Boulez at 90, a workshop residency with CSO

Three day residency with Gerard McBurney (Creative Director of the CSO’s Beyond the Score series), architect Frank Gehry (scenic designer), and Mike Tutaj (video designer) for the development of Boulez at 90: Provisionally Definitive, a CSO music-video-performance event based on the life of composer Pierre Boulez (Sep 2014).

During this three-day workshop hosted by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and Logan Center for the Arts, Gerard McBurney (creative director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Beyond the Score), world-renowned architect Frank Gehry (scenic designer) and Mike Tutaj (video designer) and nine University of Chicago students collaboratively worked on  script-development and staging for the event, which will take place at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on November 14 and 16. 

The staging involves rolling projection screens designed by Frank Gehry, onto which images and words associated with the composer Pierre Boulez' life will be projected.  UChicago students worked with the creators on the integration of staging, video projection, storytelling and music (which will be played live by orchestra members in performance). 

The workshops were held in the Gray Center Lab and Logan Center for the Arts Performance Hall.

More about the upcoming presentation:  Boulez at 90: Provisionally Definitive

In 2015 Pierre Boulez turns 90, and Beyond the Score celebrates with a phantasmagorical acoustic and theatrical journey through a lifetime of musical adventures, innovations and discoveries. Performed within an extraordinary, specially commissioned design, this production will mix live performance with rare archival footage and new interviews with the composer and conductor who has been, from the beginning, one of Beyond the Score’s most passionate champions.