words and music - November 19
“We must imagine Sisyphus happy” wrote Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, a 1942 philosophical essay inspiring countless philosophers and artists with the idea of the absurd: the inexplicable human desire to attribute meaning to everything juxtaposed with the “unreasonable silence” given to us by what we call the Universe. In the essay, Camus writes of Sisyphus who was destined to meaninglessly roll a boulder up a mountain which whence it reached the top would roll back down again only for him to have to push it up over again for eternity. One such artist inspired by these absurdist philosophies was Samuel Beckett, an Irish novelist, playwright, director, and poet. Beckett wrote the short radio play Words and Music in 1962, which casts the characters of Words (aka Joe) and Music (aka Bob) in a dialogue about meaning and the difficulty of expressing such meaning through the only means they know how (either via words or music). Beckett had always felt that music did a much better job at expressing meaning than words, and for this concert InfraSound explores the way that words and music can interact.
Brittany J. Green’s work R_upTure which takes text from a Python program designed by the composer, and weaves musical material generated by that same program to disrupt and dismantle the system from which the material is built. The text, which at a first reading seems meaningless, generates its own meaning from the combination of these words with Green’s music and the implications of the two interacting. Yoshi Weinberg, in their piece Burial of the Dead, takes an excerpt from modernist poet T. S. Eliot’s seminal 1922 work The Waste Land and sets it with the colors of a chamber ensemble with mezzo-soprano soloist. The work centers around the deterioration of society with a pastiche of quotation and allusion from sources that span centuries from the Bhagavad Gita to William Shakespeare. InfraSound concludes the evening with a full performance of Beckett’s play Words and Music with accompanying score by Morton Feldman.
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