Bathed in cobalt blue, marigold, kelly green, and rose red, the four percussionists of Crossing 32nd Street Ensemble toggle their individual switch boxes on and off in a pointillistic chorus of satisfying clicks. The hardware controls each player’s lights and electronics, which create a buzzy, ambient aura around the sporadically percolating rhythms. And as composer Gabriel Bolaños slowly introduces the complementary percussion instrumentation of guiros, woodblocks, mokubios, castanets, and bongos, we find ourselves situated within a rhythmic pulse that is at once destabilizing and transfixing.
Strobe is best experienced visually — the kaleidoscopic collage of choreographed lighting, electronics, and percussion work together to visually and spatially orchestrate Bolaños’ score. The composer calls the piece “an exploration of polytemporality: the combination of multiple independent time streams, including the superposition of different tempi and the precise coordination of independent accelerations and decelerations between performers.” Assisted by a click track and a Max patch, the work is meticulously executed here by Michael Compitello, Simone Mancuso, Brett Reed, and Douglas Nottingham.
Today’s video premiere was recorded by Chris Goulet, and produced by Douglas Nottingham and Brett Reed. Strobe was funded with support from a Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and a residency at CMMAS (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras) in Morelia, Mexico.
A note from Gabriel about the piece:
I wanted the audience to see the rhythms as well as hear them. The lights flickering and dancing across the stage serve as a visual and spatial orchestration of the underlying polytemporal structure and help us perceive the crazy hocketing between players. I wanted everything else in the piece to emerge from these switch-boxes and lights. At first, the electronics resemble electromagnetic interference: in a live performance it’s hard to tell if they’re intentional or just a byproduct of the stage lighting. There is also a beautiful ambiguity between the click of the switch box and the dry, clicky instrumentation. Like the electronics, the acoustic instruments seem to emerge from the mechanical sounds of the hardware switches, before taking on a life of their own.
About Gabriel Bolaños
Gabriel José Bolaños Chamorro (b. 1984) is a Nicaraguan/American composer. He collaborates closely with performers, and writes music that explores unusual timbres and structures. Bolaños is Associate Professor of Music Composition at Arizona State University, where co-directs the PRISMS contemporary music festival. He received a BA in music from Columbia University and a PhD in Composition and Theory from UC Davis. His music is published by BabelScores.
Bolaños has received numerous awards for his work, including a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, a commission from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, a Fulbright US Scholar Grant, the Suzanne & Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award, a Research & Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a residency at CMMAS in Morelia, Mexico, a commission from Vertixe Sonora and Hong Kong Baptist University, and a commission from CIRM and Festival Manca in Nice, France.
About Crossing 32nd Street Ensemble
Founded at the turn of the millennium by Douglas Nottingham, Brett Reed, Chris Scinto and Eric Schultz, Crossing 32nd Street was shortly after recognized by the Arizona Republic as Phoenix’s “Best New Classical Ensemble.” For the past 25 years, the iconic ensemble has used performances of curated contemporary works, residencies, master classes, grants, and their recorded output to increase a broader awareness and understanding of essential modern music. Performances routinely include the music of past masters, as well as the exciting new 21st century works.
Crossing 32nd Street’s current core is a percussion ensemble featuring Sonja Branch, Michael Competello, Robert Esler, Casey Farina, Jeremy Muller, Douglas Nottingham, Brett Reed, Simone Mancuso and Lisa Tolentino- playing percussion and electronics while also composing, recording and improvising with acoustic, electro-acoustic, and multimedia tools. An ensemble-in-residence in the Maricopa Community Colleges, the group’s broader instrumentation changes with the needs of each composition, and has included over 100 musicians in its history. While concurrently embarking on a number of recording and creative research projects, the group still performs concerts regularly in alternative spaces and campuses throughout Phoenix and beyond- appearing throughout the United States and abroad as guest artists-in-residence in scholastic settings, international symposia and featured concerts.
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