To hear on Sunday 26 April and 3 May 2015, 2pm - 9pm:

Island

(2015, World Premiere)
by Dean Rosenthal

Loudspeaker installation, curator: Knut Remond

Dean Rosenthal on 'Island':

What you are hearing in 'Island' is an excerpt, a study really, in preparation for a much longer piece, also named Island, the composition of which is now underway. Island explores the history and community of the island I live on, Martha’s Vineyard. In America and around the world, Martha’s Vineyard is famous for hosting presidents and celebrities in their vacation time, and also provides a spot for the well-off and wealthy of the world to hang their hat when they want to escape everyday life.  

The year-round community who call Martha’s Vineyard home has an often separate existence and contains a richness that visitors rarely see and that richness and lore is the subject of Island. I interviewed a number of year-round residents, asking each the same three questions: What brought you here? Why do you stay? Do you have a story to tell? I also went around the island recording sounds from wherever I could. In the end, Island is a narrative of the island community and of island sounds that forms the lasting and unique connection that we as year-rounders experience as we live here on the island and the aural and spiritual landscape that is Martha’s Vineyard.

Relating to the question "sound activism" with which ohrenhoch deals in 2015, Dean Rosenthal writes:

Sound Activism is for me something that all sound is striving for – whether or not it is social or political, sound reaches out to others to bring us together, push us apart, pull us into solitude, or lead us to an intellectual and emotional space for us to contemplate or weep or jump for joy or reinvigorate us; things like that, both experiential and a-priori.

As a composer, when I activate music, it's almost as if I'm merely translating something that has already existed and forever will exist. My work often is driven by musical ideas that I find outside of myself. Finding these musical ideas usually appears to me without provocation and so the element of sound activism is less influential as an intellectual or aesthetic modality than the sound activism I find in my personal experience of community, but also acts of inspiration tempered by logic.

['Island' is supported in part by a grant from the Martha's Vineyard Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.?The ohrenhoch Sundays 2015 are supported by Initiative Neue Musik Berlin e.V. and Konzert des Deutschen Musikrates]