In Wednesday’s (1/27) Globe and Mail (Canada), J.D. Considine writes about Anthony Braxton’s eight-hour-long Sonic Genome Project, to be performed Sunday (1/31) as part of Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad. An orchestra of 60 musicians, many from the Vancouver area, will perform the piece starting at noon at the Roundhouse Exhibition Hall, with groups “subdivided into performance cells”; there will be no conductor. “‘We’re looking for a surprise,” Braxton says. ‘We’re looking for an experience that can allow for single, group and transitory experiences to take place in a way that is equal to the new possibilities that we find ourselves dealing with.’” Braxton, winner of a 1994 MacArthur “genius grant” and composer of Opus 82 for four orchestras, says in the article, “I have tried to build a model that is not mono-hierarchical, where one guy is in charge and everyone is functioning based on that model…. It’s a philosophical system that doesn’t tell you what to think. Rather, it gives you a set of tools, and you can think through that set of tools, using each tool as a transparency, a vibrational transparency.”
Posted January 29, 2010
