Inspired by Ann Lauterbach’s poem “Midsummer Night,” this piece stages a dialogue between language and sound across three interwoven sources: the cellist performing onstage; the same cello captured and transformed in real time; and a recorded reading of the poem by the poet herself, diffused through a ring of loudspeakers around the audience. The result is an immersive, spatial tapestry in which speech, resonance, and memory circulate and refract.
Lauterbach—an American poet and essayist whose work is noted for its lyrical clarity and associative thought—has been recognized with major honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a National Book Award nomination. Her presence here is both literal (the voice) and structural: the poem’s shifting vantage points become cues for the music’s own shifts in register, color, and proximity.
The cellist’s interpretation is not only heard but also shapes the electronic response, as gesture, bow pressure, and timbre trigger evolving transformations that move through the four speakers to re-situate the instrument in space. Listeners are invited to let meanings remain fluid: to hear text as tone, tone as echo, and the room itself as a chamber where language becomes sound—and sound, briefly, becomes a kind of thought.