Co-sponsored by the Metropolis Ensemble, Wesleyan University’s Office of Academic Affairs, Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, Music Department, and World Music Archives & Music Library.

About the Project

Come hear tones drift in and out of Olin Library throughout Wesleyan University’s Homecoming Weekend. Over the course of twenty-four hours, the stacks will ring vibrantly with reverberated tones, shimmer in small noises, and become perforated with musical exclamations.

This ambitious installation/performance/large-scale happening is part of DRIFT/LOOP, 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. 

The project began in 2020 and was initiated and commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble and Andrew Cyr, conductor/producer, in collaboration with composer and Wesleyan Professor of Music Paula Matthusen, visual artist Olivia Valentine, and poet and media scholar Tung-Hui Hu, with original audio interpretations by Singularity Saxophone Quartet, Metropolis Ensemble, and Matthusen. The project will also feature the Wesleyan University Orchestra directed by Nadya Potemkina.

This realization marks the first time that the entire project has been presented for the length of a full day. Audience and participants are encouraged to wander in and out throughout the day.

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.

Everyone is invited to participate in this long-form performance installation, freely and in a variety of ways, including:

• performing (bring your own 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, wandering in out and through, 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!

Create your own custom audio stream during the in-person event using the speaker on your mobile device.

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 »

Matthew Evan Taylor

Composer and saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as “a promising new voice” (Miami Herald) and a “risk taker” (Huffington Post) whose music is “insistent and defiant ... envelopingly hypnotic” (Lucid Culture). A southern kid who worshiped at the altar of Cannonball Adderly, Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley and Charles Mingus, Matthew’s music has been performed across the United States and Europe. His most recent project, New Century | New Voices, is a concert series in Middlebury, Vermont celebrating the continued contributions of women and composers of color to the classical music canon. The inaugural season, which began in January 2019, included collaborations with composers Carlos Simon, Marcos Balter, and Gabriela Lena Frank and the Vermont- based new music ensemble TURNmusic. Matthew is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College in Vermont. More »

David Leon

David Leon is a Miami-born saxophonist, woodwinds player, composer, and improviser living in Brooklyn, New York. His work is guided by a persistent search for vitality through autonomy, contradiction, hyperbole, and humor. Most recently, David was named a 2024 Music Composition Fellow by the CINTAS Foundation, an organization supporting Cubans in the arts. He was also awarded a Roulette 2024 Jerome Commission to support the creation of a hybrid work of chamber music and wordless puppet theatre, A Divine Echo, which premiers at Roulette Intermedium in May 2024. More »

Javen Lara

Javen Lara is from Harlem, New York City. After joining Face the Music ensemble as a founding member of the Pannonia String Quartet and the Face the Music Quartet, Lara was mentored by the Kronos Quartet. She is a 2016 VIVO International Competition winner, as well as a three time winner of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society Competition 2014-2016. She was the assistant principal violist for the New York Youth Symphony’s 2015-2016 season. Lara was one of two of the first African-American graduates of Bard College Conservatory. She was a member of the first all black orchestra to perform at Carnegie Hall, Gateways Symphony Orchestra. Lara is in two bands: the violist and co-lead vocalist of Seven, with renowned cellist and co-lead vocalist Aliya Ultan and the duo Neptune’s Return, as an instrumentalist and vocalist with Adia Cristina Lara-Thein.

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 »