“It was a familiar, comforting sight: the flutist Claire Chase, standing atop a scaffold and softly lit, a warmly glowing star in the expansive darkness of the Kitchen’s performance space,” writes Joshua Barone in Monday’s (12/13) New York Times. “Since 2013, a scene like this has greeted every audience to witness an installment of ‘Density 2036,’ Chase’s multidecade initiative to commission a new program of flute music each year, leading up to the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s … 1936 solo ‘Density 21.5,’ a work that, she once wrote, ‘unfurled genre-dissolving possibilities for the instrument.’… The climax will be a 24-hour marathon concert, but until then, ‘Density’ is unfolding incrementally, with Chase as the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe. This latest performance—dedicated to the composer Alvin Lucier, whose ‘Almost New York’ was featured in Part I, and who died recently at 90—opened with [Liza] Lim’s ‘Sex Magic,’ in the form of the excerpt ‘Throat Song,’ for ocarina and voice, blending and blurring the two in gentle polyphony.” The program also included Wang Lu’s Aftertouch, Ann Cleare’s anfa, and Matana Roberts’s Auricular Hearsay; several of the works involved video and electronics, with Chase playing multiple instruments.
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