BlackBox Ensemble. Photo courtesy of the Noguchi Museum
Nov. 2, 2023 By Ethan Marshall
The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City announced that an additional 50 tickets will be made available for the New York City-based contemporary music collective BlackBox Ensemble’s performance in the museum’s first-floor gallery Wednesday, Nov. 8, from 7-9 p.m.
Tickets for this concert program had been sold out prior to the Noguchi Museum and BlackBox Ensemble making these extra tickets available. The tickets will be available for free with an RSVP at tickets.noguchi.org/products/space-time-memory starting Friday morning.
This concert program of sonic landscapes is meant to make those present explore their relationships with space, time, objects and memory.
BlackBox Ensemble musicians Teagan Faran, Yifei Xu and Samuel Zagnit, alongside actors Liz Dutton, Michael Bertolini, Melani Camille Michiko Carrié and Thomas Deen Baker, will be performing the world premiere of the English-language version of “Borrowed Landscape,” a German radio play written and directed by composer Dai Fujikura and playwright duo tauchgold (Heike Tauch and Florian Goldberg). The play is meant to reflect on the nature of memory and loss contained within objects.
Borrowed Landscape tells the story of a Stradivarius violin walled up in a cellar in Budapest, a double bass left behind on a flight to Erez Israel and a piano left behind after the bombing of Hiroshima. As the musicians play these instruments, they unlock the histories and secrets each one carries. This story is inspired by the true story of Akiko Kawamoto, a young American-born Japanese girl who lived Hiroshima during the 1945 atomic bombing. While she didn’t survive the bombing, her piano, an upright Baldwin, did. It is played every year on the anniversary of the bombing to honor her and the other victims.
BlackBox Ensemble Artistic Director and Conductor Leonard Bopp will also be conducting compositions by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inti figgis-vizueta and Toru Takemitsu.
Founded in 2018, the BlackBox Ensemble is a collective of young contemporary NYC-based music performers who are dedicated to exploring the experimental boundaries of the music of today through projects that are innovative, impactful, and resonant with our times. Those who make up the group believe that music, as a cultural medium, enacts an ambiguous but vital relationship between artistic expression and social life.
The Noguchi Museum was founded in 1985 by Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. It was the first museum in the United States to be established, designed and installed by a living artist to show
their own work. Open air and indoor galleries are featured in a serene outdoor sculpture garden and repurposed industrial building.
