But let say you do want to get up off your sofa and amble down the sidewalks of New York City to the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building at 5 East 3rd Street. I love the combination of Goethe and Wyoming. Especially on 3rd Street. That's not 3rd Street in Brooklyn, where, you may remember, I lived back in the early 80s. That's positively 3rd Street in Manhattan, where you've got a lot of nerve to enter a concert hall in the dark:
After of years of investigation, the Suites are removed from the concert hall and placed in an unilluminated space, in which the cellist repeatedly plays them over a period of ten days. Through the extended timeframe and the elimination of any visual input, the listener and the playing musician are unified within the same visual and musical space.Scurry over there — would you? — if you're within scurrying distance, and let me know if you became unified with the musician by virtue of your presence in "the same visual and musical space." The "visual space" is nothingness. You can close your eyes while listening to your iPod, and imagine the cellist playing with his eyes shut. But he's not there, and it's not happening now, so unification requires more imagination. Still, this mystic state might be more achievable in the absence of the distraction of finding your way around in the dark.
Uncertainty about the original creative intentions of the Suites invites perpetual debate and allows imaginative free reign for redefining the environment in which they are played.I'm distracted reining in my imagination and reigning over my imagination about the old rein/reign pedantry. But proceed:
Bach Suites in the Dark removes the Suites from the concert hall [and] explores their malleability and the notion of practice in which they are rooted.Most people know the Suites from recordings — like this — so the notion of removing them from the place where you never needed to go invites us into the even-more-imaginary place in the past when people had no recorded music.
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