Site recording of 'Partials' at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, October 13, 2021–December 4, 2021 . 
" ... at stake is an explicit refusal of the pervasive notion that sound, over and above the other senses, is a universally immersive and unmediated experience. Instead, 'Partials' takes off from the knowledge that our sense of sound is always incomplete, differential, phenomenally distinct and materially pliable... " More: www.marinarosenfeld.com/partials

'Partials'

Live recording of Marina Rosenfeld solo performance at Vancouver New Music, October 2015

Untitled live solo performance by Marina Rosenfeld - at Vancouver New Music - 2015

Free Exercise (2014) by Marina Rosenfeld

Free Exercise is a work in which a piece of chamber music (duo for violin and piano) is nested within--and effectively challenged or destabilized by--a second work, for military ensemble in uniform, who jointly occupied the four linked galleries of the Bergen (Norway) Kunsthall in March 2014 as part of the 2014 Borealis Festival. The two musics are simultaneous and entrances are co-ordinated by a conductor. The work is flexible in total length, but about 35 minutes.

From Borealis 2015 catalogue:
‘Free Exercise‘ is a new work from the American composer and audio artist Marina Rosenfeld, commissioned by the Borealis 2014 Festival and composed for the Norwegian naval band Sjøforsvarets Musikkorps (SFMK) with the soloists Karin Hellqvist (violin) and Heloisa Amaral (piano). The work has been developed with the exhibition rooms of the Bergen Bergen Kunsthall as a site-specific framework for the performance, where the orchestra and soloists, which are separately engaged in series of motivic and rhythmic “exercises” of varying degrees of physicality, are distributed across the four adjacent exhibition rooms of the Kunsthall. This gives the audience intimate access to certain gestures while making others only available at an acoustic remove. The work fleetingly evokes two films, ‘Beau Travail’ by Claire Denis and ‘Duck Soup’ by the Marx Brothers, both featuring uniformed bodies engaged in complicated choreographies. As in her previous works, Rosenfeld’s distribution of events, objects and players, in rigorous formations that are responsive to both acoustic and architectural properties of the site, allows a compositional staging of relations—order, disorder, stress, distraction and escape—that unfolds gradually in musical form.

Free Exercise (complete) 2014 - For Orchestra And Soloists

Solo cello work performed by cellist Okkyung Lee in 2013 at Borderlines Festival, Athens. Note: photo depicts premiere performance of 'Guide...', also by Okkyung Lee, in 2012 at Tuned City Brussels, Curo Hall, Brussels.

Guide de la vie associative - for solo cello - 2014

Excerpt from score for live dance installation "PLASTIC" by Maria Hassabi at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016. The score was diffused every 30 minutes between February 21 and March 20, 2016, through multiple loudspeakers in the MoMA atrium, and the stairwell between 3rd and 5th floors. http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1611

Three songs from PLASTIC (2016) - score for live dance installation

The orchestra of Marina Rosenfeld's 'Free Exercise' is a hybrid made up of both military and experimental musicians, who together map a large-scale composition for drummers, percussionists, wind players and others over two key sites in Montreal, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) and a nearby regimental drill hall (Regiment de Maisonneuve). Participants, including the Fusiliers de Mont Royal, an enlisted band based at the Armoury of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, and luminaries from Montreal's rock, contemporary and free/improvised music scenes including Jessica Moss, Cleo Palacio-Quintin, Philippe Lauzier, Sandra Joseph, Kristie Ibrahim, as well as drummers Eli Keszler and Greg Fox, mount an initial collective performance of Rosenfeld's score, distributed throughout the gymnasium-like 'terrain de parade' of the Cathcart Armoury. Over the course of an approximately 60-minute performance, participants engage in a series of collective musical "exercises" testing the limit points of rhythmic and melodic unisons. In subsequent performances, segments of the work are restaged within the confines of the museum, further extending the sonic juxtapositions and mappings of the initial performance into the space of the exhibition.

Free Exercise was originally performed in the linked galleries at the Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen Norway, as part of Borealis Festival 2014, and featured performers from the Royal Norwegian Naval Band. Rosenfeld's new version for the Biennale de Montreal moves the work into open, resonant space and expands upon sequences from the Norwegian production that highlight patterns of cooperation and conflict that play out in acoustic space.

'Free Exercise'  - version for Biennale de Montreal - 2016 - excerpt 2

The orchestra of 'Free Exercise' is a hybrid made up of both military and experimental musicians, who together map a large-scale composition for drummers, percussionists, wind players and others over two key sites in Montreal, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) and a nearby regimental drill hall (Regiment de Maisonneuve). Participants, including the Fusiliers de Mont Royal, an enlisted band based at the Armoury of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, and luminaries from Montreal's rock, contemporary and free/improvised music scenes including Jessica Moss, Cleo Palacio-Quintin, Philippe Lauzier, Sandra Joseph, Kristie Ibrahim, as well as drummers Eli Keszler and Greg Fox, mount an initial collective performance of Rosenfeld's score, distributed throughout the gymnasium-like 'terrain de parade' of the Cathcart Armoury. Over the course of an approximately 60-minute performance, participants engage in a series of collective musical "exercises" testing the limit points of rhythmic and melodic unisons. In subsequent performances, segments of the work are restaged within the confines of the museum, further extending the sonic juxtapositions and mappings of the initial performance into the space of the exhibition.

'Free Exercise' - version for Biennale de Montreal - 2016 - excerpt 1

Excerpt of live performance on February 2,  2015, at House of Gaga, Mexico City, with Joseph Strau "Loyalties," composition for piano and dub plates.

'Manners/Duck Soup, in several parts, with restored memory of interruptions and rehearsal' - 2015

Oh

you’ve been

to Afghanistan? or Iraq

UAE

Dubai

or

Saudi?

—from USO, by Kim Rosenfield

"My red, red blood" (2011) is a composition for video projection (color, sound) and live ensemble. 

“My red, red, blood” began as a recorded reading and later re-writing, by the composer, in handwriting over manuscript paper, of the text “USO,” by the New York poet/experimental writer Kim Rosenfield. Rosenfield's text appropriates language from a website ostensibly by an American “USO” entertainer who discusses his travels abroad to perform comedy to US military personnel. Rosenfeld renders the episodic structure of Rosenfield's fragmented and enigmatic text in both image and sound; the resultant video-score is then “read’ by an ensemble, in this performance a group including strings, piano, percussion, winds and electro-acoustic musicians. Both a meditation on US military power and the curious position of the “visiting American artist” abroad, "My red, red blood" takes its cue from the punning, disjointed pacing and self-referentiality of the stand-up comedian. It was premiered in Oslo in December 2011 by Ensemble neoN at Dramatikkenshus, Oslo." For an excerpt of the video-score with sound, see https://vimeo.com/36710664.

My red red blood - 2011 - premiere by Ensemble Neon, Oslo

6 minute excerpt from the exhibition, 'Deathstar,' by Marina Rosenfeld, at Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, Feb 17-April 16, 2017. 

From Portikus.de: 
The exhibition title of Marina Rosenfeld's new work for Portikus, Deathstar, refers to an unrealized line of research conducted in the late nineties in the last days of the sound laboratory at AT&T (formerly Bell Labs). Before it was abandoned, researchers explored the possibility of formalizing the subjective and transitory nature of sonic experience through a proprietary microphone configuration and set of calculations. So-called “perceptual soundfield reconstruction” aimed to allow users to reproduce a sensory account of the experience of one space within another. The “death star,” the device's informal nickname, referred more to the appearance of the structure, but the device also pointed to an alternative future, a future where listening was closely tied to cognition and the body.

Marina Rosenfeld takes up the “death star's” idea of environmental recording but inserts it back into a more immediate and complex temporality. The gallery is co-opted as a site of continuous simultaneous recording and playback, a fluid and recursive acoustic environment where a constant production and dispersal of data is subject to a series of delays and to the native distortion of Portikus' architecture. Indeterminacy in this system is a function not of philosophy, but the inability of the apparatus to fully grapple with the quantity and complexity of the signal that is continuously collected, translated, and redistributed through a set of shotgun microphones, an interface and four speakers.

Part echo chamber, part unruly machine, the Deathstar ultimately achieves a kind of legibility through another recursive gesture, the conversion of its collected sound back into notation. In that sense sound is neither an abstraction nor a means to an end, but rather a material condition connected to the formation of music. . . 

More: http://www.portikus.de/en/exhibitions/205_deathstar

6 minutes of sound from the exhibition 'Deathstar' , @ Portikus, February-April 2017

8-minute excerpt of 5-hour performance on March 31, 2017, by pianist Marino Formenti, as part of the exhibition 'Deathstar' by Marina Rosenfeld, at Portikus, Frankfurt, Feb 17-April 16, 2017. 

More information:
http://www.portikus.de/en/exhibitions/205_deathstar

8 minutes of 5-hour performance by Marino Formenti inside 'Deathstar', Portikus, March 31, 2017

14 minute unedited excerpt from middle section of 30 minute premiere performance of 'Deathstar Orchestration' by Marina Rosenfeld, 2017. With Ensemble Musikfabrik, Marino Formenti, amplified piano, Enno Poppe, conductor. Recorded live by SWR.de radio.

Deathstar Orchestration-PREMIERE-Donaueschingen 2017-excerpt

"Greatest Hits: A Reproduction" was originally conceived for the Guggenheim Museum rotunda as part of "Moholy-Nagy: Optical Sound" in 2016. The work draws on the composer's history of producing acetate test-pressing records, or dub plates, since the late '90s: the composition is a translation into numeric patterns of an archival playlist of Rosenfeld's dub plate recordings. This recording is taken from a performance at Qubit, New York, 2018.

GREATEST HITS (excerpt) with Greg Fox and Eli Keszler

Marina Rosenfeld's "Teenage Lontano" is a "cover version" of Ligeti's 1967 orchestral work 'Lontano', rewritten for 34-voice choir and overhead speaker installation. The work is an extended free structural analysis of Ligeti's modernist masterpiece substituting earphone and mp3 technology, a dynamic loudspeaker installation, and procedures involving chance and improvisation, where the original relied on traditional notation to produce cloud-like acoustical effects. 

The first performance was commissioned and presented by the Whitney Museum for the Whitney Biennial Exhibition 2008, and co-produced by Art Production Fund, with acoustical engineering by Bob Bielecki and Arup Acoustics.

Teenage Lontano - 2008 - First performance Whitney Biennial 2008

Cannons is a 3-movement work from 2010 composed for four large, resonating ‘bass cannons’—steel pipes fitted with subwoofers—and ensemble (percussion, viola, cello and electronics) in resonant space.. The original cannons were fabricated from local steel by J T Pegg and Sons, Snape Maltings, and were graduated in size from 1 meter to 7 meters long. They were capable of reproducing bass frequencies with unusual fidelity and could be experienced vibrating at the threshold of the physical and the aural at close range by audience members and performing musicians alike. The concert portion of the work was approximately 30 minutes. Cannons was commissioned by UK festival Faster Than Sound, and has also been produced in Australia at the Midlands Railway Workshops, by Ensemble Decibel and Festival THNM/Tura New Music.

Cannons  - 2010 - (excerpt) - at Faster Than Sound - Aldeburgh UK

Excerpt from 2019 performance of the Sheer Frost Orchestra at Dark Mofo festival, Tasmania. More info: www.marinarosenfeld.com/the-sheer-frost-orchestra

Sheer Frost Orchestra, Tasmania

My Body was a commission of the 2019 Time:Spans festival and was premiered by Yarn/Wire ensemble with Marina Rosenfeld performing alongside them on turntables. Each movement is oriented around a different approach to a suite of custom dub plates that have been distributed to the ensemble. The plates house seven bands of pre-composed sound materials—mostly short vocal ‘utterances’ Rosenfeld made during 2019 at Nokia Bell Labs with a 1930s prototype Voder (an early electronic speech synthesizer)—and are the basis for a set of eight variations. Each variation is both a social and musical occasion, requiring a distinct, intensive mode of listening. Performers collaborate to track and respond to the dynamic outcomes of various techniques of playback on turntables together in real time, foregrounding and building outwards from the sociality of collective listening. The eighth variation sees the ensemble recreating the acoustic signature of the dub plate itself by rubbing small stones together in imitation of LP surface noise.

'My body'

'Guide de la vie associative' is a piece for solo cello I composed for my longtime collaborator, cellist Okkyung Lee, in 2013, with live amplification aimed at highlighting and working with the resonant characteristics of the performance site. 'Guide' takes off from the close relationship Lee and I have established in over a decade of collaboration. As improvisers, we both have ways of thinking through motivic repetition, through listening for small changes and for resonances and other acoustic features of sites. I wrote this piece quickly in 2013 when another work I had planned to present in a festival in Brussels was held up in customs. I drew inspiration from the concert site itself, a large social-services bureau in Brussels’ Anderlecht section that housed dozens of helpful agencies devoted to aspects of daily life. The score is a translation from each entry in the bureau’s pamphlet, into a set of numbers, which I use to regulate series of repetitions, de-tunings and difficult to perform technical operations. It offers Lee and myself an intricate framework within which to explore Lee’s palette of extended techniques on the cello, and my interest in creating a conversation between the architecture of the building and the music. My role in performance is to sit nearby at the mixing desk and spatialize the mic signal live to a carefully prepared PA system. The length of 'Guide de la vie associative' is approximately 40 to 45 minutes. 'Guide' was premiered in 2013 as part of the festival “Tuned City Brussels,” and has been performed by Lee several times since, including in Borderline Festival, Athens, in 2014 and at Project Qubit in New York in 2018, where this recording was made.

Part 1     0:00
Part 2    7:57

Marina Rosenfeld

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