Joseph Klein – An Unaware Cosmos

October 26, 2018

Faculty composer Joseph Klein's An Unaware Cosmos—the premiere performance of the complete cycle of nineteen solo and chamber works— in UNT's Winspear Hall. This performance was made possible by a faculty fellowship from the UNT Institute for the Advancement of the Arts, and features faculty, student, and guest performers, including members of the International Contemporary Ensemble in residence at UNT. The individual works in this modular cycle were composed between 2012 and 2018, and are intended as a celebration of humankind’s quest for knowledge through skepticism and critical inquiry, and to those freethinkers who have devoted their lives to such noble pursuits. The mutable arrangements of the works in this cycle are intended to explore a variety of relationships—timbral, spatial, conceptual, structural—both within and between modules. In performance, music from these distinct modules is fragmented, dislocated, suspended, disrupted, and penetrated, often in unpredictable ways, thus challenging our teleological assumptions regarding musical form. 

The nineteen soloists and chamber ensembles that comprise the work are distributed throughout the entire performance space; in order to coordinate all of these disparate forces, iARTA fellow Christopher Poovey developed a Max patch cuing system that uses a central router to send performance information to the various performers through their laptops, tablets, or smart phones.