Mills Presents Online Concert by Faculty

Cellist Tomeka Reid (from the Eventbrite Web page for the concert being discussed)

Last night Mills College presented an online concert, presenting a video recording of a performance that took place in Chicago featuring cellist Tomeka Reid, who currently holds the Mills Darius Milhaud Chair in Music Composition. Reid performed one uninterrupted hour of improvisation with percussionist Adam Vida as the only other musician. However, video artist Selenia Trepp contributed to the mix with her electronic video processing gear. She provided real-time synthesis of images projected behind the two musicians. The projector itself was on “audience side,” meaning that it also cast shadows of the performers that (presumably) contributed to the overall visual effects.

The greatest risk in this performance is that the visual experience would overshadow the auditory one. Reid is clearly a skilled cellist with a powerful command of a hefty repertoire of extended techniques. However, by the time half an hour had elapsed, even the most attentive listener would probably acknowledge that she had said pretty much all that she had to say. Because Vida seemed to be conscientiously committed to remaining in the background, his own contributions did little to extend the overall flow of the improvised music.

That left Trepp’s contributions to the mix. Her work was both technically imaginative and aesthetically stimulating. She had an almost uncanny gift for exploiting ambiguities across two-dimensional and three-dimensional images. Clearly, the projection itself was two-dimensional; but Trepp summoned highly inventive techniques to convey impressions of physical depth, often exploiting those techniques to summon up “impossible objects,” which were then set in motion.

It was the diversity of the visual journey that kept the viewer occupied after that first half-hour during which Reid “had her say.” Nevertheless, after about 45 minutes, Trepp seemed to resort to recapitulation; but, when combined with Reid’s meanderings, there was little conveyed to the listener/viewer that would establish any “sense of an ending” on the way. Indeed, after the hour had elapsed, all three performers just stopped, almost as if they had been “working on the clock” rather than exploring the underlying communicative nature of acts of improvisation.