(re)Sounding (2020)

Exhibition in collaboration with Seven Count at The Bennington Museum, February-May 2020.

(re)Sounding presents an imaginative reinterpretation of the Bennington Museum’s archive of historic instruments through installation, improvised performance, experimental composition, and historical research. Collectively, the exhibition organizers and participating musicians investigate what happens when historically significant instruments are treated as instruments rather than relics.

(re)Sounding adopts a manifold approach to sharing this collection. First, we made and commissioned new music with the instruments. We composed a piece as Seven Count, and we invited composers Laura Cetilia, Kristen Gallerneaux, and Molly Herron to contribute their own. Second, we presented live improvised performances with these instruments. Improvisation is a way of being in the present with our bodies,our instruments, each other, and our environment. Third, we exhibited the instruments in a museum gallery along with historical ephemera and photographs. Alongside these, we offered historic, period-accurate recordings. Lastly, we created an essay and gallery guide that critically addresses the histories of these objects and the museum. It was essential for us to learn how and why this collection came to be, and to consider how it might create a sense of historical belonging for certain people while silencing that sense in others.

Each aspect of (re)Sounding—improvisational performance, composition, exhibition, archival research, and writing—is a filter through which we can listen to the collection and a mode through which we aspire to shift its course.

Gallery guide and essay here. Compositions and audio here.

Jake Nussbaum

Scholarship Projects Music

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