144 Singers in 20 Boats in Central Park
144 Singers in 20 Boats in Central Park
Maclean’s previews Americas Society and Make Music New York premiere of R. Murray Schafer’s Music for Wilderness Lake and Credo at Central Park Lake on June 21.
New York City Opera artistic director George Steel hopped out of the rowboat and reported that “the geese were very interested in the bass section.” This is as it should have been for the aquatic sound test of R. Murray Schafer’s Music for Wilderness Lake and Credo a few weeks before their New York premiere on June 21 at the 7th Make Music New York (MMNY) festival. Based on France’s Fête de la musique, MMNY began experimenting on Central Park Lake in 2010 with Iannis Xenakis’s sextet Persephassa, written for an audience surrounded by percussionists. They performed it with the musicians on rafts and the audience in rowboats and have used the lake every year since. This year, the daylong festival presents more than a thousand events in all the boroughs.
“It’s more of a happening than a concert with ushers,” explained festival founder Aaron Friedman. It was Americas Society-Council of the Americas’ music director, Sebastián Zubieta, who suggested Schafer, Canada’s most famous living composer—outside of Canada—and an influential pedagogue credited with inventing the field of sonic ecology and motivating an entire generation to listen. MMNY began with the idea of performing a piece—written for a lake near Bancroft, Ont., (Wilderness Lake)—on a lake in Manhattan. Zubieta went at dawn in November and made recordings to hear if Central Park Lake was quiet enough. It was. “The city almost disappears,” he says. “It’s amazing how strong nature is.” Credo was added to the program afterward. It has never been performed outside.
Credo is the second part of Apocalypsis, which has hardly been performed since its 1980 premiere at Centennial Hall in London, Ont.; it was last revived in 2001 in Toronto. Schafer is happy they will try it in Manhattan’s wilds….
