Loose Associations

Loose Associations is the world premiere of a new 22-minute work by Joseph Michaels for cello quartet and playback.

There is a long tradition in music of creating meaning through references to the visual arts or earlier compositions. In Loose Associations, an additional layer of reference is created when Joseph Michaels adds his voice to works by other composers and associates them with the visual arts. To cite a few examples: In the first movement, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 is reinterpreted as a dancing Hungarian figure through its pairing with Béla Bartók’s Hungarian Dance (from Mikrokosmos III). The near-quotation from Bartók’s folk dance in D major quickly transitions into an original composition featuring dense clusters and a delay effect, representing Duchamp’s transformation of the recognizable figure into a depiction of movement. In the second movement, the delay effect is pushed to another extreme. A melodic C minor cell from Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes is layered over itself seven times and constantly altered harmonically and rhythmically in small steps to depict the numerous squares and rectangles of Paul Klee’s Polyphony and their color shifts. The movement concludes by turning to the many miniature dots in Klee’s painting with staccato-like, repetitive block gestures.

The live concert was originally scheduled for June 2021 at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Due to complications caused by the coronavirus, the event took place as a livestream concert in the newly renovated space at the Werkstatthaus.

Graphic design by Nicolas Zupfer.
Video by Luis von Wolff.
Audio by Nikola Lutz and Lorenz Lehmann.