Coming Soon: 80 Trombones at the Guggenheim

Sounds Promising!

Free performances of Henry Brant's Orbits—a "spatial symphonic ritual" calling for 80 trombones plus sopran(in)o and organ—are scheduled for the great spiral at the Guggenheim Museum on Sunday night at 7:30 and 8:30 pm.

This could be pretty good! Brant, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music who died in 2008, devoted his career to the exploration of spatial music—how sounds don't have to emanate from a single physical location (like a stage) but instead can come from a variety of locations. Naturally, like any good composer with an appreciation of the Low Brass Union (LBU), he was attracted to the notion of composing for a mass gathering of trombones.

The Sunday night performances are part of this year's Make Music New York! festival. I'm afraid that many such events will be rained out—Water Music, anyone?—but thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright's foresight in designing the Guggenheim with a roof, the presentations of Orbits should be reasonably free from any precipitation—aside from the spit valves, of course.

Thanks to Manhattan Users Guide (MUG) for the lead!