Find more Music events in New York
About the concert
This concert presents the world premieres of two works for solo violin by Samuel Clay Birmaher that attempt to recall the experience of existence before life. Both pieces were written for violinist Christopher Otto—a founding member of the JACK Quartet—and this performance will be Otto's first public solo concert.
Seating is limited.
* * *
The two works on this program exist in the most spare and static territories of any of Birmaher's music. Following in the footsteps of metaphysical experiments by musicians such as Coil and Pauline Oliveros, the music is composed so that the sound of the violin guides the listener into an altered state as it attempts to retrieve the feeling of pre-existence.
In Eden Melody, the violin plays in an unchanging rhythm, using an unusual tuning system that erases the melody’s memory of itself as it unfolds, becoming unrooted from any fixed pitch.
In Time Escape Harmony, the violin is tuned to only two pitches—D and A—which are used to form a stretching chain of bare chords and silences.
In both works, every natural variation in the violin's sound becomes magnified and exposed, heightened even further by the detailed acoustics of The DiMenna Center. The simplicity of the music allows the entirety of Otto's violin technique to come into focus.
* * *
When I was very young, my father would tell me stories about our family from the years before I was born. Whenever I asked him, “Where was I?” he would say, “You were on Jupiter.”
I knew his answer was a metaphor for something hard to describe. It made me want to know what it was like before I was alive—with no body, no memory, no time. The only way I could understand it was to think of myself as having been an idea. But it was impossible to imagine or remember the feeling of that kind of existence.
These two pieces are attempts to rewind awareness to a point before birth, before life, before existence, in order to experience something that can’t be experienced.
— Samuel Clay Birmaher
* * *
Samuel Clay Birmaher (rhymes with “here and there”) is a composer living in New York City. He was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and studied music at Cornell University. His music tells stories about internal and external worlds, using familiar musical elements to create undefined symbols. In addition to composing, he has written prose for NewMusicBox and Mode Records, and performed conceptual music as a member of Gemini Society. Recent projects include co-creating The Holy Liftoff, a new work by Terry Riley, for Claire Chase and the JACK Quartet. Read and hear more at www.birmaher.org.
Christopher Otto is a composer and violinist from Champaign, Illinois, now living in the Bronx, New York. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and mathematics at the University of Rochester. His music, which seeks to connect the abstract with the sensual, the universal with the particular, and the eternal with the transient, can be heard at christopherotto.bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com/ottotelic, and christopherotto.space. As a founding member of the JACK Quartet, he has performed contemporary music throughout the world, premiering hundreds of works from composers including Catherine Lamb, Tyshawn Sorey, Ellen Fullman, John Zorn, Anthony Cheung, John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Liza Lim, Juri Seo, and Georg Friedrich Haas.
Date and Time
Wed, Apr 23, 2025 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Venue
Benzaquen Hall at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 West 37th StreetNew York, New York 10018
