Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/01/2015
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Location
Center for New Music
Category(ies)
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$15.00 / $10.00 CNM members
In 2013, Amy X Neuburg performed at an electronic music festival in Cologne, Germany, after which she was invited by Hermann-Cristoph Müller, the Musik Kulturamt of Cologne, to create a new version of Jerry Hunt’s Song Drapes. Mr. Müller, along with Jerry’s longtime friend and archivist Rod Stasick, had been looking to recreate these songs and chose Amy specifically for the task. Amy returned to Cologne in March 2015 for the world premiere of her version of Song Drapes. This May 1 concert at Center for New Music will be the U.S. premiere.
Composer Jerry Hunt, a Texas-based innovator known for his frantic and strikingly obtuse occult-inspired works, created the Song Drapes as backgrounds for the performance texts of artist Karen Finley in 1992. He then released his accompaniments as precomposed sound beds for unspecified texts, to be delivered vocally in any manner desired by the performer.
Amy remembers Jerry’s bafflingly intense performance at Mills College when she was a grad student there. Sadly, Jerry ended his own life in 1993 rather than succumb to incurable cancer, but not before making, in all earnestness as a helpful guide, an instructional video entitled “How to kill yourself using the inhalation of carbon monoxide gas.”
There were 24 Song Drapes all together, of varying lengths from 40 seconds to nine minutes. Amy has chosen 16 of these Drapes as backdrops to a new song cycle inspired by the aging of her parents, the many deaths and near-deaths of recent months, and Jerry’s own tragic story – all delivered in Amy’s wide-ranging tragicomic style. It’s not depressing! It’s actually kinda funny/intense/Dada-esque, replete with jumpy choreography, triple slide-whistle, and much theatricism in homage to Jerry, picking up on some of the themes you’ll find in his films.
Preceding the concert will be excerpts of these films, including Jerry’s “(Talk Slice)” – a riveting improvised rant made after Jerry’s diagnosis, “Transform (stream): core” – a weirdly semi-sexual doctor/patient electronic ritual, and “Bitom (fixture): topogram” – a study in seemingly meaningful facial expressions. Amy will also present a quick biography of Jerry’s life and work.