The seed for the Resonant Spaces project was planted after Mantra Percussion performed Michael Gordon’s Timber at Artpark in Buffalo, NY in July 2023 in front of a hundred-foot, concave, sheer cliff along the Niagara River Gorge. Gordon and Mantra Percussion quickly began seeking-out unusual, unappreciated, and unexpected places in New York City and planned a six-concert, six-space, six-hour tour of New York City over 2 consecutive weekends in April 2024.
The concepts behind this project have been decades in the making.
Michael Gordon, music-innovator and co-founder of NYC’s inimitable music collective Bang on a Can, has long been focused on adding dimensionality to the traditional concert experience. Many of his works harness the sonic space as part of the music itself. Oftentimes within a work Gordon’s music travels around the ensemble and into the physical space like a musical object — the architectonics of music.
His 2001 cult-classic and orchestral tour-de-force, Decasia — with film by Bill Morrison — is performed by musicians sitting on a multi-tiered set behind hanging projection scrims. The audience stands or sits, surrounded by the set, engulfed in a barrage of sound and imagery. Big Space (2017), for amplified sextet with spatial brass and percussion, fills the concert hall with an echoing shimmer of undulating sound; Gordon’s concert-length music for multiples — Timber (2009), Rushes (2014), Amplified (2015), 8 (2018), and his newest installment Resonance (2024) — all create kaleidoscopic waves of sound immersing the audience in layers of polyrhythmic resonant harmonies born as the sound combines in each unique performance space. Each of these works toys with the listener’s perception, using subtle movements of notes through time and physical space, their interactions reveal new sounds beyond their instruments’ standard timbral palette. Taken as a whole, these discrete elements and the environment in which they are embedded form the architecture of a larger structure — one in a state of slow but unrelenting flux, in which no two moments are alike.
Gordon’s 2022 work for 36 percussionists, Field of Vision — to be performed in open, outdoor spaces — takes the ideas he has honed over a lifetime of creation to shape and organize the sounds of over 150 metal instruments and drums (many of them made specifically for the work) into an ocean of sound: sometimes a placid and calm undulating sea, sometimes a violent and tumultuous tempest — swelling and building, crashing down and tossing around the listener on an hour-long sonic odyssey.
We all spend our lives immersed at all moments within an unceasing cacophony — whether it is the chaos of shrill sirens on a city street or the whisper of quiet in a room while we sleep.
The frequency of sound waves (the sound’s pitch/tone) can exist at the smallest, most imperceptible sizes — and also at unfathomable lengths. The amplitude of a sound wave, what we perceive as volume, is the relative strength — the “height” — of a wave’s crest and its trough.
Sound most notably (but not exclusively) propagates via air pressure and we perceive it through the sympathetic vibrations within our bodies: in our ears, our head, chest, stomach… in our feet. The intricate, complex sounds of a symphony orchestra magically transfer from the vibrations of strings, columns of air in wind instruments, or the crash of a cymbal — and not just the pitch, but the timbre of the sound (its quality: a flute versus a trumpet; a snare drum versus a cello; a chainsaw versus a nightengale) — bouncing off the walls of a concert hall and into our bodies; or, as music is heard most often these days: transferred through a digital language of 1s and 0s into a speaker and through the air or directly into your eardrum.
The complexity of all of these processes is mind-boggling. Of course sound is not limited to music in a concert hall, the noise of a city, the wilds of a forest, or the solitude of a cave: sound is everywhere, at all times.