I just caught a fascinating performance on KALW, a live interpretation of an essay written by an inmate comparing and contrasting two photographs of movie screens with eerie music in the background… was hoping I’d be able to Google up the photographs described and was thrilled to find a video of the entire performance:
I was quite moved by the live music / commentary + film performed during Brent Green and Sam Green: Live Cinema at the Exploratorium a month ago
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFYHMKjEY9l/?taken-by=aelizabethu
and so if I weren’t going to be out of town that weekend, I would definitely be checking out Paul Dresher Ensemble’s They Will Have Been So Beautiful: The Electro-Acoustic Band In Concert with Guest Artist Amy X Neuburg at Z Space:
The Electro-Acoustic Band presents the San Francisco premiere of “They Will Have Been So Beautiful,” a song cycle featuring commissioned works by Lisa Bielawa, Jay Cloidt, Conrad Cummings, Fred Frith, Guillermo Galindo, Carla Kihlstedt, Ken Ueno, and Pamela Z, plus a piece each by Paul Dresher and Amy X Neuburg.
The composers were invited to create songs inspired by Diane Arbus’s Guggenheim grant application, American Rites, Manners and Customs. Arbus proposed to photograph everyday people, places, and routines, which to generations of the future “will have been so beautiful.” Each composer found or created a photograph or series of images, ranging from intimate self portraits to stark landscapes, that spoke to him or her in this regard, and used the images as inspiration for the music.
Here’s hoping there will be some good recordings of that after the fact!
Elizabeth Ü 