
Ben McCarol -Butler
Lemniscate is an eight-piece choir that sings new pieces. Made up of individually creative composers and improvisers as its members, the choir has its inaugural performance at In Situ 2018.
These pieces concern themselves with how landscape can mirror, influence, and even control how a subject experiences, understands, and behaves in the world. The utterly unfragmented wholeness of the ontolgy of trees; the alternately calming and anxiety-provoking sensations eliciited by continuous snowfall; the mysterious metamorphic
power of the moon. The landscapes portrayed in the pieces are given a physical reality through the lush harmonies of the migrating 8-person choir as it moves through the space of the small arms inspection building, ulti- mately finding its way to a reverberant vault. These two worlds of landscape – that of the music and that of the space in which the music is performed – influence and inflect one another, just as the landscapes in the pieces influence and inflect the lives of their subjects.
The power of landscape to alter experience thus is not simply sung about, but enacted.