Sounding Serra // Gagosian Gallery (W. 21st St)

Sounding Serra
Music in Conversation with Reverse Curve

Saturday, December 14, 2019, 8pm
Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York
Event Page

To attend the free event, RSVP to nyperformancegagosian [dot] com. Space is limited.

Join Gagosian for a concert featuring new music inspired by Richard Serra’s Reverse Curve (2005/19) and other works that engage with questions of weight, timbre, volume, and form. Some of the compositions will test the acoustical properties of the sculpture within the room, while others will produce sound masses in the shadow of the sculpture, creating dialogues between sound and space. The range of musical strategies will illustrate a historical path from the 1970s through the present day. Musicians Lea Bertucci, Miguel Frasconi, Joan La Barbara, Chris McIntyre, Chris Nappi, and Danny Tunick are all major players in the world of experimental music and collaborate in addition to their solo projects. As well as their own compositions they will perform a 1973 piece by Michael Byron.

McIntyre program note:
Reverses (2019) is a musical response to the Serra piece installed at Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery and the acoustic characteristics of the large, resonant space in which they coexist. Employing the diffusion created by brass and percussion in an extremely reverberant room, Reverses attempts to establish an analogous sonic experience to that of the torqued Cor-Ten steel sculpture and its bisection of the space. It does this by locating a duo of trombone and percussion (playing snare drum) on opposing sides of the sculpture where they exchange material back and forth in an accretional and elided formal system, a sort of simplified prolation canon that acknowledges the lingering resonances of each iterated sound. Many thanks to percussionist and event curator Danny Tunick for his efforts.