A Twenty-Four Hour Performance Installation
November 1–2, 2024 (12 noon to 12 noon)
Wesleyan University
Olin Memorial Library (Campbell Reading Room and Balcony)
252 Church Street, Middletown, CT 06459About the Project
DRIFT/LOOP is an expansive multi-tiered space for sonic engagement and reflection, involving distributed performance, sound installation, audio streaming and radio transmission, community participation, and group contributed performances and scores.
DRIFT/LOOP is a large-scale participatory environment initiated and commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble and Andrew Cyr, conductor/producer, which has a large form improvisatory score written collaboratively by Paula Matthusen, visual artist Olivia Valentine, poet and media scholar Tung-Hui Hu, and original audio interpretations by Singularity Saxophone Quartet, Metropolis Ensemble, and Matthusen.
About the In-Person Experience
This is a long-form performance installation that one may freely participate. Please feel free to listen and explore throughout the entire space and duration.
There are several ways to participate in-person:
performing (any instrument) – listen for loops, fragments that can transform over time. Feel free to join in and repeat anything you hear, wandering between spaces, always transforming and drifting away.
singing/humming – carry sound with you as you move from space to space.
cell phone / transmission – there are three separate radio streams that you may tap into on your phone. Please feel free to drop in on them and carry the live audio around with you inside or outside the space.
listening – please feel free to hang out, listen, pause, or even rest for a bit. It’s long form, so it’s impossible to hear it all, but it does change very, very slowly.
About the Scores
LOOP scores consists of repeated, looping fragments.
These scores use elements of western musical notation.
The audio streams act as additional scores, so feel free to listen to what you hear repeating and shifting as a way to play along and with people.
There is a graphic score that frames the entire 24 hours of the piece. Feel free to use it as a prompt, or a way to think about writing your own score as part of the piece too.
DRIFT scores are made by community members.
These scores are contributed by community members.
Participants are welcome to view these and see what kinds of interactions they may invite. It will change every time!
Meet the Artists
Paula Matthusen
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing.” Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space — real, imagined, and remembered. More »
Olivia Valentine
Olivia Valentine is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in textile construction, creating architectural scale installations and collaborative projects that span a variety of media and disciplines. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for Installation Art in Turkey and the Brandford/Elliott Award for Excellence in Fiber Arts, is a 2020 Iowa Arts Council Fellow, and has exhibited her work internationally. Olivia received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently an assistant professor of art and visual culture at Iowa State University. More »
Tung-Hui Hu
Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and a media scholar. Hu currently lives in Rome, where he is a 2022-23 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, which grew out of his graduate studies in film, as well as two studies of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud and Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass. More »
Singularity
Singularity is a saxophone quartet — Chris Sacco, Cole Belt, Scotty Phillips, and Bryan McNamara— dedicated to building relationships through live performance, combining thoughtful interpretation with an honest presentation of the close friendship these four share. Singularity was featured at the album release party for William Brittelle’s Spiritual America at Public Records in Brooklyn presented by Metropolis Ensemble, Nonesuch Records, and New Amsterdam Records. More »
Andrew Cyr
A champion of new work, Grammy-nominated conductor Andrew Cyr has led premiere performances at venues ranging from Cité de la Musique (Paris, FR), The Met Museum, Celebrate Brooklyn(!), Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall, New Victory Theatre, Hamer Hall (Melbourne, AU), Radio City Music Hall, BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, and The Tonight Show. Cyr's work as conductor has been described by Esa-Pekka Salonen as "...precise, rhythmically incisive and fluid. He made complex new pieces sound natural and organic.” Cyr’s passion for creating new platforms for outstanding composers and performing artists led him to found Metropolis Ensemble in 2006. More »