Gray Sound continues its fifth season, Saturday, March 23rd, 8pm (doors at 7:30pm), with a double bill of electroacoustic works by Serbian firebrand Mark Sarich, including a new reconstruction of a rarely-heard archival work produced expressly for the occasion. A stalwart of the midwestern DIY scene as composer, presenter, and activist, Sarich's compositions careen between scathing political critique and austerely minimal, confessional utterance. 

For Gray Sound 5, Sarich presents two sound works: a new reconstruction of The Control of Fire (2001), an electroacoustic “opera” drawing together commentaries on corporate- and state-sponsored oppression from Chicago to Arizona’s Black Mesa; and The Fragrance of God (2014), a work based on Rumi’s Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi. 
* A short conversation with the artist follows the performance. 


A note from the curator of Gray Sound 5: 
For over a decade, I have considered the compositions, curatorial work, and community organizing by St. Louis-based Serbian composer Mark Sarich to constitute an important, undersung vein of stewardship of experimental music and performance in the postindustrial Midwest. 

Sarich, who counts Herbert Brün (one of the members of the European avant-garde exiled to the US during the Holocaust) and Ben Johnston (pioneer of just intonation tuning systems) among his teachers, has deep connections to a strand of modernism seldom countenanced on American stages. Working at some remove from the cosmopolitan, bicoastal (also curiously parochial) economy of prestige that subtends institutional contemporary music in this country, he has pursued a unique artistic vision with philosophical seriousness regarding that most unfashionable and central proposition for composition, namely: that the form and content of a composer’s work — over and above faddish “social practice” — can stand in an ethical and destabilizing relationship to the present.

For Gray Sound 5, Sarich presents two sound works: a new reconstruction of The Control of Fire (2001), an electroacoustic “opera” drawing together commentaries on corporate- and state-sponsored oppression from Chicago to Arizona’s Black Mesa; and The Fragrance of God (2014), a work based on Rumi’s Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi. 
— Andrew Stock

Free and open to the public
Masks recommended
**Entrance to the building is on the west side, facing the Logan Center for the Arts

About Mark Sarich
Mark Sarich is a composer, conductor, educator, and community organizer. He studied composition with Ben Johnston, Salvatore Martirano, and particularly with Herbert Brün. Personal influences include Chris Mann and Vinko Globokar. His music, mainly for small ensembles, has been performed around the country and has received commissions from Sarah Hennies and Anthony Macaluso.

In addition to hosting the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center (a celebrated independent and experimental music venue), he founded, in 2008, Orchestrating Diversity, the eleventh recognized El Sistema program in the US. He was part of the original planning committee and founding board of directors for El Sistema USA. Throughout his career Sarich has focused on the use of language as music in the context of electro-acoustic work. Like his mentor, Herbert Brün, he is convinced that the realization of dialogue between the composition and the audience provides an opportunity to “estrange the world [and] reveal it to be [...] as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (Adorno).

About Gray Sound
Founded in 2019 by Gray Center Director and UChicago Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, Seth Brodsky, Gray Sound was envisioned as an ongoing performance and discussion series that represents a chance for artists and the broader community to tease the boundaries of sound—when it moves from voice to music, recognizable tune to noise, experience to idea, and back.

Related To:

• GRAY SOUND