The first performance was the installation Book: Speaker Ensemble at the Burchfield-Penney in January 06. I recorded around 55 solo vibraphone interpretations of first two pages with each interpretation lasting between 15” and 4’. These recordings were distributed randomly among 4 CDs, with only a few tracks shared between the discs. I gave each member of the Open Music Ensemble between 1 and 3 4x6” loudspeakers and a disc of vibraphone music and asked them to alter the speakers in some way as to react to the vibraphone music – using the speakers as their instruments, the musicians were performing with the vibraphone. Each resulting speaker/instrument/sculpture was then displayed in a gallery at the museum. The tracks on the four CDs were played randomly through four audio channels with 5 speakers per channel. As the listeners walked through the room they could mix the instrumentation of the piece, always hearing a combination of the vibraphone and some or all of the speakers.
J.T. Rinker, Chris Reba, Leah Muir, Otto Muller, N. Andrew Walsh, Bill Sack, Todd Whitman, Will Redman, Josh DeScherer