Samuel Clay Birmaher | Unity Song (2025) (excerpt 2) скачать в хорошем качестве

Samuel Clay Birmaher | Unity Song (2025) (excerpt 2)

Unity Song is a three-hour composition for keyboard written in dialogue with artist Tamiko Kawata’s installation Together II (Waterfall) at Alison Bradley Projects, an art gallery in NYC. Like much of Kawata's work, the installation is made out of interlinked safety pins, in this case long chains draped on all four walls of the space, their form imitating the sylvan waterfalls of Japan's interior. In the autumn of 2025, when I joined other volunteers in creating the strands that make up the installation, I witnessed how the bonds of safety pins we made with our hands became the human bonds we began forming naturally with each other. My focus on this was strengthened by my conversations with Kawata in preparation for writing the music. Like the artwork, the music is fundamentally about connection, and was written in response to this specific moment in time. Echoing Kawata’s use of safety pins, Unity Song is built entirely from a simple musical unit that can connect with versions of itself in different ways. As the music slowly breathes, the units coalesce into communities of notes, then disperse again into emptiness. This ebb and flow develops in cycles, each time transformed into something new, but always formed out of the same musical atom. And as with everything else in this music, the ending connects back to the beginning in an unbroken flow. Unity Song’s transparency—its sounds, its silences, its arc and its flow—is in service to acting as a focusing lens for the space it exists in. Together with the artwork, unfolding at a pace far below the rhythms of daily life, the music invites listeners to enter a shared space of unfractured attention.