McIntyre's "Presencing Piece No.1" | SummerStreets/Federal Plaza

Presencing Piece No. 1 (Fed Plaza) (2014)

by Chris McIntyre
In collaboration with TILT Brass, Ed Bear, and David Shively
A site-specific performance and installation at Jacob K. Javits Federal Building Plaza

Chris McIntyre - Composer and Creative Director
Ed Bear - Technical Director
David Shively - feed-back drums

TILT Brass
Trumpet
Garth Flowers, Mike Gurfield, Rich Johnson, Tim Leopold, Stephanie Richards
Trombone
Jen Baker, Jacob Garchik, Sam Kulik, Will Lang, Matt Melore, James Rogers, Peter Zummo

Contextual information available on the project Tumblr site

Conceived by composer and trombonist Chris McIntyre for SummerStreets, Presencing Piece No.1 (Fed Plaza) is a collaborative, site-specific sonic experience designed for the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building Plaza. Unfolding over a 2-hour period, Presencing Piece... features a 12-piece compliment of Brooklyn-based experimental music group TILT Brass, Either/Or percussionist David Shively, and a state-of-the-art implementation of multiple PA speakers. McIntyre locates the live musicians and the arrayed speakers around the plaza to amplify physical and intangible properties of the site. The PA system and other small devices broadcast sound via infrared transmitters with which the audience is able to interact. The goal for McIntyre and his collaborators (including tech director Ed Bear) is to transform the audience’s sense of aural dimensionality and scale as they are immersed in the simultaneity of sound and spectacle. The piece also aims to create a dialogue between the present and past of the site. One piece of this is the presentation of text-based sounds that tell abstract histories specific to the site and surrounding area. Content ranging from local geologic data, facts about Manhattan’s pre-colonial population, and fragments of other social and political narratives is projected from the on-site speakers while also accessed in earphones from “hidden” online sources (directed via QR-code posters). To many contemporary New Yorkers, “Fed Plaza” is tied to Richard Serra’s site-specific sculpture Tilted Arc (1981), an extremely controversial work that was commissioned for and eventually removed from the site. March 2014 marked the 25th anniversary of its deinstallation. McIntyre and Company’s impressions of the dialogic relationship between Serra’s work and the plaza are found at the core of Presencing Piece No.1 (Fed Plaza).