Fields of Sound

Selections from Musique d’ombre. Performed at Intersection for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, August 17, 2008.

Musique d’ombre is a collaborative work developed with my NYSAE colleague Edmund Mooney. Inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s notions of acousmatic music—music where the source of the sound is not seen—and partially playing on the idea of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” we gathered pre-recorded sounds and objects to sound live, behind a scrim, in shadow. A score was made based on our individual collections of sounds and proposed actions with objects and then arranged so as to form a series of duets and solos. Our colleague Matthew Stang provided the lighting and gobos.

Some photos of the San Francisco performance:

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The work was first performed for Great Small Works “Spaghetti Dinner” event in April 2007 at Judson Church in New York City. Stephen Kaplin performed the lightwork. In this performance we had access to a grand piano and I manipulated its insides with various objects. Below is video documentation of the first performance.