Illustration by Sarah Mazzetti
Spring Classical-Music Preview
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Goings on About Town
"The first edition of the cellist Amanda Gookin’s Forward Music Project took on large-scale issues affecting women and girls, including sex trafficking and child marriage, but the second edition, titled “in this skin,” pivots toward the individual. Five female composers have written new works for cello that channel their deeply personal responses to such concerns as body shaming, street harassment, and women’s rights in Iran, drawing on experimental and multimedia techniques as wide-ranging as the subject matter. Alex Temple’s “Tactile,” a piece about “the erotics of everyday life,” uses ASMR-esque whispers and taps, and Paola Prestini’s “To Tell a Story” manipulates audio from a 1983 interview with Susan Sontag. With its husky sound, Gookin’s cello gives voice to these fights and flights of the soul against projected backdrops designed by S. Katy Tucker."