There were several things that clued me in to the possibility that this wouldn’t be a typical performance venue. To begin with, I was sweatily hauling music stands and metallic percussion infrastructure past the gleaming entrance to a DKNY, where chic, unsmiling salesgirls were lounging around cloth-heaped glass tables. The elevator opened up into a hushed space, museum-like; bold gashes of color, hanging suspended above a polished floor, spoke more loudly than the thin threads of our voices or the late-afternoon street noise floating up through the misted windows. This elegant room, hovering above the fashionable hubbub of Newbury Street, was the space we were planning to fill with dissonance, harmonics, glissandi, multiphonics, scrapes, bangs, parallel fifths, and other trappings of new music—all in our quest to relate in our own way to the visceral paintings around us.

As it turned out, the acoustic was lovely, crisp and rich; the paintings inspiring and the lack of stage/audience divide liberating. I know that I could benefit from more visual art in my life—something to artistically stimulate my eyes beyond all those black circles and squiggles on the page…and what better way to do it than to have the eyes and ears explore together?

We’re very fortunate to have not one but two opportunities to perform our music in the middle of the artwork that inspired it. This Thursday features the repeat of our Hyman Bloom project program—if you feel like getting to know some seascapes, Christmas trees, disenfranchised body parts, and wise Rabbis, we’d love to have you join us!

­–Zoe

Alpha Gallery, 37 Newbury St. 4th floor
Boston, MA 02116
Thursday 5/24 | 7:30pm doors | 8:00pm concert
free | donations appreciated

Painter Hyman Bloom (1913-2009) spent his career pursuing realities beyond his immediate world. During the years of Cubism and early Abstraction, he affirmed his comfort working in figures while locating himself squarely outside of the mainstream with his jarring use of color. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, Bloom grew old without religious devotion; instead he sought meaning in such disparate places as anatomy, Indian traditional music, and Eastern Mysticism. He painted Christmas trees and decaying legs, conventional still lives and quasi self-portraits in Rabbi garb. His approach was both deliberate and yet inquisitive, and his work continues to inspire in its subject matter, use of color, and highly personal attitude.

Much like composer Olivier Messiaen was to Boulez, Stockhausen, and the Darmstadt school, Bloom offered the impetus for the remarkable developments of Abstract Expressionism as explored by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. And like Messiaen, Bloom too regarded the revolution he helped launch as just another tree planted in the forest of his lifelong exploration.

As composers, performers, and artists of all kinds, we can learn a lot from Hyman Bloom. There is in his work a disregard for polemics, statements, the need for longevity. As a composer, I’ve noticed and even participated in a common, pervasive fixation on posterity and the place of our work within “the canon.” Naturally, though, it is the artists who are able to leave this anxiety behind who recognize that art is ultimately a search for identity and self-betterment.

In this spirit, Equilibrium is privileged to be behind a project exploring Bloom’s work through music. An avid listener during his life, Bloom is well honored through music. Equilibrium is launching the Hyman Bloom project next week and the following with a short program of chamber works reflecting his paintings. The concerts will take place at the Alpha Gallery on Newbury St. in Boston’s Back Bay, where the first posthumous exhibit of Bloom’s works has just opened. The music will be performed in the company of the very paintings which inspired them, and there will be ample opportunity to visit the collection throughout the evening.

–Mischa

Alpha Gallery, 37 Newbury St. 4th floor
Boston, MA 02116
7:30pm doors | 8:00pm concert
free | donations appreciated