The performing space is confined, defined by a tall structure comprised of pipe, curtain and moveable panels. Oil paintings hang from the grid that spans the length of the stage and abbreviates its depth. Clusters of lights invade the space. One such cluster, downstage center, evokes a fallen Tree of Life.

The next section took my breath away as 14-year old Non Griffiths took her turn at solo virtuosity. Both child and woman, this young dancer executed the ambitious choreography with intense precision. Her diminutive presence evoked mystery and even creepiness as she portrayed Mary. Together with James Tyson (as Jesus), they executed a queer duet of archetypal significance.

The third major section depicted Adam and Eve of course, cartoonish cheerleader gymnasts in the Garden of Eden. Their duet repeated, riffed upon itself and built into a lather of poignant meaning as they attempted time and again to achieve ridiculous partnered lifts. This fall from grace took its time. Shadows lengthened and fissures deepened upon the long diagonal that was both the on-ramp and the way out.

The initial soloist returns. She is Narrator and a little bit Mother Nature. She again performs movements to words, and this time I am able to listen and watch both. There is gentleness, a feeling of having been on a journey and returned safely home. A certain peace has been made with the events that occurred, the physical manifestations and rigors of the notion of devotion. I can practically see sand or dirt under her feet as the space is wiped clean with her sneakered feet, making room for more.

Past & Present: An Interview with Lucinda Childs

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   Choreographer Lucinda Childs’ Dance met with boos and walkouts when the Walker and Northrop copresented the piece in Minneapolis in 1981 for the New Dance USA Festival. It returns to the Walker 30 years later (April 7-9) as an acclaimed revival—a radical combining of choreography, music, and film that has over the decades attained [...]

 

Lucinda Childs's DANCE; Photo by Sally Cohn

 Choreographer Lucinda Childs’ Dance met with boos and walkouts when the Walker and Northrop copresented the piece in Minneapolis in 1981 for the New Dance USA Festival. It returns to the Walker 30 years later (April 7-9) as an acclaimed revival—a radical combining of choreography, music, and film that has over the decades attained a unique neoclassical grandeur. A landmark collaboration between Childs, composer Philip Glass (performing April 6 at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant), and visual artist Sol LeWitt—who created a larger-than-life film version of the piece as its décor—Dance “brought together three individuals who since the ’60s have been working with similar modular structures in their separate disciplines,” wrote critic Ann-Sargent Wooster after its 1979 premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.   

In this wide-ranging interview, Childs talks about working with LeWitt (whose work is currently on view in the Friedman gallery exhibition Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D), the renewed acclaim for Dance, and her work in Europe over the past ten years.   

Julie Caniglia  

How did the collaboration with Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass for Dance come about?  

Lucinda Childs                       

Working with Philip [Glass] on the opera Einstein on the Beach in 1976 was a big new experience for me. Up until that time I had been working just with dancers using kind of selective patterns that were musical in nature. But there was no musical accompaniment of any kind.  

Philip suggested we do another piece together, and since Einstein was an incredibly ambitious project, with sets and lighting by Robert Wilson, I thought we must turn to a visual artist to complete this new project. I didn’t want to just take it into a bare theater, which in and of itself is sort of a statement.  So Philip suggested we meet with Sol Lewitt; I didn’t know him.  

Sol said ‘I’m not interested in making some kind of arbitrary drop for you to dance in front of.’ And I said ‘I’m not interested in that either, I agree completely, we should think of something that makes sense for why we would all work together.’ And finally we came up with the idea of the film of the dancers—the décor becomes the dancers. That solved our problem for how to get around the visual aspect of the piece being something arbitrary in form. And Sol did a fantastic job.  

Caniglia  

Had he worked as a filmmaker before?  

Childs      

No, but he’s always been very interested in photography. At Mass MoCA [where Sol LeWitt:A Wall Drawing Retrospective is on view through 2033], there’s a video where he’s talking about having photographed absolutely everything in his house, even his toothbrush. He had such an interesting way of approaching detail, there’s nothing he doesn’t notice, and he has a wonderful eye. I’m still finding things I hadn’t noticed before in his editing of the film. It’s just beautifully done.  

Caniglia 

How did the two of you collaborate to make the film?  

Childs 

I didn’t work on the editing at all. But I had a score worked out—kind of a storyboard, showing which dancer is doing what with whom, and where in the music and how in the space, and so on. He could follow that and we worked together on what to shoot. Sol wanted to sort of edit in his mind ahead of time which parts to shoot and how, because the piece consists of sometimes just film, sometimes just dancing, and then the combination of the dancers on film with the live dancers. And shooting in 35mm was and still is very expensive. You can’t just shoot endlessly and pick out what you like. So he worked almost all of that out before we actually went into the studio.  

Caniglia   

That sounds incredibly mind-boggling to figure out. But that kind of mathematical complexity is in keeping with what we see in his visual art, too.  

Childs      

Yeah, exactly. It was great because I could say ‘I know exactly where he wants me to start and stop’ and we’d move on to the next passage. Still, it was hard with a piece that’s almost an hour; for the dancers it’s almost 40 minutes of really rigorous material.  [See the Visual Arts blog for an essay excerpt about LeWitt's role in Dance, by Ann-Sargent Wooster.] 

Lucinda Childs's DANCE; Photo by Nathaniel Tileston

 Caniglia   

How have the audience’s reactions to this work changed since its 1979 premiere?  

Childs      

We had a lot of conflicted responses. I think people had never seen this sort of thing before, or heard this kind of music, which was kind of strange because Philip by then was quite well known, in my opinion. But in the dance world it’s a little different. In Minneapolis, at the Northrop Auditorium in 1980, a lot of people just walked out. So it’s amazing to come back with this piece 30 years later.  

Caniglia   

What do you think changed over those intervening years, in terms of audiences and what they expect from dance?  

Childs      

I think they respect what we went through. Now people are talking about it like it’s a classic. I wasn’t at all the recent performances in Philadelphia but the dancers told me there were standing ovations!  

Caniglia   

In reviewing this revival, some critics have noted interesting stylistic differences between the performers seen on the film from 1979 and the contemporary dancers onstage. What have you noticed in that regard?  

Childs      

In the film we didn’t really isolate too much, there was a lot of freedom in the interpretation. Now there’s a little more, I would say, ‘uniformity’ among the dancers, and they need that , they need to know  okay, now where are my arms supposed to be? Whereas in the old days a lot of things were let free, because I don’t like to make too many positions sort of forcing the dancers into a certain presence or a certain style. I want them to use their arms in an organic way because there’s all these changes of directions, quick turns and half-turns, very very fast work . I find that in the film there’s a lot of diversity and of course therefore the dancers look different—but people understand that and it adds a dimension.  

Lucinda Childs's DANCE; Photo by Nathaniel Tileston

Caniglia   

Was this stylistic aspect related to what you were saying earlier about being your own little group?  

Childs      

We were our own little group, but we were all from different places. Now in New York everybody’s in ballet class, absolutely everybody. In those days that was not the case. People were doing tai chi, all kinds of things, gymnastics. It was a freer world, with contact improvisation and all that—it was a freer world in terms of the downtown scene anyway. Although my work is very very demanding, and I had to find people who could deal with it and do it.  

Caniglia   

Dance has been called “a seminal collaboration emerging out of one of the most vibrant and prolific periods in New York’s art world.” What made the art world at that time so vibrant, and how is it different from today?  

Childs      

Well, we just … we made that piece happen, a lot was through the generosity of the artists involved. I by some miracle got a Guggenheim Fellowship that year, which enabled me to devote my time to the work and that was so great. But everything else about the work, there was no production budget … it happened, and we wanted to do it, and as Philip said, we found a way.  

Caniglia   

Was there something about New York at that time that made it easier to work in that way?  

Childs      

There was a lot of interaction with the visual arts community and musical people. Einstein brought together so many different people, singers, dancers. Now I don’t feel very connected to the visual arts community except for the people I knew then. Also, what’s changed is the technology in theater—you tend to want to work with someone who’s inside that world, who knows about what can be done.   

Caniglia   

So a Sol LeWitt today couldn’t pick up a film camera and shoot like he did in 1979?  

Childs      

I’m not really saying that, it’s more that the technology of the theater has changed radically. With Sol, we brought in a wonderful lighting designer, Beverly Emmons, to translate his ideas. That can still be done. But now there are theater artists who want to work specifically for choreographers or for opera.  

Caniglia   

It’s about the evolution of theatrical professions, then.  

Childs      

Exactly. The whole visual aspect of contemporary opera and contemporary dance, especially in Europe, has been a phenomenal development in the last 25 years. And I would say a very small percentage of that work in Europe comes here.  

Caniglia   

You’ve been working mostly in Europe for the past 10 years, right?  

Childs      

Since my 25th anniversary season at BAM in 2000. I don’t regret at all those 25 years, it was wonderful to have my company, but I was at a point in my career and my life where I wanted to open up to all these freelance opportunities in opera, and to continue working with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, and doing solo work.  

Caniglia   

Is that a dream now, to bring more of the work you made in Europe to the U.S.?  

Childs      

Or make new work for this new group [formed for the revival of DANCE], that would be wonderful. We may have a chance because there’s another revival we might be doing in connection with Einstein, from that same period, Available Light, a collaboration with John Adams and Frank Gehry. Because I’m still working – I’ve loved doing this revival, but I like to have the chance to make new pieces. Or, as you say, bring pieces made in Europe here at some point.  

Caniglia   

How would you describe the work you’re making today, how has it evolved?  

Childs      

It’s the same process; it’s always the same because the music is always different. I study the music, improvise, then I find, little by little, how to bring the improvisation into a structure that fits the music, then that material gets set on the dancers and then I set the piece. It’s quite a long process, but I love working this way. I choose music that sort of takes me different places—mostly in the postmodern genre, but also because of opera I’ve been exposed and had more opportunities to work with more classical forms.  I’ve moved out into another realm, it doesn’t always have to be Philip Glass, John Adams, Steve Reich, or composers like them. These explorations in other genres have been satisfying … I think 20 years ago it would have been terrifying to me, but now that kind of challenge is very interesting.

Attend to Devotion

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Jesus, Mary, Adam, and Eve are all characters in Sarah Michelson/Richard Maxwell’s cult of Devotion, opening February 17 in the McGuire Theater. Richard Maxwell wrote the text  for this “narrative ballet” and then Sarah Michelson took over. Canonical figures of modern dance peek through: Twyla Tharp (with Philip Glass’ music from her In the Upper [...]

Jesus, Mary, Adam, and Eve are all characters in Sarah Michelson/Richard Maxwell’s cult of Devotion, opening February 17 in the McGuire Theater. Richard Maxwell wrote the text  for this “narrative ballet” and then Sarah Michelson took over. Canonical figures of modern dance peek through: Twyla Tharp (with Philip Glass’ music from her In the Upper Room joining the original score), Merce Cunningham; “and what gloriously severe dancing it is,” said the New York Times. The ambitious athleticism of the dancing has kept more than one reviewer in suspense; there is much at stake in this choreography, like the most difficult of figure skating jumps. Devotion‘s text, narrated in New York by Sarah Michelson, like William Blake evokes both the tone of a scripture and a pointed vulnerability.

Let’s pause here to mention that the two-week run of Devotion at the Kitchen last month was severely sold-out, with lines around the block steadily growing as buzz spread. Visual artists, curators, composers, gallery owners, critics, and downtown theater innovators were all there, mixing together as rarely happens in NYC,  to witness this coming together of two of the most iconoclastic purveyors of  contemporary dance and theater right now.

Let’s pause here also to state that while each Walker dance performance this season is unique in its own way, Sarah Michelson’s Devotion is the piece to see if you are most interested in what’s happening (and what’s happened) in the New York downtown dance scene. In other words, it’s more than fair to call this cutting-edge work (see again the art21 blog where artist Marissa Perel said that Michelson “pretty much defined what is cool. Period” ?)  not only for dance, but in theater; par exemple, Jim Fletcher, Devotion‘s Adam, is also the star of (Walker-commissioned in 2006) Gatz, which finally made it to NYC last year and which the New York Times said was “The most remarkable achievement in theater not only of this year but also of this decade (which, gee, means this century too).”

Devotion will surely be one of the most remarkable achievements in dance this year. Sarah Michelson! We missed you so.

Devotion has been favorably reviewed by:

the Village Voice

the New York Times

the Financial Times

Dance Magazine

 

Worlds in a Quartet, part 3

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Before the Kronos Quartet’s second encore, I had a very different post in mind summarizing tonight’s concert. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW43jE7Oj_0[/youtube] After they played their arrangement of Sigur Rós’ “Flugfrelsarinn,” a billowing tapestry of lyrical melodies and lush harmonies, all four musicians stepped down off the platform and stood in front of the audience, seemingly taking their final [...]

Before the Kronos Quartet’s second encore, I had a very different post in mind summarizing tonight’s concert.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW43jE7Oj_0[/youtube]

After they played their arrangement of Sigur Rós’ “Flugfrelsarinn,” a billowing tapestry of lyrical melodies and lush harmonies, all four musicians stepped down off the platform and stood in front of the audience, seemingly taking their final bow. As the applause waned, David Harrington announced that they were going to do something brand new, that we were the first audience to experience this. After a couple minutes of set up and backs now turned to the audience, the four men looked up at the screen as a score of Penderecki’s String Quartet no. 1 filled the back wall of the McGuire.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umL3v2ubVZo[/youtube]

As the Quartet dug in to the beyond-extended techniques required by the graphically-notated score, it was the first time in the evening that I felt really challenged something musically, even if the piece dates from 1960 and has become a touchstone in 20th century musical history. Much of the rest of the concert felt even more like a chamber concert. A chamber concert by the Kronos Quartet, with its mixture this evening of styles and genres from across the musical spectrum, but a chamber concert nonetheless.

The night seemed to pick up where it left off on Friday night, with a piece by Bryce Dessner entitled Aheym (Homeward), which continued Friday night’s exploration of place and geography, but with a much greater emotional import. Dessner is better known for his work in The National, and this was one instance in the evening’s program where the worlds of art music and popular music met in such a way that you didn’t care about musical origins or genres. The other was Missy Mazzoli’s Harp and Altar, its digitally chattering vocal samples both sharpened and melted by her gorgeous melodies and harmonies.

The same can’t be said for two of the other pieces on the evening’s program. Damon Albarn’s Untitled was the most adventurous the group got in the first half, opened similar to Schoenberg’s slow-moving Farben, yet soon became a highly disjunct and sporadic series of techniques. Bloodstone, which in Harrington’s words is a remix of Amon Tobin’s remix of a Kronos rehearsal, was similarly disappointing, not so much for the string parts, but for the clichéd beat that came in part way through, heightening the separation between the two elements, rather than dissolving it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2jd_UElBns[/youtube]

The other works of the evening fared better, especially Michael Gordon’s Clouded Yellow, with its lilting violin opening that returned throughout the piece and its highly ambiguous ending, and Laurie Anderson’s Flow. For this piece, each member muted its strings, giving the sound a far-off quality, as if shrouded by an invisible mist. My only criticism was that the piece wasn’t long enough.

The ups and downs of the concert, however, were all forgotten with their performance of the Penderecki. While some audience members giggled as a red line moved through the score to keep the players together, each musician did just about everything you could to the strings of his instrument. I left Friday’s concert desiring more musical adventure by the Quartet tonight, and though I had to wait until the very end, they didn’t disappoint.

Worlds in a Quartet, Part 2

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To think of music without borders is a humanistic ideal, a space where all sorts of sounds can live together, and where the problems that exist within, between, and across the borders of their country of origin no longer persist. During Thursday night’s conversation, Kronos violinist and founder David Harrington said the first of Kronos’ [...]

To think of music without borders is a humanistic ideal, a space where all sorts of sounds can live together, and where the problems that exist within, between, and across the borders of their country of origin no longer persist. During Thursday night’s conversation, Kronos violinist and founder David Harrington said the first of Kronos’ two concerts at the Walker was meant to “add up to a way of thinking about the future.”

While it feels too simplistic to view tonight’s concert as a utopian musical vision, it’s equally simplistic to say that these pieces performed were simply “from” the countries of the composers’ origin. Most of the pieces did deal with a specific geographic place, whether it be Iraq, Iran, India, or Canada, evoking it not only through the strings of Kronos’ instruments, but through field recordings and samples, sonic fragments of the actual world. Some felt like radio scene-setting, like the barking dogs that opened Chrake’s Cercle du Nord III, whereas other moments, such as the young girl’s wisping voice in the opening movement of Aminikia’s String Quartet No. 3: A Threnody for Those Who Remain, were processed, distorted, and transformed until they interacted and blended in counterpoint with the strings themselves.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl_Mj62yw10[/youtube]

This borderless world reached its greatest expression in the evening’s finale, …hold me, neighbor, in this storm…, written by Aleksandra Vrebalov. Inspired by a documentary about Chicago’s Serbian community, and their preservation of folk songs and traditions to a greater degree even than Serbia itself, the piece was an incredible mélange of rollicking folk dances, drums, shouts, stamps, and ghostly, disembodied voices singing and shouting Serbian songs. What the piece became was less a portrait of a place, as in Cercle du Nord III, than a portrait of someone’s memory of a place, where borders and boundaries are much more porous.

Much like the composers did with their individual pieces, the Kronos Quartet created their own world tonight. The overall program, though, was not that adventurous, when compared to a piece like Crumb’s Black Angels, which Harrington’s extolled Thursday night. Even compared to something explicitly symbolizing borders, Music for 4 Fences, tonight’s music came off as striking, yet safe. Thankfully, neither the music nor its presentation had the pretension of other hybrid and utopian musical visions (such as Jon Hassell’s so-called “fourth world” music).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DToHsLPbqEU[/youtube]

There’s little need for pretension when an ensemble possesses the simply stunning capacity and imagination to produce unheard (and unheard of) sounds from instruments and ensembles that have become such a conventional part of the musical landscape. Hank Dutt’s solo in the alap from Ram Narayan’s Raga Mishra Bhairavi was astounding; I’ve never heard a viola sound anything remotely like this before. Less technically dazzling but equally beautiful was his solo in The Wheel, part of Terry Riley’s Salome Dances for Peace.

Let’s see what worlds Kronos has in store for us tomorrow night, when a whole new set of seemingly strange bedfellows share the McGuire stage.

Worlds in a Quartet

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The Kronos Quartet has long occupied space on my record shelves. The first piece I heard performed by them, Steve Reich’s Different Trains on the group’s Released compilation, introduced me to the world of new music. It wasn’t traditional avant-garde, though I’d later find out they could pull that off, too, and it wasn’t traditional [...]

The Kronos Quartet has long occupied space on my record shelves. The first piece I heard performed by them, Steve Reich’s Different Trains on the group’s Released compilation, introduced me to the world of new music. It wasn’t traditional avant-garde, though I’d later find out they could pull that off, too, and it wasn’t traditional classical music either. It was in the wonderful grey area along this continuum, a space that the Kronos Quartet have made a career exploring, premiering an incredible 703 works over nearly 40 years.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEzP6u5uCwU[/youtube]

Tonight’s conversation between Kronos’ founder, David Harrington, J.G. Everest, and a surprisingly small audience meandered through biography, music, collaboration, and demonstration. Through it all, it’s clear that Harrington is simply a fan of music, playing it, learning about it, stretching what constitutes it, and, above all else, sharing it with audiences, from the initial life-changing shock of Beethoven’s Op. 127 string quartet to the birth of Kronos after Harrington heard Crumb’s Black Angels to the absolutely astonishing Music for 4 Fences. This more recent piece consists of the musicians’ bowing and plucking barbed wire fences, and whose stunning imagery in performance is matched only by the cascade of sounds Kronos can free from these pieces of metal designed to either keep things in or out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7dQRaEIhic[/youtube]

The night ended with a 7-minute documentary of Kronos’ collaboration with Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. Harrington spoke eloquently about Kronos’ intimate collaborations with composers like Terry Riley, Clint Mansell, Ken Benshoof (Harrington’s own composition teacher), and many more, and it was wonderful to see this in action, as the 5 musicians worked their way through a piece structured around colors rather than chords.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YTtUolJa9E[/youtube]

There was a brief hint of the controversy that Kronos’ explorations in “global music” or “world music” have often brought, as Harrington seemed to re-hash the tired stereotype of non-Euro-American musicians and artists being more “instinctive” and “connected to the earth.” (Given that tomorrow’s program is called “Music Without Borders” and features pieces from 8 different countries, I’m sure it’ll give me plenty to think about along these lines.) Harrington’s enthusiasm for music and musical humanity in all its forms, however, makes it hard to judge him in too harsh a light.

I’ll write more about tonight’s conversation as I discuss this weekend’s performances, which I’m incredibly excited to see and hear.