Meriel Price

This summer saw two outings for Ari Benjamin Meyer’s Symphony X, the German premiere in K21, Düsseldorf and the World premiere of the accoustic version in KW, Berlin.

Both performances were of the installation version created together with artist Tino Sehgal.

The performance in Düsseldorf was part of the SCHALL UND GLUT series from tanzhaus nrw.

Symphony X is a love letter to neo minimal no-wave music, a style that came into being in New York City in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In this very physical work, compositional procedures influenced by composers such as Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham meet elements from post punk, minimalism and contemporary music. Musical situations at a steady 120bpm are exposed to a permanent web of construction and deconstruction, leading the audience’s expectations astray. The German newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ called it “a completely new music that doesn’t even have a name yet.” The composer and musician JG Thirwell aka Foetus describes the work this way: “a vividly evolving, involving minimalist meditation that is propelled by a rock backbeat. It pummels thru a dizzyingly unrelenting series of progressions, existing somewhere at an intersection of Branca, Glass, and Love Of Life Orchestra.”

While symphonic music has changed drastically over the course of the last 250 years, the formats of its presentation, the concert, basically has not. Tino Sehgal, an artist who has redefined the format of the exhibition, creates a spatial and temporal framework for the symphony, which is as ever-changing as the music itself and can be described as a ‘choreographed space’. (From the Springdance website)

Redux is Meyer’s 17 member ensemble for which I am the baritone saxophonist. To hear an excerpt of Symphony X click here