Marina Rosenfeld: GREATEST HITS
For our final event of the 2017-18 season, Qubit has been planning something extra-ordinary. Set amidst the incredible backdrop of Project-Q, Marina Rosenfeld will take over the 6000-square foot raw space, with an all-star lineup including cellist Okkyung Lee and percussionists Greg Fox and Eli Keszler.
Rosenfeld has been a pioneer of a relational kind of music composition that addresses the resonances— social, situational and acoustic— of sites in works of music and sound installation. She’s been especially associated with composing sound for vast spaces since occupying the Park Avenue Armory a decade ago with the seminal performances Teenage Lontano, for 40 voice choir, and her sound-system P.A., in 2008 and 2009, respectively. In recent years, in both concert and exhibition settings, she’s also turned her attention to solo and chamber instrumentation, producing a series of experimental, recursive scores that locate new works within the data sets associated with their formation.
For Qubit, Rosenfeld presents Guide de la vie associative (2013), a solo work written by Rosenfeld especially for superstar improviser and longtime collaborator Okkyung Lee. Influenced by the social-services bureau in Brussels where they premiered it in 2013, Guide expresses each entry in a pamphlet the composer found on-site as a set of numeric and spatial relations, offering Lee an intricate framework within which to explore her wild palette of de-tuned sounds and extended techniques.
The evening will also feature GREATEST HITS (2016), in a staging for two drummers. Originally conceived as a duo between Rosenfeld and Fox for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the work draws on Rosenfeld's prolific history producing acetate test-pressing records, or dub plates, since the late 1990s. With drummers Greg Fox and Eli Keszler as co-interpreters in this performance, the work reanimates Rosenfeld’s 20-year archive of delicately degraded and destroyed LP recordings. The resulting music mediates between reproduction and live event, generating waves of color and noise from a re-reading of an exhibition playlist.