I Am....

Works exploring identity 

Ricks moved to Amsterdam this fall to work closely with McGowan in the development of his new piece Lecture no. 4: The Composer Confronts Identity, which takes as its point of departure typical university course lectures and Ted talks.

In a format Ricks has explored in three previous performative lectures, this work uses speech, video projection, electronic sound, and written and improvised music for contrabass flute to create a surrealistic, interactive environment that explores the questions and ideas about cultural and other types of identity that Ricks and McGowan have been discussing over the past several weeks.

Laurent Durupt’s new, ambitious piano cycle FRANKENSTEINWAY vol. 1 features four movements which he composed for solo piano to frame works by three other composers: Bernhard Lang, Daniel Moreira, and Isaac Schankler.

Several of the works deconstruct or recompose Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ in different ways, and two of Durupt’s movements reveal his statistical approach of taking all the notes from a particular piece of music and simply re-ordering them to come up with a new piece.

In his own words, he feels these pieces “reflect the world of today, where algorithms play a central role, and where the reality of what we know can be transformed into something new.” Durupt will also perform Ricks’s piece from 2011 Medusa in Fragments, an intense monodrama for amplified piano, electronic sound, and video, in which a video version of Medusa reflects on and obsesses over her existence and the characters who wronged her.