TAK Ensemble presents an evening highlighting the impossibly small sounds and glacially slow music of composer and visual artist Seth Cluett. The performance will feature the world premiere of irreversible histories of disturbance, a long-form composition employing handmade instruments and novel scoring techniques that emphasize communal interdependence, performer agency, and playful curiosity about sound. The result of an extended collaboration, this work takes an ecosystemic approach to audible form and language that considers time-cycles, symbiosis, causation, erosion, disturbance, crisis, decay, and growth as catalysts for musical interaction. The concert will also present the premiere of a short video work the reformation of assemblages, part of Cluett’s no small matter series of works utilizing found flora. For this installment TAK Ensemble, choreographer Abigail Levine, and filmmaker Itziar Barrio were given separate text scores resulting in an experimental document of an outdoor performance collecting and exploring the sound of seed pods, pine cones, leaves, and downed branches.

Seth Cluett composer
TAK Ensemble
Laura Cocks flute
Madison Greenstone clarinet
Charlotte Mundy  voice
Marina Kifferstein violin
Ellery Trafford percussion

“One of the city’s most fearless contemporary ensembles, known for rigorous experimentation and technical precision” —The New York Times

“21st century chamber music that combines crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex.” —The Wire

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.

Regarded as “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen), TAK Ensemble delivers energetic performances “that combine crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex” (The WIRE), and “impresses with the organicity of their sound, their dynamism and virtuosity” (New Sounds, WQXR). Founded on the principles of curiosity, change, and caring communication, TAK is dedicated to the commissioning of new works and direct collaboration with composers and other artists and they have premiered hundreds of works to date. TAK is Laura Cocks, flute; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Charlotte Mundy, voice; Marina Kifferstein, violin; Ellery Trafford, percussion.

Seth Cluett is a composer and visual artist who creates work that explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and investigates memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Ranging from photography and drawing to installation, concert music, and critical writing, his “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Exploring the territory between the senses, Cluett’s works are marked by a detailed attention to perception and to the role of sound in the creation of a sense of place, the workings of memory, and the experience of time. The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM. His concert work has been commissioned by ensembles ranging from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the International Contemporary Ensemble to So Percussion, Catch Guitar Quartet, and Clogs and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice, and Winds Measure recordings. Since 2017, Cluett has served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs and is Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art MFA Program at Columbia University.