“In 2014, Brooklyn-based cellist Ethan Philbrick began work on the project that would become Choral Marx, which sets The Communist Manifesto to music,” writes J.W. McCormack in Tuesday’s (11/27) The Nation. The project “began with a simple desire to read Marx’s pre-Capital works out loud in a reading group…. Choral Marx … was recently performed at NYU’s Skirball Center…. Led by Philbrick’s cello, the band played all the hits: ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies/ Is the history of class struggle,’ ‘The bourgeoisie has reduced personal worth to exchange value,’ … and so on. In addition to the fancy central chorus … a volunteer chorus planted among the audience would occasionally add their echo…. Performers [included] Zapatist activist Gizelxanath Rodriguez [and] avant-gardist Amirtha Kidambi, known for her collaborations with Robert Ashley …. There’s also the obvious fact, which Philbrick was quick to acknowledge, that … NYU [is] one of the biggest developers in the city…. Philbrick … hopes the audience leaves asking the questions that the Manifesto continues to ask…. It’s also … a mnemonic device for committing sections of it to memory… ‘We’re not singing the communist society to come,’ Philbrick explains. ‘We’re singing our way through the contradictions of capital.’ ”
Posted November 30, 2018
