Musician Minus Instrument

Works

Performed by

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 an embouchure through which to experience it?

Musician Minus Instrument both breaks and expands what it means to be a musician and a performer. The “instruments” run the gamut from a loose jack cable to an IKEA desk lamp to simple 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, we emerge on the other side having glimpsed at a possible future where musical expression is no longer constrained to the world of instruments.