Reverses

Reverses (2019) is a musical response to Richard Serra’s massive sculpture Reverse Curve (2005/2019) which was installed at Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street gallery where the piece was performed. Reverses acknowledges and utilizes the acoustic characteristics of the large, resonant gallery space in which the music and sculpture coexisted. Employing the diffusion created by brass and percussion in an extremely reverberant room, the piece attempted to establish an analogous sonic experience to the steel sculpture and its bisection of the space. It did 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.