Join us this Sunday, October 30, at 7:00PM in Barnes Hall for a special performance by composer Jerome Begin and pianist David Friend (Cornell ’19). The duo performs their GRAMMY-nominated album, Post-, a 50-minute set of pieces for solo piano with live electronic processing. Each movement explores a different way of creating an uncanny valley-esque reality where human, acoustic aspects, and electronic, processed aspects interact and overlap in hard-to-define, disorienting ways, upending the conventions of traditional “solo piano music” while still retaining the piano at its core.
The music on this album came into its own after starting as a multidisciplinary collaboration and then unexpectedly shedding its skin. The project was forced into hibernation by a global pandemic, but has reemerged at a moment in which nothing and everything has changed. It pierces the willful suspension of disbelief that leads most piano recordings to strive to efface the layers of technology between the pianist and the listener. This music abandons the problematic myth of the solitary artist-genius and revels in a web of creative networks. Instead of trying to reify a particular ideology or style, it transcends boundaries as it traverses and imbricates a wide range of musical ideas, textures, and tropes. By immersing itself in these unpredictable waters, it develops a rethinking of what the piano can be and do in our time. It channels the intense creative power emanating from this disorienting cultural moment, a moment defined by the decay of the past and the abyss of the future, a collective moment of ___?