DATES

July 18, 10:30am - Saranac Lake Free Library

July 19, 7:30pm - Cedar Street Studios, Saranac Lake (formerly Bluseed Studios)

PROGRAM

Cathedral of Light by Juhi Bansal

Piranesi

Music by Elizabeth Brown

Video by Lothar Osterburg

Brief Pause For Stage Reset

A Bookmobile for Dreamers

Music by Elizabeth Brown

Video by Lothar Osterburg

MUSICIANS

Elizabeth Brown, theremin

Asher Wulfman and Sonya Stith Williams, violins

Catherine Beeson, viola

Sara Fierer, cello

(Shown above in alphabetical order)

Learn more about the musicians here.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Cathedral of Light for string quartet by Juhi Bansal

This barely 5 minute work for string quartet begins intimately, builds to an ecstatic swirling height of expression, and then gently floats to rest.

“Radiant and transcendent”, the music of Juhi Bansal weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models. Her music draws upon elements as disparate as Hindustani music, the spectralists, progressive metal, musical theatre and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. As an Indian composer brought up in Hong Kong, her work draws subtly upon both those traditions, entwining them closely and intricately with the gestures of western classical music.

Bansal composed Cathedral of Light in 2020 on a commission from Hartt School of Music's Uncertainty of Fate festival. She writes "Cathedral of Light draws upon imagery of looking for light in dark places, using a simple melody elaborated, orchestrated, and constantly reinvented through varying shades of color."

Two pieces of music composed by Elizabeth Brown with video by Lothar Osterburg

Piranesi, the 3^rd collaboration between Lothar Osterburg and Elizabeth Brown, is inspired by the dramatic, exaggerated architectural world created by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) in his Carceri, or imaginary prisons. One of the masterpieces of printmaking, the Carceri are notable for being issued in two states: initially in 1744 when Piranesi was 24, then again 17 years later, in a heavily worked, dramatically darker version; these two states give the viewer a unique insight into the creative mind and working process of the artist. In his homage to Piranesi, Osterburg uses stop-motion animation to capture the many stages in his own unique artistic process, from the initial conception to the completion of a photogravure, his printmaking specialty. Osterburg and Piranesi, who share an October 4^th birthday, both combine a unique artistic vision with an outstanding technical expertise in etching. Brown combines string quartet, with its long history in western culture, with the wild card of the theremin!

A typical performance lasts about 14 minutes.

A Bookmobile for Dreamers combines live theremin, recorded soundscape, and video into a meditation on books, reading, libraries, and culture.

Inspired by the joy of browsing, A Bookmobile for Dreamers celebrates the imagination as triggered by the printed word. As a bookmobile makes its rounds, we enter a series of books – and are carried away with the leaps, associations and meanderings of the imagination in all its unpredictability.

Brown and Osterburg have drawn on their diverse talents to create this piece. Osterburg, who is a sculptor, photographer, printmaker, and filmmaker, has created a dreamlike model world using real-time video, stop-motion animation, and some special effects. Brown’s theremin sings over an electronic soundscape which she built from transformed field recordings of everyday sounds, and she uses the theremin’s spatial playing technique to interact with the virtual world of the video projection.

Osterburg builds his small models by hand from memory, from readily available materials—vegetables, toothpicks, electronic debris—often rescued from dumpsters and piles of refuse on city streets. Stripped of superfluous detail and appearing in unlikely settings, the scenes draw the viewer into a world suspended between the real and the imaginary.

Brown, who collects sounds the way Osterburg collects sculptural materials, hears music everywhere. A very moldy piano, mating frogs deep in the Grand Canyon, Aunt Irma’s grandfather clock at midnight, dropped silverware, a friend’s washing machine, rushing water in the drains of Lucca, Italy during a rainstorm, squeaking doors and groaning pipes, spinning tops, jawharps, footsteps in cinders, chickens . . . . all these sounds coexist as books dissolve, refold themselves, and march along city streets, and the theremin plays on.

A typical performance lasts about 40 minutes.