Ear Heart Music presents

Contemporaneous – Living Toys

November 12, 8:00pm at Roulette

In its opening concert of the season, Contemporaneous performs a show of frantic magic encompassing a series of pieces that provide a surround-sound explosion of energy and childlike wonder. This is music that moves like data across the internet or electrons around the nucleus.

The show opens with John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony, an apotheosis of the manic joy of discovery. Up next, Julia Wolfe’s The Vermeer Room shivers with sinister daydreams. The famed Bang On A Can composer drew inspiration for the piece from the discovery that Jan Vermeer edited out a figure standing in the doorway of his peaceful 1657 painting, A Sleeping Girl. Yotam Haber’s We were all follows in a transfixing blend of vigor and delicacy, composed for three voices and ensemble. Haber himself describes the piece as “a short burst of physical, muscular energy, sometimes menacing, sometimes exuberant.” Tracing this line of fascination through music, the show winds its way to Thomas Adès’ work Living Toys.  An adventurous projection of a child’s magnificent and superhuman vision for a future life, the program restores to us the magic of our craziest, innocent, and imaginative dreams.