Event

Wild Rumpus: Mission Ammonia

Wild Rumpus March program explores the merging/diverging of multiple identities, musical and personal. Each piece marries two or more with varying degrees of success or fraught tension. Angelita Negróns La Isla Sacra joyfully juggles influences from the islands of Bali and Puerto Rico. Daniel Wohls Kin weaves found and offered sounds from a consortium of percussionists into a mosaic for solo percussion and electronics. Missy Mazzoli's Magic with Everyday Objects, which the composer describes as "a piece on the verge of a nervous breakdown, seems to try desperately to present a traditional musical narrative while elements of the piece spiral increasingly out of control.
Dan VanHassels monodrama Mission: Ammonia for soprano and seven instruments, with text by Jesse Rimler, follows a similar trajectory. A sci-fi allegory, it tells the story of an American woman traveling to the distant planet Ammonia to sell a special new cleaning product. In the composers words: "On the surface it is the tale of an utterly unremarkable individual trying her best to do her job and live her life in the proper way. Underneath thisfacade however, lies adeep anxiety and terror; hints and suggestions of terrible forces at work. Despite her best attempts to find meaning in hermission of bringing the wonders of American cleaning technology to distant worlds, theseforces keep bubbling to the surface, eventually becoming impossible to ignore.

Program:
Angelita Negrón: La Isla Sacra contrabass, electronics
Daniel Wohl: Kin percussion, electronics
Missy Mazzoli: Magic with Everyday Objects flute, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, contrabass
Dan VanHassel: Mission Ammonia flute, trombone, violin, contrabass, electric guitar, piano, percussion, soprano