Erin Rogers - Composer/saxophonist

thingNY’s IN HOUSE at the Voelker Orth Museum in Flushing

Voelker Orth Museum
14919 38th Avenue
flushing, NY 11354-4839
http://www.vomuseum.org/

Part house concert, part sound installation, IN HOUSE is a collection of new musical meditations on the idea of “the home” written and performed by members of experimental music ensemble thingNY.

The works explore aspects of performance art, sound installations, and contemporary chamber music. How do you guide a listener’s ears and eyes while still leaving freedom to explore a space? How does a piece of music capture the essence of a room of a home across cultural lines? How do the sounds of audience and environment affect composition and the performance of new music?

The pieces are written with flexibility in mind. With each composer creating a work for one room of the home, each performance is adapted for and inspired by the individuality of each home’s distinct rooms. This allows IN HOUSE to be programmed differently for each home and experienced uniquely by its audience, who can listen to one piece in its entirety, or explore the house freely, hearing how the compositions fit together.

The project is a continuation of the ideas explored in Gelsey Bell’s extensive Bathroom Songs for solo vocalist. Written in 2010, it is a collection of songs that oscillates between extended vocal techniques, popular song structures, and everyday bathroom events like brushing ones teeth.

Isabel Castellvi’s Music for a Quartet of Speaking Pot Players utilizes the kitchen space and items in a rhythmic work of text and percussion. Paul Pinto’s Music for Your Living Room for solo clarinet and Erin Rogers’s Bedroom Music for violin, tape and visiting chamber musicians both span the entire event, occurring simultaneously and responding to behaviors of the audience.

And in the hallways and stairways, Memorial for _____, a series of constructed noise-making kinetic sculptures created by Alejandro Acierto, will sound throughout the performance.

Full performance schedule is available at http://www.thingNY.com/inhouse
Queens performances supported by the Queens Council on the Arts.

thingNY is a 501c3 not-for-profit collective of composer-performers who create and perform theatrically charged experimental music, champion the work of avant-garde and contemporary classical composers, and collaborate across disciplines, media, and genres.