This Saturday, Feb. 23, the JACK Quartet will perform with Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Ryan Carter in Wellin Hall in Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, and $5 for students. The event will be hosted by Hamilton College Performing Arts, and will begin at 7:30 PM.
Violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell make up JACK Quartet, which is currently focused on new work in their brand of contemporary classical music.
The Washington Post
calls them “the go-to quartet for contemporary music, tying impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity and a take-no-prisoners sense of commitment.” They are recipients of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.
The performance will feature the world premiere of “Direct Attention” by Ryan Carter, as well as the late American contemporary composer Elliott Carter’s “String Quartet №5,” Zosha Di Castri’s “String Quartet №1,” and Tyshawn Sorey’s “Everything Changes, Nothing Changes.”
The performance will blend technology, music, and audience involvement. Carter’s “Direct Attention” is a new piece arranged with strings and motion-controlled interactive electronics. “‘Direct Attention’ is a piece for string quartet and motion-controlled interactive sounds that are played from the mobile devices of the audience,” said Carter. “All audience members are invited to participate.” Throughout the performance, the audience will be able to use their phones to navigate to a special website designed specifically for this event that turns each device into a musical instrument to participate in the quartet’s performance.
“My work as a composer often considers the impact of emerging technologies on our experience of music,” said Carter. “Since 2011, I’ve developed mobile applications that create sound from code, allowing listeners to interact with specific aspects of the sound as it synthesizes.”
At the performance, Carter will seek to create a new medium for musical performance through audience engagement and the repurposing of electronic devices for creative expression.
“You will be able to control certain aspects of the sound by tilting or shaking your device,” he said. “There is no interaction with the screen other than tapping a ‘start’ button and occasionally glancing to see whether to ‘tilt’ or ‘shake’ your device, though you could also just experiment to find out what moving your device will do.
“This work seeks to reposition the phone from a tool for remote interaction to a musical instrument that requires no experience to play and supports the communal experience of hearing music in concert.”
The title of the piece is an homage to Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and a writer of computer philosophy. Lanier has worked at the forefront of new digital technologies for decades and offers trenchant critiques of the underlying business model that drives social media. Carter says that “Direct Attention” is a reference to a quote from Lanier’s
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
, an inspiration for Carter’s project.
The quote reads: “If ordinary people were to get all happy and satisfied, they might take a moment away from the obsession with social media numbers and go frolic in the flowers or even pay direct attention to each other. But if they’re all on edge about whether they’re popular enough, worried about whether the world is imploding, or furious at morons who are thrust into the middle of their connections with friends and families, then they dare not disengage. They are hooked because of provoked natural vigilance. We in Silicon Valley like to watch the ants dig harder into their dirt. They send us money as we watch.”
The title “Direct Attention” demonstrates Carter’s aim in designing the production as an interactive experience — audience members repurpose their devices to interact with “direct attention” to the performance at hand, an act that necessitates direct engagement with the live performance itself.
