Ghost Ensemble: Sarah Davachi's "Basso Continuo"
Sarah Davachi’s music pays close attention to the rumblings under the surface. Her work Basso Continuo, commissioned by Ghost Ensemble, stretches the Baroque practice of harmonic accompaniment to an extreme duration. Woodwinds work through a glacial counterpoint, anchored by low-end strings of two contrabasses, cello, and viola, and scaffolded by a retuned harp and ensemble leader Ben Richter’s custom just intonation accordion. Like much of Davachi’s work, the real action happens in the phenomenological experience beyond the notation. Close interactions of microtones ripple and waver, with a just intonation tuning involving the prime number seven—a favorite of minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, particularly in his The Well-Tuned Piano—and occasional glides of intervallic spans smaller than a semitone. Davachi’s work invites a harmonic listening in between stasis and motion, where the physical body of the instrument and resonance of the room are constantly in play with one another.
On their program at The Lab, Ghost Ensemble also performs work by their mentor and central artistic figure Pauline Oliveros along with Teodora Stepančić’s Harp N Ropes No. 4—commissioned by Ghost Ensemble in 2016—and the late drone legend Phill Niblock’s Exploratory for ensemble and prerecorded amplified accordion. The performance of Niblock’s work will be accompanied by projections of films from his landmark minimalist series The Movement of People Working.
Katherine Liberovskaya presents a program of her own video work, as well as her collaborations with Niblock, at Artists Television Access on Sunday, April 6, 2025.
Ghost Ensemble’s performance at The Lab is made possible with the support of the Violet World Foundation. The Lab’s contemporary chamber music programming is supported in part by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Amphion Foundation.
Program
Pauline Oliveros, The Well & The Gentle
Teodora Stepančić, Harp N Ropes No. 4
intermission
Sarah Davachi, Basso Continuo
Phill Niblock, Exploratory