Salt Wood Salt Wire Salt Salt

This event was recorded. Please view the performance here.

Salt Wood Salt Wire Salt Salt is a new composition by Jace Clayton, visiting artist at the Harvard Art Museums. It serves as a companion piece to his current installation at the museums, titled Jace Clayton, The Great Salt. Written expressly for—and performed with—the new music ensemble Bent Duo (David Friend, piano; Bill Solomon, percussion) and featuring Clayton’s live electronics, Salt Wood Salt Wire Salt Salt explores the structural themes of The Great Salt installation: 17th-century British classical song form, West African thumb-piano polyrhythms, granular synthesis, and playful interactivity.
 
Museums freeze time. Music melts it. Clayton’s work flows between these binaries—moving from oceanic abstractions to pointillistic melody patterns—with surprises lurking throughout. The composition is tailored for Bent Duo’s singular ability to unite world-class musicianship with a forward-thinking approach to contemporary performance.
 
As salt both preserves and corrodes, so this pair of works by Clayton situates itself in issues of historicity and nonlinear time—not as metaphor but as an active museum intervention quite literally regulated by the intermodulation of clocks (and the audience), and as a through-composed score that contains rules for its own alteration. 

This performance will take place in Adolphus Busch Hall, 29 Kirkland Street.

Free admission, but seating is limited. Tickets will be distributed beginning at 6:30pm at the entrance on Kirkland Street. One ticket per person. 

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Please visit Jace Clayton, The Great Salt, a digital response and sonic extension and intervention into the complex history of a 17th-century silver vessel, on view in the Lightbox Gallery at the Harvard Art Museums through February 4, 2019.
 
Support for the program is provided by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities.  

In addition, modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.