Hastings & meicht
outdoor public performances 2021 - 2025
cloudsplitter (2021)
Cloudsplitter is an outdoor performance featuring a brass ensemble that is centered around the mythic persona of radical abolitionist John Brown. The title, Cloudsplitter, is a reference to the author Russell Bank’s novel on John Brown, which alludes to the highest point in New York State (Mt. Marcy). John Brown’s favorite hymn, “Blow, Ye The Trumpets, Blow!”, as well as the Civil War era March “John Brown’s Body” will be used as a centering device for the performance, a reference point to construct the harmonic and melodic content of the musical work.
Cloudsplitter was supported by LMCC (Lower Manhattan Community Council), Make Music New York, New York City Parks Department, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
forest song (2023)
Forest Song is a free music performance that takes place in a forested setting. Musicians are spread throughout the forest, performing a variety of sonic materials. Harmonies are reflected, words appear, and the melodies from revolutionary hymns are re-cycled, all conjuring a human and arboreal conversation. A Forest Song gathers everyone together over distance, a unitary statement that underscores the fundamental relationships that foster all our existences in this world. Over the course of an hour performance, the audience is free to wander the park, to hear the musicians at a distance, while also observing them close-by.
Myths and stories swirl around our forests, some of them fanciful and fantastic, others feed into age-old tropes of colonial settlement. They have been many things to humans: a source of fuel, shelter, fear. They are a place of mystery and repose. Forest Song takes these many iterations of human conception of the forest to fashion a poly-narrative: a Native American home, a European folk drama, a technocratic “shelterbelt”, and now a conserved piece of our future. Forests are a mirror for humans: the reflection of our wants and desires throughout our years of existence.
Forest Song was made possible in part with funds from Creative Engagement , a regrant program supported by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in partnership with the City Council , and administered by LMCC. This project is made possible in part with funds from UMEZ Arts Engagement, a regrant program supported by the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), and administered by LMCC. Forest Song was also funded by a NoMAA (Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance) Small Grants for Individual Artists made possible by the support of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
south cove song (overlay) (2024)
South Cove Song (overlay) is a site-specific music performance, featuring a brass ensemble, centered on the past(s), present(s), and future(s) of Lower Manhattan. The human interaction with the natural landscape and the built environment is questioned, reframed, and reassembled through sonic interventions in South Cove Park.
Using the site of the artist Mary Miss’s park project (created with Stanton Eckstut and Susan Child in 1987), the performance is partly an homage to this visionary artist’s work. It is also a musical and textual accretion of materials, from 17th century Dutch melodies, Romantic-era seafaring novels, to the contemporary resiliency plans for Lower Manhattan designed to mitigate against unstoppable natural forces. Humans have strung and knotted lines of increasing complexity in our world. What does the future hold?
South Cover Song (overlay) was presented as part of the River to River Festival 2024 and co-produced by the Battery Park City Authority.
river rhyme (2025)
River Rhyme is a live music performance featuring a brass and percussion ensemble sited at the edge of the Hudson River, on the West Harlem Piers. With the river itself as a sounding source, the performance invites listeners to contemplate the musical, political, and environmental histories of human interaction with our rivers.
Societies, cities, and civilizations have been birthed by their connection to waterways and rivers. From the Seine, the Thames, the Rhine, to the Yellow, Ganges, Nile, Irrawaddy, and to the Hudson, humans have interacted with inland water systems to grow crops, facilitate trade, and navigate new and future courses in their histories, for good and ill. River Rhyme is a music performance that builds on these histories through sound, music, text, with striking visual elements.
River Rhyme was presented with the Riverside Park Conservancy and was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature via a New York State Grants for Artists.