Marina Rosenfeld

GREATEST HITS (2016)

Greatest Hits: A Reproduction was conceived for the Guggenheim Museum rotunda as part of a program of live music for the exhibition "Moholy-Nagy: Optical Sound" in 2016. The first performance was a duo with drummer Greg Fox. In later performances at Qubit New York, PS1 MoMA and others, drummer Eli Keszler joined the drum section, making the work a trio. The recording, GREATEST HITS, was released November 17, 2023 by Berlin-based label INFO Utld., with Marina Rosenfeld, turntables, Greg Fox & Eli Kezsler, drums. Listen on this website at Records. Or go to Bandcamp.

“The score for GREATEST HITS, is essentially a way of reading “as notation” the numbers that occur sequentially in a playlist I previously created for an exhibition of all my dub plates (to date) at Carnegie Melon in 2016: see Turn of My Century/Dub Plates and Test Pressings, 1997-2014. Using the numbers 1 through 7 as they occur in the playlist’s dates, times of day, and ‘a side’ or ‘b side’ indications, the drummers convert these into polyrhythmic, technically virtuosic patterns and sequences in real time. For example, dates are converted into numbers of repetitions (so, the date “8.21.15” calls for 8 repetitions followed by 21 repetitions followed by 15 repetitions). Buttressed lightly by my own passage on the plates themselves through the playlist (without regard to the score’s rules), the drummers’ produce shimmering stochastic textures that do not in any way transcribe the sounds of playback, but begin to resemble it anyway.” Score examples below.