On the night of Sunday, May 6, 2001, composer Kenneth Kirschner, as part of a series of pieces documenting the sounds of different New York City neighborhoods, took his tape recorder to the Financial District of Lower Manhattan to begin field recordings for a new piece. The resulting low-resolution portrait captured the sounds of a deserted urban landscape: the empty, winding streets of old Dutch New Amsterdam, its modern, towering skyscrapers — and a region of the city that, several months later, would be renamed Ground Zero.
and/OAR is proud to present “May 6, 2001”, a collection of five interpretations by five renowned contemporary composers of the aforementioned field recording portrait.
With excerpts from Kirschner’s original 2001 composition based on the field recording, the CD also includes pieces by Taylor Deupree (USA), Tomas Korber (Switzerland), Ralph Steinbrüchel (Switzerland), and Aaron Ximm (aka Quiet American; USA), all utilizing the 2001 Financial District field recording as their sole source material. The result is a project that obliquely and subtly evokes the source recording and its subsequent meanings, while also standing on its own as an estimable example of each artist’s mastery of his craft.
