Episode 89 — February 23, 2021
Nicolee Kuester: “Improvisation” for horn
Performed by Nicolee Kuester

There’s a seven story steel water tank about five hours outside of the Denver, Colorado metropolitan area. But it isn’t abandoned—it’s been transformed into the TANK Center for Sonic Arts, which welcomes musical experimenters into its walls to play with the encasement’s enveloping reverberations (the echo there lasts about 20 seconds). This is the site of French Horn player Nicolee Kuester’s House Music series video.

Kuester found herself living in the Denver area during 2020, and decided to take a road trip and book a recording slot at the TANK Center to see what kind of sound she could make there. She drove up the night before, camping out in the Dinosaur National Monument before heading off to make music. At the TANK Center, she found herself able to harmonize with its monumental echoes as if she was performing with another musician, a feeling she missed after so many months of no live performances. Playing this improvisation was like musical therapy for her, a way to become enveloped in sound and transform her monophonic horn into a polyphony.

Kuseter first became involved with Metropolis Ensemble in the winter of 2018, when she performed Bill Brittelle’s Spiritual America at Symphony Space. She remembers the experience with fondness, admiring the massive scale of the production and working with indie band Wye Oak. Since, she’s been involved in the group’s education initiatives, visiting with young composition students to perform their recently written works.

Here, Kuester improvises on the B-flat harmonic series, which she describes as the horn’s “home-base.” These are the notes the instrument plays organically, without any changes of the shape of the player’s mouth. In her improvisation, she uses the space as a second instrument, allowing the room’s echoes to crash into the billowing tones coming from her horn. The result is a mash of sound, a wash of harmony to soak in.

Notes by Vanessa Ague

 
House Music: Bite-sized concerts recorded at homes around the world

In 2020-21, we created a weekly video series featuring short-form concerts of newly-commissioned works, supporting 208 artists around the world during the pandemic.