Joyce To, Timothy Roth, Jasmine Tsui performers
Video Production | Andrew Ascenzo
Audio | Peter Olsen
Recorded Live in Walter Hall – February 21, 2021
Great Hymn of Thanksgiving (2003) takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced by fragments of news reports from Iraq, scraps from the Army prayer manual, invented Arab folk tales, and a recurring State of Emergency pointing everywhere and leading nowhere. The sounds of the table itself struggle to bring this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.
The piece is a trio between the functions of music, noise, and semantic meaning, wherein each function can mingle with the others, lose itself in reveries (under fields of motive force that assert themselves with varying degrees of insistence), or, when necessary, take a solo.