Chaya Czernowin: HIDDEN at hcmf//
Creative Tourist
Chaya Czernowin’s music is an excavation. For years, she’s been burrowing deep into the ground of her pieces, writing music that can be heard going through itself. With its layers of sound and sensation, HIDDEN pushes down. It exists not only horizontally – across her score, from one destination to another – but vertically. The low, seething vibrations of HIDDEN orientate the piece differently, pointing below the surface into places where the music emerges.
In collaboration with sound engineering from IRCAM, the Arditti Quartet’s performance becomes a holistic exercise, making use of electronics and multi-speakers that push the piece’s sound through the concert environment, as if we were underground with it. The piece asks its players to treat the act of playing music as an observation – using instruments not to create sound, but to sift through it. It is performed slowly, attentively, and gradually, until we have been taken through it.
Performed alongside HIDDEN are works that also sift and search: Natasha Barrett’s Hidden Values, for electronics only, and the UK Premiere of Swiss composer Michael Pelzel’s Birds, Bees and Bells.
