Musician Minus Instrument @ Northern Illinois University

BTP is glad to join NIU’s annual New Music Festival, presenting its program Musician Minus Instrument.

What does a musician become without their instrument? Can they use their skills in other ways, and still make music? What are the boundaries of what we can all agree is an “instrument”? What does musical virtuosity become if we don’t have 88 keys, 4 strings and a bow, or a polished brass tube through which to experience it?

Beyond This Point explores these questions in a concert that both breaks and expands what it means to be a musician and a performer. The musicians’ “instruments” run the gamut from a loose jack cable to an IKEA desk lamp to their own bodies and voices. Each work is suffused with musical virtuosity, but that virtuosity is brought to bear on an object or context that seems to resist being labeled as “musical”. Yet, after passing through the eye of the needle, the performers and audience alike emerge on the other side having glimpsed at a possible future where musical expression is no longer constrained to the world of instruments.