Professional Development: Field Trips: Lost Objects, Brooklyn Academy of Music

Friday, December 3, 2004

PMP’s staff was joined by eight representatives of Greater Philadelphia’s contemporary music community for a performance of Lost Objects. Lost Objects is a multimedia music production with music by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, of the new music ensemble Bang on a Can. Members of Bang on a Can performed in the program along with Concerto Köln, The New York Virtuoso Singers (Harold Rosenbaum, Artistic Director), Elizabeth Keusch, Andrew Watts, Daniel Bubeck, and Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid.

Thematically, the piece addressed the “forgotten and mislaid objects that compose our continually vanishing culture,” as well as “the myriad implications of loss, and what it means to us when those things once lost are found.” The music rubbed up against the edge of rock, guitar- and drum-heavy, an aggressive take on such spectral material. From the first soloist chirping “I lost my wits” to the final memorial to Amelia Earhart – a conclusion as sudden and baffling as her own disappearance – the production built steadily in spectacular intensity. Staged by director and filmmaker Francois Girard, the three-tiered picture-plane of singers and instrumentalists was emphasized by a scrim onto which both ambiguous images and the libretto, by Deborah Artman, were projected. In one scene, a lost child, thirty-feet high, was presented in an almost invasive close-up, a discomfiting paradox of presence and absence.