Composer Joshua Coyne and artist Misha Ilin present “during celebration: fragments, arrangements, and interventions.” Building upon the shared interests of Coyne and Ilin in works that incorporate chance and encourage active audience participation as fundamental compositional elements, this concert event will showcase an aleatoric piece developed live before the attending audience. Using a violin combined with techniques and technologies that enable complex layers of sound, Coyne’s composition will adapt in response to the actions of Ilin and interactive prompts from the audience. The piece’s construction will unfold in real-time, anchored in the dynamic rearrangement of score fragments throughout the performance. This approach seeks to recontextualize mid-20th-century avant-garde practices, offering a reinterpretation of traditional ideas about musical linearity and predetermined composition.

This program accompanies the launch of Misha Ilin’s meta-meta: book of instructions (WPA, 2023). The documentation of this discussion as well as other evidence of it created during this program will become a part of the meta-meta exhibition on view October 14 – November 18, 2023 at WPA’s Project Space.

About the Participant

Joshua Coyne (he/him) is a composer, arranger, violinist, and music director based in New York. Known for his command of music and broad versatility both onstage and off, he enjoys developing multi-disciplinary projects that combine musical genres as well as vocal, instrumental, dance, and spoken word performance. His work has been featured at the Kennedy Center, The Sculpture Center, and the Socrates Sculpture Park.