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Eclipse Quartet Performs Morton Subotnick’s A Fluttering of Wings; Chamber Opera Jacob's Room to Premiere at Bregenz Festival in August

May. 04, 2010

On Saturday, May 8 the Eclipse Quartet presents Morton Subotnick's groundbreaking A Fluttering of Wings at Roulette in New York City. The ensemble's performance of the 1981 chamber work for string quartet and live electronics accompanies works by John Cage, Roger Reynolds, and Zeena Parkins in a program devoted to the musical pairing of string quartet and processed sound.

 Enhancing Subotnick's evocative and idiomatic writing for strings with electronic timbres that add layers of sonic texture to the written music, A Fluttering of Wings is realized through the "ghost box" electronic device, as musician and journalist Christian Hertzog explains:

[the ghost box] consists of a pitch and envelope follower for a live signal, and the following voltage controlled units: an amplifier, a frequency shifter, and a ring modulator. The control voltages for the ghost box were originally stored on a tape, updated now to E-PROM. A performer, whose miced [sic] signal is sent into the ghost box, can then be processed by playing back the pre-recorded tape or E-PROM, containing the control voltages. As neither the tape nor E-PROM produce sound, Subotnick refers to their sound modification as a "ghost score." By providing the performer with exact timings, coordination between performer and the ghost score is controlled.

On August 5 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, Morton Subotnick's new chamber opera Jacob's Room sees its world premiere. Commissioned by Kunst aus der Zeit, Bregenzer Festspiele and soniq performing arts, Berlin in cooperation with the American Academy, Berlin and supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin, the opera inhabits Jacob's consciousness as he struggles to accept the loss of his family in multiple world conflicts. The creative team is led by music director Ari Benjamin Meyers and director Mirella Weingarten and features live-video projections by Lillevan.

Visit www.eclipsequartet.com and www.roulette.org to learn more on the program.

For information on the music Morton Subotnick, visit www.mortonsubotnick.com and www.schott-music.com.

Find out more on the Bregenz Festival here.

Morton Subotnick
A Fluttering of Wings (1981)
for string quartet and electronic ghost
25'

Jacob's Room (2010)
chamber opera in one act
libretto (En) by Morton Subotnick inspired by Phaedrus by Plato, Eleni by Nicholas Gage, The Pit and the Trap by Moshe Kohn, The Little School House by Alicia Partnoy, The Holocaust Kingdom by Alexander Donat and Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass-baritone and 2 high baritones
keyboard, cello section(min. 4 players) and electronics
70-75'

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