Listen In with David Watson
Saturday March 6, 2010, 7 pm FREE
HARVESTWORKS DIGITAL MEDIA ARTS CENTER
www.harvestworks.org
596 Broadway #602
New York City (at Houston St)
Harvestworks is pleased to present composer David Watson who is exploring and expanding the boundaries of the Highland Bagpipe instrument. This work was produced in part through the Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program.
“My instrument – the Highland Bagpipe (or, as Alan Licht once wrote, the “strap-on organ”) – has indelibly strong contextual associations. Mostly, it is seen as antithetical to new music. However, the ambulatory bagpipe is in fact a spatial and sonic explorer par excellence.
For this project, I have selected, explored and expanded on the existent nuances that are inherent in the instrument. A digital dimension has been added to the acoustic, both expanding its range and affirming it.” David Watson, 2010
David Watson is a musician living and working in New York City since 1987. A key figure in the experimental and improvisation scenes, he has worked closely with a wide range of exceptional musicians (Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Lee Ranaldo, Chris Mann, amongst many others).Originally a guitarist, in the early 1990’s he also started working on a new music vocabulary for the Highland Bagpipes.
The Wire magazine described his latest release – a double CD project of both guitar and bagpipe performances released on the Experimental Intermedia label – as “magnificent” stating, “nobody has heard anything quite like this before.”