silent green 1

This evening at silent green opens with the world premiere of Mazen Kerbaj’s new work “Lungless”, which reworks the composer’s painful childhood memories of the Lebanese civil war in sonic form: “The title ‘Lungless’ should be understood both literally (the sound is generated by an air compressor) and figuratively (the inability to speak in the face of war’s violence).” This is followed by a solo concert from baritone Ty Bouque, which navigates the boundaries between the audible and the inaudible, the communicable and the private, the vocal and the muscular through works that include a study of the voice by Evan Johnson. Bouque’s relationship to sound is explicitly queer, luminous and introspective, barren and vulnerable. The programme is completed by a concert by the research project Global Breath, initiated by Marco Blaauw, for which the musician has explored the meaning of a trumpet sound in different cultural contexts around the world since 2016. Numerous new works have emerged from this research; the compositions by Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Elena Rykova, George Lewis and Aaron Holloway-Nahum offer some initial glimpses.