Synaesthesia Playground Poster - Jocelyn Ho

PC: Dave Sweeney

Synaesthesia Playground

Synaesthesia Playground is a classical concert experience for the 21st century masses. Jocelyn Ho brings together a world-class team of musicians, computer scientists, visual artists, and fashion designers to create an immersive and interactive concert experience. Featuring six newly commissioned multimedia works for piano, the visual effects of Synaesthesia Playground is nothing less than spectacular. Multimedia artist Celeste Oram and Takefumi Ide create video projections onto the body of the piano, reimagining the piano as a living organism with a “skin.” Visual artist Nobuho Nagasawa and HUL ARNOLD create a performance attire made of optical fibres and spacer mesh fabric that pulsate and change color to the performer’s heartbeat, breathing, perspiration, and movements. The pianist’s interiority vs. the piano’s exteriority—this dichotomy will change audience perception of the very nature of music making. This project was sold-out at Spectrum NYC, and has been performed at Stony Brook University’s Staller Center and UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall between 2016 and 2017.

FULL RECITAL PROGRAMME

FIRST HALF feat. Piano Epidermis by Celeste Oram with Takafumi Ide

Toccata and Bruise by Celeste Oram
[skin touch]
Iyalāmai by Anne-Sophie Andersen
[voice of feminist struggle]
Missa di Glossa by Sidney Boquiren
[spirituality-core]

SECOND HALF feat. Bio Lux by Nobuho Nagasawa with HUL ARNOLD

Love Spiral by Andrew Batt-Rawden [heart]
tech: Ben Finchley, Pierre Depaz
Lux Venit by Daniel Weymouth [breath]
tech: Pierre Depaz, Drew Petersen and Al Petersen
Sheng by Jocelyn Ho [inter-bodies]
tech: Drew Petersen and Al Petersen

PROGRAM NOTES BY JOCELYN HO​

It is my pleasure to bring to you a vision that has been in the making for many years, borne out of my interdisciplinary research in music and embodiment. Any lover of music can tell you that music affects them not only on a cerebral level; great music can chill bones and raise hairs. And so, Synaesthesia Playground is about experiencing music on this kind of physical plane. The theme of this concert is the body, and I am going to take you for a ride through my own and ultimately, through yours.

The first half of the program is a journey inwards from the skin to the depths of the core: we start with the superficial touch in Celeste Oram’s toccata & bruise, then enter into the vocal apparatus with Anne Sophie Andersen’s Iyalāmai, and finally plunging into the core where we experience spiritual ecstasy in Sidney Boquiren’s Missa di Glossa.  

In the second half of the program, we start interiorly with my live heartbeat and breath: both of these physiologies will be hooked up to the music and the visuals in Andrew Batt-Rawden’s Love Spiral and Daniel Weymouth’s Lux Venit. Finally, the trajectory of the bodily journey catapults outwards: we finish off with my composition Sheng, a collective improvisation where your gestures (via your mobile phones) will be part of the music-making.

The music and the visual installations — Celeste Oram and Takafumi Ide’s Piano Epidermis and Nobuho Nagasawa and HUL ARNOLD’s Bio Lux— meld together as one to highlight the inter-sensoriality of this physical journey. The two halves of the recital juxtapose the piano’s exteriority with the pianist’s interiority: while Piano Epidermis is a dynamic installation on the body of the piano, Bio Lux is a luminescent garment pulsating to my internal viscera. One may ask, where is the boundary between the pianist’s and the piano’s bodies?

The vision of Synaesthesia Playground exists within my general outlook of bringing Classical music to the masses. In this 21st century of dwindling classical music audiences, the classical concert needs to shed its elitist image and bloom in directions that are exciting and contemporary.  I hope that this experience of Synaesthesia Playground inspires you to explore what the world of new music has to offer.

MEDIA

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