Between here and not here, a collaboration between me and the brilliant visual artist Jim Toia, will be premiered on Saturday May 14 at 8pm at The DiMenna Center, Cary Hall (450 W37th Street). Scored for alto flute, viola, piano, electronic sound, and video, this work was commissioned by The New York Viola Society with funding provided by The American Music Center’s Commissioning Music USA grant (formerly Meet the Composer). Between here and not here explores the inevitable experience of loss: the passage between the states of presence and absence, above and below, life and death. Over the course of the piece, the music’s expressive nature is gradually erased into silence—a reminder of those larger processes that gradually dissolve the self. Jim Toia’s video consists of images of water, visual meditations on its different stages of calm and agitation. The images gradually become more abstract; they are projected onto ephemeral materials which fade away as video and music dissolve. The two media inform and transform each other: sound disappearing into silence, form into abstraction, longing into emptiness.
Between here and not here will be performed by these fantastic musicians from Ensemble Meme: Barry Crawford, flute; Liuh-Wen Ting, viola; and Molly Morkoski, piano.