Samuel Vriezen – Ten Readers (2008)

Описание: Samuel Vriezen’s “Ten Readers” (2008), performed by Stephanie Lavon Trotter, Catherine Lee, Juniana Lanning, Gilly Hanner, Tom DeBeauchamp, James Yeary, Evan Cordes, Linda Austin, Ben Cohen-Chen, and Matt Hannafin (reading voices) at the Extradition Fall Concert 2025, held at Leaven Community in Portland, Oregon, USA, on Saturday, October 18, 2025.

The composer’s program notes for this piece read, “’Ten Readers’ is part of a series of pieces in which I use spoken text. In many of those pieces I do not actually prescribe the text, but I specify how performers put together texts that each of them bring to the occasion. What you get is something like a chance encounter of texts, and out of it might emerge a super-text or a diagonal text, which is no longer part of a single text stream but evokes a community of texts. In this piece in particular I thought of the typical coffee house environment, where people might sit together sipping coffee and reading their book or newspaper or magazine. Everybody is in a private world but at the same time, these very private worlds form something like a social scene. In such situations we seem to be on the very border of being private and being public, and that is precisely one of the most fundamental borders to our modern culture. We're private individuals or public citizens, and the drive in how we organize our culture is towards making those two spheres as separate as possible. And that divide can actually be quite problematic. Practically, what I was interested in were two things. First, the idea that you could ‘puncture’ those private worlds, and so play with this fundamental divide. Second, there was the idea that we could produce a text that has no conscious author whatsoever. This is an ideal that can't ever be quite reached, I think.”

Extradition is an ensemble and concert series dedicated to exploring the history and depth of the American experimental tradition and the global disciplines of open composition, guided improvisation, and other forms it helped inspire. Based in Portland, Oregon, USA, we collaborate closely with both known and emerging composers worldwide, producing quarterly concerts and intimate recital events that unite composition and improvisation, deliberation and chance, clarity and silence.

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