Crosstown M42

Did you guys listen to that!!??!! Liement me deport is such a haunting piece. The performance got rousing applause from our young (and not so young) audience, and so did Eve.

Now Robert is explaining what his piece, Crosstown M42, is about. He's having the kids do some of the sounds and they're all having fun. "Teaching kids to hyperventilate through internet technology," quips John. He's introducing Robert and Fred now, explaining what "foley" is. Fred is doing some foley sounds to the great amusement of the kids.

The story behind this piece goes something like this: Robert and Fred took the M42 across Manhattan and they didn't really know what to, except that there were all those sounds that they found so interesting ("back door!!! back door!!!"). They decided to mix the music they heard along the way (e.g. sitar) with the sounds, then get a choir to try all these sounds (that choir being YPC).

So Fred sent Robert a piece with all these sounds he recreated on a computer, and Robert wondered what he could do to lift it to another level. His idea: at each stop, they would hear some kind of music. Music and sound effects = a new kind of music lifted as metaphor, so that when you get on the bus again, says Fred, you think about the music. You think about the sounds, says Robert, in a musical way.

The real message of the piece: If you see something, sing something. For those of you outside of NYC, this is a pun on the paranoid Metro bus message after 9/11 (if you see something, say something).

Here we go, Crosstown M42!