Alisa Weilerstein: FRAGMENTS 2
Part of: Fast Forward II
Performers
Alisa Weilerstein, Project Creator and Cello
Elkhanah Pulitzer, Director
Seth Reiser, Scenic and Lighting Designer
Molly Irelan, Costume Designer
Hanako Yamaguchi, Artistic Producer and Advisor
Event Duration
The program will last approximately one hour with no intermission. Please note that there will be no late seating.In the Artist’s Own Words
In early December of 2020—during yet another of what seemed to be endless lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic—I started scribbling ideas down on paper, anticipating a time when we would be able to reconvene with one another in the concert hall. I knew I wanted to create a visceral, emotional, and personal concert experience that would embrace the world we live in without sacrificing the intellectual aesthetic qualities that make our art form—concert music—such a singular mode of human expression and communication. I was also searching for a way to strip away our own natural instincts to categorize and contextualize everything we hear and see. I thought, “What would our experience of music be like if we could be given the chance to simply listen first?”
The entire FRAGMENTS project integrates all of J. S. Bach’s cello suites with 27 new commissions in original multisensory productions to make six programs, each an hour long for solo cello. Every program, or fragment, is played without pauses, and the program details are distributed after the performance.
The composers who have been commissioned to write for FRAGMENTS are diverse with respect to compositional approach, race, gender, age, nationality, and ethnic background. There is also an even mix of well-known voices and young composers or composers whose work has heretofore not been adequately appreciated by the wider public. I asked all the composers to write multi-movement pieces for solo cello and to kindly grant me permission to insert the movements at different points throughout the program. That being said, FRAGMENTS is not a project about people who write music, but rather about the music they write. The context and narrative in the sense that we are used to in our art form is far less important than listening to how these disparate voices interact with one another and create an entirely original, unified whole.
Although FRAGMENTS began as a flickering of thoughts and images, it has become something much greater. The remarkable group of artists with whom I am collaborating on this project and their joyful and thoughtful enthusiasm have been nothing short of inspirational to me. At its core, FRAGMENTS is about deep connection—links between disparate compositional voices, between concert music and theater, and most important, between audience and performer. I invite you to embark upon this adventure with us.
—Alisa Weilerstein