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A Plateau of Trilogy
 

Year of production: 2025

Running Time: 6:57 min

As a component of Music Becoming-Minor in Performance Spaces, the project is developed primarily in collaboration with pianist Ning Yu. In Trilogy for Two Pianos, Tape, and Live Electronics, Pianists Ning Yu and Cory Smythe enter into machinic assemblages with various bodies through three movements. The film captures these desiring-machines that generate continuous flows of sonic intensity, forming a bloc of sensations. 

This performance-event emerged as Trilogy for Two Pianos, Tape, and Live Electronics (Muntendorf, 2014–2018), a 45-minute two-piano cycle developed over four years and composed by German composer Brigitta Muntendorf. This piece comprises three movements: Key of Presence, KreisIncrease, and Key of Absence. Premiered in North America as part of the TIME: SPANS 2024 contemporary concert series (Yu & Smythe, 2024), the work featured pianists Ning Yu and Cory Smythe performing as a duo.

Ning and Cory were not individual performers but functioned as components in and of a larger New Music territory. Human gesture, piano mechanism, and electronic processing enter continuous variation, each element simultaneously deterritorializing and reterritorializing the others in music becoming-minor. Before its concert in the performance space, musicians underwent a week of rehearsal and recording at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

© 2025 by Xiaoyue Zhang

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