
to repair the damages of gravity
I will my weight upwards
that the fractured earth beneath me
may begin
to heal



The Damages of Gravity draws inspiration from Ai Weiwei’s Straight, a work that responds to the devastating earthquakes that occurred in China’s Sichuan Province in 2008. Because of poor construction practices, these earthquakes resulted in an exceptionally high number of deaths - approximately 5000 schoolchildren and teachers were killed. Ai and his team gathered 150 tons of reinforcing rods from collapsed buildings, then spent 3 1/2 years straightening the metal, symbolically repairing the damage. In the final work, Ai arranges the straightened rods to resemble an undulating, fractured landscape. 

Compositional materials for The Damages of Gravity were extracted from the sounds of struck metallic plates using spectral analyses; these analyses were used to generate harmonic structures and to process instrumental sounds during performance. The instruments are thus able to take on certain qualities of the metal plates, as Ai Weiwei’s metal rods took on the identity of the lost children. Over the course of the work, these metallic spectra are stretched, fractured, deformed, and transformed into new structures, as the piece searches for reconciliation in the wake of tragedy. 


The Damages Of Gravity

Karen Siegel conducts C4 in a performance of Seawall, by Jamie Klenetsky Fay.

Composer: Jamie Klenetsky Fay
Conductor: Karen Siegel

Soprano
Rebecca Ehren
Noele Flowers
Christina Kay
Melissa Wozniak

Alto
Maya Ben-Meir
Jamie Klenetsky Fay
Erin Halpin
Jane Lawson
Beth Marker
Leonore Nelson

Tenor
Ben Arendsen
Nate Barnett
Mario Gullo
Joseph Prestamo
Casey Rule
Richard Tucker
Grant Yosenick

Bass
Daniel Andor-Ardó
Hayes Biggs
Brian Mountford
Perry Townsend
David See

Composed November 2016, Recorded March 18, 2017
Church of Saint Luke in the Fields, New York, NY

Audio Recording
Noriko Okabe

Collaborations

Jamie Klenetsky Fay: Seawall

C4 is a unique, award winning chorus directed and operated collectively by its singing members, functioning not only as a presenting ensemble in its own right but also as an ongoing workshop and recital chorus for the emerging composers and conductors who form the core of the group.

Jamie Klenetsky Fay: Seawall

c4ensemble

Related tracks