Gray Sound: Peter Ablinger Residency

Описание: The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry kicked off the inaugural week of Gray Sound, a new performance series focusing on experimental music and sound, with Peter Ablinger’s first visit to Chicago. For decades, Ablinger’s work has been forcing open fault lines in the topography of the audible. His vast output of scores, electronic pieces, installations, and conceptual works consistently finds ways—funny, pointed, disturbing—to put the ear’s organization of reality in doubt. Is that a voice, and what is a voice? When is something newly or no longer music? Noise? Information? In Ablinger’s cunning scramble of sonic categories, listening loses its lay of the land. Concepts come unmoored from sounds, and the land changes shape.

In partnership with Goethe-Institut Chicago, Gray Sound hosted a nine-day residency from January 19 — 27, 2020. The residency threaded a series of talks, composition seminars, and experimental discussions in between multiple performance events featuring world premieres and internationally renowned ensembles, rendering Ablinger’s work alone and alongside other artists who enjoy his influence. Running throughout the week at the Gray Center Lab was the world premiere of MUSIC’S OVER, one of the most ambitious of Ablinger’s Quadraturen (“Squarings”) series: a computer-controlled piano performs a clangorous, spectrally derived “phonorealist” transcription of a raucous live Doors performance from 1970.

The residency included performances by Fonema Consort, Wet Ink Ensemble, and a•pe•ri•od•ic, featuring two world premieres by Ablinger as well as works by Chiyoko Szlavnics, Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Sam Pluta, and others.