I never got around to posting this when it came out last Fall, so here it is. My article on the Wordless Music Orchestra's performance of Maxim Moston's orchestral adaptation of William Basinski's "dlp 1.1," from The Disintegration Loops at the "Remembering September 11" concert at the Met. Two non-consecutive passages from an earlier draft of the article:
As the performance drew to a close, all that remained was an extended drone by the orchestra’s cellist. Surely, this was now the sound of the bare analog medium that we were hearing. In true Minimalist fashion, that lone final drone did not determine the listener’s experience so much as it presented the conditions for our phenomenological sensation of time and space. The sound of that bow scraping against its lowest string, so expertly performed that one could not determine without looking when the bow changed directions, slowly faded into silence, and you could hear the tension in the enormous, packed room: the quiet stillness of not a single person shifting in her chair or soothing a lump in his throat sounded more than anything like the restraint and discipline of the musicians we had all been watching for almost an hour. The brute physicality of the performance before us, and our collective recognition of our physical presence at this performance, which indeed constituted an important element of this performance, restored to “dlp 1.1” the affective force that Basinski must have meant when he described his emotional experience recording “the death of this sweeping melody.” The uniqueness of the performance was not in the notes we heard—I have listened to a recording of the performance more than a dozen times in preparation for this review—but in the wordless sociality of this collective listening experience.The full, untruncated last paragraph:
As the performance drew to a close, long after I had quietly migrated from my seat at the back of the Sackler Wing to the standing room by the rear door, conductor Ryan McAdams held the orchestra at attention in complete silence for two minutes and fourteen seconds before laying down his hands and accepting the audience’s rapturous applause. Or so I read in the New York Times the next day. The tension was too much, and I really had to run to the Neue Galerie, pick up Alex, and catch a cab to La Guardia. Breathless and with my heart pounding, I silently exited the Wing and then ran out of the Met. In those twenty seconds of silence before I left, I’d like to think that what I thought I was hearing was accurate and that everyone else in that room was feeling exactly the same way.
