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Joan La Barbara Performs "The Wanderlusting of Joseph C." at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Celebrated composer and vocalist Joan La Barbara has long worked at the nexus between artistic disciplines, collaborating with fellow composers, performers, and artists across a wide spectrum. In 2017, La Barbara premiered a new song cycle, "The Wanderlusting of Joseph C.", inspired by the filmmaker, sculptor, and visual artist Joseph Cornell. Working with novelist Monique Truong, La Barbara has created a song cycle for four singers, singing texts inspired by Cornell's neologism "wanderlusting", which turns the German compound word "Wanderlust"—the desire to travel—into an English gerund, a kind of nominal state that is always-already informed by action. 

On April 13thLa Barbara, accompanied by Lauren Flanigan and Mario Diaz-Moresco, performed three songs from The Wanderlusting of Joseph C., as well as "Windows" and "Habité par ses rêves et les phantasms"—the latter taking its title from a description of Cornell by the painter Dorothea Tanning—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the galleries housing their exhibition, "Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell's Tribute to Juan Gris". This environmental performance puts La Barbara's work in immediate and visceral contact with Cornell's work, provoking connections between music, art, and text. The project was developed in association with American Opera Projects.

Writing in The New York Times, Seth Colter Walls celebrated La Barbara's performance, commenting on her longstanding role in "shap[ing] experimental sound in New York," and praising the unified breadth of La Barbara's style between the extended vocal techniques of "Windows" and the "wounded grandeur" evoked in "The Wanderlusting of Joseph C."   

La Barbara spoke about her long-standing interest in Cornell in 2014, in anticipation of a performance at Roulette. Check out the video below:  

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