BlackBox Ensemble: New works by Dai Fujikura & tauchgold (Thursday Evening Centerpiece Performance)

Dai Fujikura — Being As One (text by Harry Ross)
Dai Fujikura — Borrowed Landscape (text by Heike Tauch & Florian Goldberg)

The New York City–based BlackBox Ensemble presents a series of performances exploring how objects reflect and shape our relationships to time, culture, and historical memory. The centerpiece of the series is Thursday evening's performance of Borrowed Landscape, a play by the German playwright duo tauchgold (Heike Tauch and Florian Goldberg) with original music by prominent composer Dai Fujikura. Conceived by tauchgold as a "narratorio"—a dramatic play based on the musical structure of an oratorio—this piece was originally broadcast as a radio play in Germany in 2022. The BlackBox Ensemble presented the staged premiere of this new English translation at New York City's Noguchi Museum in November 2023.  

The narratorio tells the story of three special instruments: a famous Stradivarius walled up for years in a cellar in Budapest, a double bass left behind by a Jewish orchestral bassist fleeing Poland in 1939, and a Baldwin upright piano silenced after the Hiroshima bomb killed its young owner. As the musicians of a trio approach these instruments, which for decades were considered lost, they uncover the stories, secrets, and histories these objects contain.

In the companion program on Wednesday, February 7, the ensemble performs an eclectic selection of contemporary works by Angélica Negrón, Baldwin Giang, Tristan Murail, and George Lewis, curated to reflect the themes of the radio play as well as those of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. More information here: https://www.livemusicproject.org/events/79399/blackbox-ensemble-negron-giang-murail-lewis-wednesday-matinee-prelude-performance

About BlackBox Ensemble

The BlackBox Ensemble is a New York City-based, flexible-instrumentation contemporary music collective. We produce projects that aim to resonate with our cultural and political present, advocate for social justice causes, and push the experimental boundaries of the music of our time. In doing so, we are committed to championing some of today’s most powerful emerging composers through close collaboration.

https://www.blackboxensemble.org/