315 Ensemble presents:
”Strains in the Signals”

may 25, 2022
7 pm
WCNY Performance Studio

415 West Fayette St
Syracuse, NY

Tickets are free, but please RSVP at the link below:

“Strains in the Signals”

315 Ensemble returns for our May concert program, Strains in the Signals, featuring a range of acoustic and electro-acoustic chamber music from local, national, and international composers. As we continue to emerge from the previous two years, we all collectively find ourselves discovering, rediscovering, and for many us, creating new versions of ourselves, amidst a continually fraught, fragmented world, while still living in a version of the internal and imaginary worlds that sustained us through the first two years of the ongoing pandemic.

The works on this program find their respective composers existing somewhere in the tension of the real and the imaginary. We'll hear natural soundscapes in Kirsten Volness's Bering Sea, where her imagination of the Bering Sea, a landscape she's never visited, leads her "to consider fairly unfathomable conceps: geologic time, the migration of early humans, a remote and unique ecosystem..." and Ben Smith's Ex Nihilo, Latin for "out of nothing", takes field recordings from a family vacation and transforms them into a short meditation.

In Chris Cresswell's From Dreams, We Emerge, the instruments emerge from a synthetic sonic landscape and play the fragmented remains of a musical thought the listener never gets to hear. Instead these fragments become their own musical work. Patrick Ellis's Unbranded Ensemble Piece sees the ensemble further retreating into a digital landscape, where the acoustic instruments are led by a persistent MIDI part.

We see the overarching theme of these works echoed in Natalie Draper's Strains in the Signal, which gives the title to this concert program, where "soft delicate dreamscapes" are fragmented amongst "loud surges and interruptions". All of this is summarized by the central question that makes up the title of Emily Levy's Sorry, where are we now?, a question first asked in response to Brexit and the 2016 US election, that feels more and more prescient with each passing year.

This project was made possible with the funds from the ReStart NY Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor's Office and the New York State Legislature and administered by CNY Arts.

Preview of the Music: