Species of Spaces The Ensemble intercontemporain Plays Blondeau, Lindberg, and Vivier
Paul Gr iff iths
Music, we know, exists in time, unfolds in time. But it also exists and unfolds in space—in the resonant spaces within and around an instrument, in the larger space of the concert hall, and then in another space, virtual, where we position it in our perception. The new work by Sasha J. Blondeau, and the one very nearly half a century old by Claude Vivier, both change the spacing of musicians within the hall. This will jolt our perceptions, but no more than they will be jolted by the ideas that have demanded departing from conventional placement—ideas coming from ritual spacing and movement in the Vivier, and in the Blondeau from the internalized geographies of our minds. And of course, as Magnus Lindberg will remind us, it is possible to propose a new space from within a normal concert layout. Another Space, Another Time Sasha J. Blondeau’s twelve-minute Contre-espace takes its title— “counter-space”—from Michel Foucault, two quotations from whom head the score. For Foucault a counter-space, which he also calls a “heterotopia,” a place of otherness, is somewhere off our regular mental maps of familiarity and unfamiliarity, safety and danger, habit and exception, rest and action. A counter-space may
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