What Is It Like To Be a Bat

Question posed by Cartesian linguist Thomas Nagel. Reflected by Erik Satie: "We cannot doubt that animals both love and practice music. That is evident. But it seems their musical system is different from ours"

Performer/composers Kitty Brazelton and Dafna Naphtali collaborate on a montage of extremes: textures hard/soft, noises white/red, harmony rooted/disembodied, silence.

Both women sing from startling 4-octave ranges, Brazelton having honed her edge in rock bands since 1969 and currently leading Dadadah (Village Voice :"Wild-woman vocalist...with a wailing intensity in all her genres"), Naphtali vocalizing in bands as well as straight classical recitals and new music opera casts.

Both women play electric guitar: Naphtali has toted hers from coast-to-coast, purveying jazz, folk, disco, whatever the gig required, while Brazelton makes unheard-of sounds, no pick, Soviet-made fuzz box, never having played one (though she's written concertos for the instrument) before.

Both women compose hard-core computer music: Naphtali, erstwhile studio director of New York University's Music Technology program, conducts live interactive radical ambience processing using her custom Max programs, while Brazelton (D.M.A. Composition, Columbia University, 1994) creates software-synthesis DAT soundtracks and samples at Columbia's Computer Music lab.

All this is woven, spliced, patched, threaded, then drummed together by BAT's third member: Danny Tunick, percussionist extraordinaire, whose credits span alterna-rock and contemporary classical realms. He's a recorded member of the bands Guv'ner, Camp and Mad Scene, as well as the Princeton Composer's Ensemble, Common Sense Composer's Ensemble and the Bang on a Can Festival's Spit Orchestra. But WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT? is a whole new thing.

"What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new"Jacques Attali "Please ask me if you like it." Gertrude Stein

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Events:
Concert 3

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