Hinge presents a program blurring the lines between contemporary classical and avant-garde rock. This concert features pieces ranging from the lush harmonies and quirky rhythms of Dan VanHassel’s Sea Change, to the noisy electronic soundscape of Katherine Young’s Camilles, to Hinge’s reimagining of a song by extreme metal band Meshuggah. The program closes with Hinge’s interpretation of Julius Eastman’s epic and monumental minimalist work Gay Guerrilla.

Founded in 2018, Hinge is a quartet made up of Philipp Stäudlin (saxophones), Dan VanHassel (electric guitar), Matt Sharrock (percussion), and Keith Kirchoff (piano). Lying somewhere between a classical chamber ensemble and a rock band, Hinge presents programs combining cutting-edge contemporary and experimental music, seamless multimedia integration, and the innovative re-imagining of rock and pop songs. 

Program

Dan VanHassel: Sea Change
Katherine Young: Camilles
Meshuggah: Clockworks (arr. VanHassel)
Julius Eastman: Gay Guerrilla

“Camilles” is a speculative sonification invoked by multispecies feminist Donna Haraway’s “Staying with the Trouble.” Haraway suggests that one way to do this is to increase our capacity to experience the world as nonhuman critters do. In the book’s final chapter, Haraway explores radical ways this capacity is biologically enhanced in future generations of humans. In her story, Camilles are humans who have had “a few genes and…microorganisms” from monarch butterflies “added to [their] bodily heritage, so that sensitivity and response to the world as experienced by the animal critter can be more vivid and precise.” Recent scientific research suggests that some butterflies, although virtually silent to human ears, have remarkably expansive hearing. So, I wondered, what do monarchs sound like to one another? What would monarchs sound like to humans who are truly able to listen to them?

Composed about a year before AIDS was first clinically observed in the United States, on the tenth anniversary of Stonewall’s riots (a coincidence?), Gay Guerrilla (1979) is not Julius Eastman’s first piece to make reference to homosexuality. Neither is it the first of Eastman’s compositions in which the word “gay” is used in the title. Yet if all of Eastman’s music but this one were to disappear, Gay Guerrilla would still be enough to guarantee him a firm place in the history of twentieth-century music. Read "Julius Eastman's Guerrilla Minimalism" from The New Yorker.