Karen Bentley Pollick performed the World Premiere of Capital Spheres by Michael Angell at the Birmingham Museum of Art on March 11, 2010.
Capital Spheres is the second work that Michael Angell has written for Karen Bentley Pollick. The performance forces are violin and computer generated and manipulated soundfiles. The work is an analogue concerning the nature of personal identity and place. In one's life, one may travel and live in various different places, maintaining the distinction and sovereignty of their identity within a sphere. One may move abruptly from place to place or transition, as through a pipe. The score is organized in an unusual fashion. A board is divided into six sections, two rows of three. The performer chooses six out of eight score sections to play in the space. These eight sections consist of a sphere and pipe for each of four cities: Washington DC, Birmingham, Chicago, and San Francisco. In addition to these six sections, the performer has the option of utilizing any of three more traditional written segments for unaccompanied violin: Introduction, Detour (which may be played at any point in the middle), and Parking (at the very end). Many of the concréte sources were recorded during a sound hunting expedition in Washington, DC in June of 2008.
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