Talea Ensemble: Bird, Blondeau, Chen, Cohen-Elias, Hall, Kochavi

Program Notes

Uri Kochavi
dermis (2024)

When the epidermis is torn, the distinction between the external and internal
collapses.
Inner layers are revealed, exposed.
The organism becomes unbounded by flesh.
It moves in all directions.

Dermis is a piece that freezes a moment of
oscillation between the external
and the internal.
Their implosion becomes space.
Their fracture becomes sound.

Sasha J. Blondeau
État d’exception (2014)

For me, this piece is a ‘youth’ piece. I wrote it for the academy that Chaya Czernowin and Steven Kazuo Takasugi were organizing at Harvard in 2014. The title referred to a concept developed by Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben. The piece was written with this background in mind.

For Agamben, the state of exception is becoming a paradigm of government in contemporary societies. This means that under the pretext of security or emergency (such as war or a terrorist threat), the government can progressively erode individual rights and freedoms, suspend laws, and rule by decree. What is crucial in Agamben’s analysis is the idea that this state is not limited to explicit moments of crisis, but can become a normal method of governance, permanently eroding democratic and legal structures.

The state of exception is also linked to the notion of ‘bare life’. This is a concept taken from Roman law, designating a life that can be killed without it constituting homicide. In a state of exception, individuals or groups can be placed in a position where their most fundamental rights are nullified, reducing them to a bare life that can be exposed to violence without legal recourse.

Agamben thus criticizes the way in which modern democracies have routinely adopted measures of exception, and how this profoundly transforms the relationship between the state and individuals, questioning the very foundations of democracy and human rights. Since 2014, the dark times that govern us have only uncovered more additional examples of this deadly policy.

David Bird
Moln (2019)

Moln is the Swedish word for cloud. On April 28, 1986, Sweden’s second largest nuclear power plant, Forsmark, detected heightened levels of radiation in the atmosphere. The staff at the plant were worried that an accident had taken place, but after coordinated analyses by nuclear physicists, meteorologists, reactor experts, and even jet fighter pilots who flew through the radioactive cloud they discovered that the source of the radiation was 1,100 kilometers away in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. The early detection by the Forsmark plant, one hour north of Stockholm, played a crucial role in forcing Soviet authorities to acknowledge the Chernobyl disaster.

Shasha Chen
The bee is present (2022)

The ideal performance scenario for this piece is to create an event by releasing a bee into the performance space right before it starts. The buzzing of the bee and the sound of the audience interaction in this situation are intended to be part of the piece. If this is not possible, telling the audience ahead of the performance that there is a bee in the room to psychologically plant the idea of disturbance and instability of the environment in their minds is also an acceptable alternative.

Alec Hall
Vertigo (2017)

Vertigo was written in late 2017, when the Trump presidency was starting to blossom into full insanity-mode. The Mueller investigation had recently started, and all its attendant conspiracies were developing underground and online, similar to the way Japanese knotweed grows in every direction out of an invisible, decentralized rhizome. The mood in the United States was one of intense instability, and I felt that I had to express this in my own music. In the film Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock made use of an ingenious camera trick called the dolly zoom effect, which skews the perception of foreground and background, generating a field of visual instability. In my own Vertigo, sixty years later, I shifted this visual effect into a sonic one at certain points of the piece. But, more importantly, there is a sense of acoustic instability and sonic confusion that reigns throughout, mirroring that moment in time when nothing felt normal or routine in the slightest.

Sivan Cohen Elias
Still Life with Squares (2014)

Still Life with Squares is a study on the representation of geometrical shapes and movements, specifically squares, and their translation into sound and musical performance. Each musician draws, both sonically and gesturally, squares of different magnitudes, perspectives, and angles, while their mechanical movement reflects the idea that each body is part of a large, complex machine. The musicians are part of various mechanisms, while the live electronics, which have been recently revised, expand the realm of the machine.