September 8, 2015

This past Sunday we, members of the Southland Ensemble, spent all day rehearsing for a concert coming up this Friday night in Eagle Rock. While some of the scores are very specific in terms of instrumentation and meter etc., others are very open and we had a great time coming up with interpretations of these scores. One in particular asked for the use of closures and fasteners (zippers, snaps, buttons and the like). I was able to use this pillow that my aunt made for my daughter when she was about 2 years-old and obsessed with zippers and pulls. In another piece, red on black, we decided to turn the score into a game of BINGO where the number and letter combinations are called out through a megaphone. The performers use old cassette players and small radios to play with with noise and tape distortion in order to interpret the graphic score. I always like to work on scores like these as we walk the line between improvisation and score interpretation.

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