Pamela Z’s Times Square Tone Poem

from the PROTOTYPE event page for  “Times³”

This month one of the contributions to the PROTOTYPE Opera | Theatre | Now Festival is Pamela Z’s latest project. “Times³” is a site-specific sonic experience involving a text by Geoff Sobelle and music by Z. Those that enjoy wordplay may be able to guess that the site in question is Times Square. The piece was designed to be experienced through headphones, meaning that listening to it could take place in Times Square itself (or any other place).

From a musical point of view, “Times³” can be approached as a follow-up to Z’s “Simultaneous,” which was conceived for radio broadcast and discussed on this site a little over a month ago. Sobelle’s text is structured primarily on the history of Times Square, often in the context of the history of Manhattan. That text is delivered by a rich variety of historians, performing artists, and other individuals impacted by studying or working in Times Square. Z then applied her transforming and editing techniques to weave a rich fabric of discourse punctuated by isolated phonemes and lexemes along with a diversity of concrete sounds. She also added to the mix relatively brief parts for three instrumentalists, Tom Dambly on trumpet, Todd Reynolds on violin, and Crystal Pascucci on cello.

The result is a thoroughly engaging listening experience so rich in content that many will feel it deserves to be repeated. Fortunately, it will be available for listening throughout the remainder of the PROTOTYPE Festival, which will conclude on this Saturday, January 16. Tickets are available at no charge through the “Times³” event page. This will involve providing an electronic mail address to which will be sent instructions for listening to the composition.

Between “Simultaneous” and “Times³” I have found myself fascinated with Z’s unique venture into the domain of concrete music (whose origins can be found in innovative “experimental” approaches to providing programs for radio broadcast).  “Times³” is rich in historical and sociological content, but the listener is drawn into that content through techniques that broaden the boundaries of what may be classified as wordplay. It is because those techniques are so rich that it is inevitable that anyone listening for the first time is likely to tap into new insights when returning for a second time.

 “Times³” was designed to be experienced through headphones, which is really the only way to appreciate the spatial context of all the sounds that emerge. That said, I can also imagine that this work could serve as an installation: a room in which the spatial qualities are revealed through a physical array of loudspeakers that surround a seating area for listeners. Like the projection of a film, the composition would be broadcast through those speakers at scheduled times, allowing listeners to experience as much of what interested them as often as they wish. However, until we can put “social distancing” behind us, solitary listening through headphones is likely to be the only way to appreciate Z’s creation at its fullest.