|
The Columbus Ohio Discovery Ensemble presented the world premiere of All that we see or seem… composed by Michael Rene Torres, at the Urban Arts Space on Thursday, July 26th, 2018 in Columbus, Ohio. All that we see or seem… for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, toy piano, and percussion is an installation piece that explores how we interact with music in the 21st century with the six musicians separated spatially throughout a gallery space. The work is a 15 minute piece of
|
The piece is inspired by the idea that music in the 21st century is identified as a tangible product and not as a sonic experience. We tend to lazily view the paper with notation, the digital audio file, and the CD as the music itself. Music is consumed less and less often in a live setting. We have culturally abandoned the premise that music exists only in the mind (or in time and space) and thus seem to value the purchasable, physical product as being worth more than the aesthetic experience.
|
The instrumentation of the piece is the traditional new music ensemble of the 20th and 21st century, the (modified) Pierrot ensemble (fl, cl, vln, vc, pf, & perc), yet, deconstructed as the performers are stationed not as a group, but as individuals who interact only as echoes to each other. This also forces the audience out of the unmovable theater-seat and treats the musicians almost like a museum painting (for better or for worse). The performers will be wearing masks to dehumanize the musicians in the experience, bringing attention to the product of music and intentionally taking focus away from the relationship between
|
performer and audience; almost like how a stage separates audience from performer with an invisible wall and makes the musicians unapproachable (physically and metaphorically). The music performed is a collection of miniatures (music that is either 60 seconds in length or less than 100 notes) in an effort to make parallels to our collective difficulty (perhaps by conditioning) in concentrating beyond the standard (and repetitive by design) pop-song length radio selection. The musical score of each movement of
|