Sospeso's two-part program at the Whitney forms an evocative musical commentary on the Mies van der Rohe and Wayne Thiebaud exhibitions.
Next to the Mies in America exhibition, Architectural
Music reflects upon parallels between two media. And to accompany the works of artist Wayne Thiebaud, Sospeso offers a glimpse of the diversity of musical life in
California. This program offers five New York premieres of compositions by important composers of our time.
From its beginning at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in twelfth-century Paris,
Western classical music has been intimately linked with architecture,
and the digital revolution will bring these two media closer
together. The musician and architect
Iannis Xenakis died in 2000 and will be the focus of a
tribute retrospective by the Ensemble
Sospeso in fall 2001 at the Miller Theatre. For Xenakis,
the formal bases of music and architecture are directly translatable:
both music and architecture are generated by the same formal
design. His celebrated Philips Pavillion (Brussels Exposition,1958)
was entirely created from the same hyperbolic paraboloid that,
translated into music, formed his groundbreaking orchestral
work Metastasis. Even those pieces most directly concerned
with problems of sound, such as Zyia, are permeated
by his preoccupation with musical space. Works by
Pascal Dusapin,
Joshua Cody, and
Wolfgang Rihm are also concerned with the projection of
clearly etched plastic forms into time, investigating the
degree to which musical content can—and cannot—be transposed.
California has been home to a wide range of visual artists—from Diebenkorn to Thiebaud to
Hockney—and important composers, from Cage to Stravinsky to Zappa. The
four composers featured here, Adams,
Cage, Lebaron, and
Mosco, draw upon entirely distinct cultural traditions, but they all share a certain irreverent critique of modernism.
Adams, who lives in Berkeley, one of America's most admired and frequently performed composers, creates an homage to two familiar characteristics of his home state:
the landscape and the movies. The final period in Cage's career, the Number Period (1987-1992), is the composer's most abstract; titles of works represent simply the number of players in various ensemble configurations.
