This weekend Tori Lupinek, Annie Lyle Mason, Connor Thummel, Dakota Wayne, and I got to play a show at the opening night of Slate Arts + Performance‘s PROTEST exhibition that included two Chicago premieres of my pieces (I Was On the Side of the Highway and Ruckus from the Quiet Zone).
Performing at Slate was everything we dream about as musicians: a warm, encouraging environment from Slate’s curators and a big, vibrant audience of people of all ages. (Apparently there was a girl in a dinosaur costume looking in the window at Annie during her solo performance of I Was On the Side of the Highway! Perfect first New Music experience!)
It also was an intriguing space with engaging, diverse works by artists including Soheila Azadi + Liz Cambron, Olga Guse, Gary Lehman, Chris Wanklyn (who I got to meet and was great!), Charity White, Chris Willie, and Jade Williams.
Annie and I found some great spots to do the different spatialized sections of Highway. The first part of it is always meant to be removed, distant and marginalized, which was in perfect contrast to Connor bringing the unfiltered thunder in Persichetti’s Parable no. 18.
Ruckus from the Quiet Zone centers around Chris Vaisvil’s canon, a homemade string instrument that we made available for the audience to try out afterwards. Tori, Dakota, and I joined Connor and Annie in contemplating the glacial ballet of the Green Bank Telescope and living in the National Radio Quiet Zone. See a bit of it in the video excerpt above!
So many thanks to Jenny and Ben for making it so easy to have a wonderful time at Slate!
Ralph Lewis: Composer 