loadbang Presents: Testament

loadbang Presents: Testament

“If testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted.” (Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony)

Testament catches fire in an unresolved and unspeakable tension: between a secularized new music on the one hand, and music’s inevitable discourse with the ineffable and holy on the other. All of the works on the program find themselves as a result in orientation to the Christian Bible: some subversive, some hermeneutic, some textual, some sonic, some earnest, some cheeky. Seare Farhat, Alex Temple, and Matthew Ricketts reimagine Biblical depiction of the body for queerly reparative ends; Francisco Del Pino and Eva-Maria Houben search for music’s eternity as alternative religious states; and Chenghao Michalis Li refracts Biblical resonances from the Western classical canon to rethink how we approach the sacred death. Taken together, Testament suggests the many ways that music continues to be a central site for grappling with the question of being and a human impulse to make meaning out of it. Presented at Columbia’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, the works on this program take advantage of both an intensely resonant space and overtly religious architecture to amplify the productive tension: between aesthetics and faith, between beauty and being, between testimony and its secret.