You think you know me, that's your trouble

Please be advised that I will be making my legitimate music debut this Sunday, April 27 at 2 PM at the Brooklyn Museum, in the latest installment of the Music Off The Walls series (sponsored by the Brooklyn Philharmonic). I was commissioned to write a new work inspired by the artwork of Takashi Murakami, whose buzzworthy, controversial retrospective opened at the Brooklyn Museum on April 5. The piece will also be reprised that same night (8 PM) at Drom, a newish venue on the Lower East Side.

My piece, "Body Double," is for string quartet and tapan. The tapan is a Bulgarian drum that kind of sounds like a cross between a bass drum and a dumbek, except that the left-hand beater is a lightweight switch that can be held against the left drum head to create a rattling, snarelike sound when you hit the other head with the other beater. The tapan will be played by Svetoslav Stoyanov. The strings are Jennifer Choi & Suzy Perelman (violin), Sasha Rees (viola), and Joey Amini (cello). The ensemble has been rehearsing at Suzy's apartment this week and they are sounding very good.

"Body Double" begins and ends with a sonic representation of Murakami's Milk, seen above. [I have also written a piece (for Pulse) based on photographer Jeff Wall's Milk. And yet, I drink my coffee black -- black as midnight on a moonless night. Perhaps I am sonically overcompensating.] At any rate, the "canvas-as-score" is heard left-to-right at the beginning, and right-to-left (manga-style) at the end. In between are a series of representations of Murakami's ubiquitous DOB character, whose portrayals veer wildly between the cute and the grotesque. DOB's head is made out of the letters D-O-B, so it seemed appropriate to use those notes to construct the musical material. (I substituted "C" for "O", it being the closest in shape, and also conveniently located between D and B.) Writing the piece, I had fun tweaking the expectations game for both "high art" and "pop art" and I hope that comes across in the music.

I am grateful to composer Jeffery Cotton, whose Meditation, Rhapsody and Bacchanal contains a movement for violin and tapan (the "Bacchanal," natch -- which you can listen to here.) Jeffery was kind enough to send me the score, which also features a preamble which contains a wealth of useful information on the tapan.

Other works on the concert include Randy Woolf's Try To Believe for violin and electronic track, Julia Wolfe's East Broadway for toy piano [yeah, that's right, Woolf & Wolfe -- and here you thought only indie rock bands had a canis lupus fixation], Frederick Rzewksi's charming proto-minimalist game-piece Les Moutons de Panurge, and string quartet arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu's and Koji Kondo's video game music.

The concerts have been getting some nice advance blurbs in The New Yorker and Time Out New York. It is flattering to be referred to as "significant" and a "master," but with my birthday coming up hard and fast, it is even more flattering to be referred to as "young."

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Traversing the Mushroom Kingdom -- Sunday, 27 April -- 2 PM at the Brooklyn Museum, 8 PM at Drom.

Comments

[Chip Clark]

Best of your your premiere.

I am premiering both a quartet and a symphony in Edinburgh on June 4th (which is fast approaching). Exciting times!!!