MUSIC’S OVER: Listening with Peter Ablinger

The Gray Center kicked off the inaugural week of our new program, Gray Sound, with Peter Ablinger’s first visit to Chicago. For decades, Ablinger’s work has been forcing open fault lines in the topography of the audible. His vast output of scores, electronic pieces, installations, and conceptual works consistently finds ways—funny, pointed, disturbing—to put the ear’s organization of reality in doubt. Is that a voice, and what is a voice? When is something newly or no longer music? Noise? Information? In Ablinger’s cunning scramble of sonic categories, listening loses its lay of the land. Concepts come unmoored from sounds, and the land changes shape.

In partnership with Goethe-Institut Chicago, Gray Sound hosted a nine-day residency from Sunday, January 19 — Monday, January 27, 2020. The residency will threaded a series of talks, composition seminars, and experimental discussions in between multiple performance events featuring world premieres and internationally renowned ensembles, rendering Ablinger’s work alone and alongside other artists who enjoy his influence. Running throughout the week at the Gray Center Lab was the world premiere of MUSIC’S OVER, one of the most ambitious of Ablinger’s Quadraturen (“Squarings”) series: a computer-controlled piano performing a clangorous, spectrally derived “phonorealist” transcription of a raucous live Doors performance from 1970. All were invited to come by the Lab, press the red button on the piano, and prepare to lose and refind their way.

Performances by Fonema Consort, Wet Ink Ensemble, and a•pe•ri•od•ic, featuring two world premieres by Ablinger as well as works by Chiyoko Szlavnics, Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Sam Pluta, and others. Please see event listings for complete details.

From event  the brochure for MUSIC'S OVER: Listening with Peter Ablinger, January 19-27, 2020.

For an in-depth interview between Peter Ablinger, Gray Center Director, Seth Brodsky, and Philip von Zweck on the podcast Bad at Sports, click here.