New Canons: Virtual

Raquel Acevedo Klein -- Polyphonic Interlace (2021)

Chris Kallmyer -- All Possible Music (2019)

Ray Lustig -- Latency Canons (2013)

Trevor New -- Cohere 1 (2021)

Soloists:
Diego Tejedor, Violin | Argentina
Bernd Keul, Bass | Germany
Gaurab Chatterjee, Hand percussion | India
Jocelyn Clark, Gayageum | South Korea
Patti Kilroy, Violin | Los Angeles
Trevor New, Viola | New York City
Haruna Walusimbi, Kalimba | Uganda

Pauline Oliveros -- Environmental Dialogue (1974)

About the pieces:
Ray Lustig's Latency Canons, commissioned by ACO in 2013 and developed over a series of workshop performances before being premiered at Carnegie Hall that year, calls for multiple string quartets and ACO to perform together while spread across the world. The New York Times described the piece as, “a surreally beautiful, contrapuntal soundscape.” Lustig says, “In the spirit of using the problem as its own solution, Latency Canons incorporates technology’s limitations as the central idea. Musicians in different places play simple lines together using ordinary video-conferencing software, and the random blips freezes, and delays themselves create a counterpoint of beautiful, unexpected relationships, like echoes in a digital cathedral that wraps around the world. Latency Canons poses the question of how we make music together in our world, how that may be changing, and what this will mean for the musical experience. Our technology is drawing us closer and closer together in so many ways, and the attitude of this work is one of communion over distances.”

Trevor New uses technology to manipulate latency for remote musicians in Cohere 1. New says, “I want the audience to experience the ways we are connected by creating a digital space for us to see, hear, and feel interactions with others, whether they are next door or around the world. To achieve this experience, I am using Clean Feed to achieve low-latency performances. With it, I capture sound being played from different locations around the world and remove the latency effect by matching up the sounds into a single downbeat.” 

Pauline Oliveros' Environmental Dialogue invites the audience to hear and respond to sounds within their own space as well as the communal space shared by participants near and far. Oliveros published Environmental Dialogue in her Sonic Meditations collection in 1974. To perform the work, participants gather at a specified location. Then, Oliveros writes, “as each person becomes aware of the field of sounds from the environment, each person individually and gradually begins to reinforce the pitch of any one of the sound sources that has attracted their attention.…The result of this meditation will probably produce a resonance of the environment.”

A surround-sound music experience, Raquel Acevedo Klein’s Polyphonic Interlace invites participants to travel amidst a sea of voices emerging from several directions. All are welcome to play the piece’s musical tracks from their smartphones or speaker devices following a countdown at the start of the event. Music made entirely of Klein’s voice emanates from the house speakers and participants’ devices, transforming into a sonic tapestry of stories from across New York City at the cusp of the reopening. The tracks can be accessed at polyphonicinterlace.com.

Chris Kallmyer’s All Possible Music is a collection of speculative scores that describe all of the music that could ever happen. The piece explores the contextual nature of music, encompassing both real and imagined sounds to describe a world that is mundane, spectacular, sometimes humorous, and always alive: a blissful symphony for an audience of careful listeners; dance floor hits in a cabin set deep in the woods; visionary drum machines that heal the earth and its people.