Playing with Seeds by American composer George E. Lewis was inspired by the research of anthropologist Paul Richards, who, over 30 years, studied rice cultivation by the residents of the village of Mogbuama, Sierra Leone. Richards understands this form of shifting agriculture as a system of improvisation and compares it to music. The work of women in society as primary researchers for cataloguing, introducing new techniques, monitoring, and predicting impacts serves as an analogy in the conception of Lewis's string quartet.

Playing with Seeds is the central work in a programme that will be performed by the ars ad hoc ensemble in the spaces of Material Evidence exhibition, which invokes some of the themes addressed therein, such as the materialities of history, memory, and perception and how these sustain, in more blatant or more transparent ways, cultural, social, and identity constructions.

In Purfling by Malin Bång, the sounds of the violin-making process guide us in a solo for the same instrument. Hold by Pascale Criton reveals sound interferences that arise from small gestures and almost imperceptible changes in a sound ecosystem of unstable balance.

Programme:

Pascale Criton (Paris, 1954)

Hold [2019], 10’

for violin, viola and cello

Malin Bång (Sävedalen, 1974)

Purfling [2012], 11’

for amplified violin and electronics

George E. Lewis (Chicago, 1952)

String Quartet 2.5 - Playing with Seeds [2017], 20’

Arte no Tempo is an organization funded by the Portuguese Republic – Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts.

Ars ad hoc is a project supported by Banco BPI and Fundação “la Caixa”.

arsadhoc.artenotempo.pt