...escuchando...
Program Note
“Escuchando: a madrigal of shadows for four voices” is conceived as incidental music to the video art work “...escuchando...” by visual artist Marsia Alexander-Clarke, to seamlessly integrate sound with sight. The artist describes her idiom with the concept of “video as mark”, borrowing a common term used in drawing and painting. Such marks most notably include narrow luminous slivers set against a dark background. Often these slivers function as the outer frames of highly filtered images of real life, particularly relating to the intricate play of light on plants. Marks are used as primary compositional motives in what the artist describes as a “visual narrative which develops sequentially, like a silent, visual fugue.” In this respect, one experiences marks in a dual way: as crevices through which we can gauge glimpses of our perception of the world, and as pure forms, autonomous abstract entities masterfully assembled and arranged in time.
As an aural and intellectual counterpoint to Alexander-Clarke’s work, I engaged with the idea of aural marks as perceptual crevices into a world of indistinct memories and as pure sonic objects in an abstract form. Slivers of embodied sounds consisting of minute gradations of breath emerge from islands of long silences, gradually giving way to fragile sung lines, assembled and arranged in response to the artist’s idea of a “silent, visual fugue.”
— Stratis Minakakis, composer
Music by Stratis Minakakis (https://www.stratisminakakis.info/)
Video by Marsia Alexander-Clarke (https://videoasmark.com/)
Performed by Carduus (https://www.carduuschoir.com/)
Audio edited/mixed by Peter Atkinson
Biographies
Marsia Alexander-Clarke was born and raised in Valparaiso, Chile, and came to the United States to attend high school in 1952. She received her B.A. from Park College, Kansas City, Kansas, in 1962, after which she traveled to New York City to further her studies in art. In 1970 she came to California where she further developed her painting.
From 1972 to 1974, Alexander-Clarke attended Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, during which time her high relief paintings on paper gradually became three-dimensional. Marsia received her M.F.A. from CGU in 1974. A year later she was accepted at McDowell Colony for a two-month scholarship residency. Upon her return to California, Alexander-Clarke continued developing her sculptures, which she exhibited extensively in California and nationally.
In the late 1980’s, she attended video art workshops at the Pasadena Community Access Corporation in Pasadena, California. Since then she has worked with video as her primary medium. In 2001, she received an Individual Artist Grant from the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division for her choral video installation, 6 in 1 to 64 CHOIR, which was exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. In 2018 she became a Fellow in Film-Video with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Stratis Minakakis is a Greek composer and conductor whose creative work engages issues of memory, cultural identity, and art as social testimony; it also explores the rich possibilities engendered by the interaction between arts and sciences. His music has been commissioned by The Crossing choir, PRISM Quartet, Harry Partch ensemble, Arditti String Quartet, and ERGON Ensemble. As a conductor, he has led NotaRiotous, EMMA ensemble, ALEA III, Valencia Institute Contemporary Ensemble, and NEC Contemporary Ensemble; and in 2017, he conducted the PRISM Quartet and Partch Ensemble in their album Color Theory.
Deeply committed to music pedagogy, he was awarded the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and the Louis Krasner Award at the New England Conservatory. He holds degrees from Princeton University (AB), New England Conservatory (MM), and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD). He has presented on theoretical topics at UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, Ithaca College, and Conservatorio “Joaqin Rodrigo”. He is Composition Faculty at Valencia International Performance Academy (VIPA) and is currently Faculty of Composition and Music Theory at the New England Conservatory of Music. He lives with his family outside Boston, Massachusetts.
Founded in 2016, Carduus presents the best of early and modern a capella music to Boston audiences. Led by Holly Druckman, Carduus explores musical connections between distant centuries in a way that sheds light upon the relationship between the obscure and canon. Hailed by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as “...[expressive and emotional]...” for performances of Ives and Gesualdo, they have recorded and premiered numerous works for fellow intrepid musicians, and have collaborated with visual multimedia artists Maya+Rouvelle and Guggenheim fellow, Marsia Alexander-Clarke.
The cultural richness of Boston is special to Carduus and that has inspired community-centric projects such 2021's community concert "Concert for remembrance: A Requiem for the Living", lead by guest conductor Lorraine Fitzmaurice, and 2020's fundraiser with composer Bernie Zelitch, "Come Up for Air", benefiting the Boston Children's Chorus.