Symphony No. -1: Rehearsal With Ethan Philbrick

Symphony No. -1 is a new research and performance project from Ethan Philbrick. It is a symphony that is also a symposium, involving both writers and musicians in a sonic social sculpture assembled under the sign of the negative. The negative in this instance marks a wide range of divergent valences and meanings—the negative as a mathematical and philosophical concept (nonexistence, absence, loss, lack, etc.), the political negativities of our current conjuncture (compounding environmental crises, imperialist genocide, fascism, debt, stuckness, technological dependency, etc.), as well as the negativity necessary to make a more equitably livable world (dissent, critique, resistance, refusal, conflict, struggle, rupture, etc.). While Symphony No. -1 will eventually grow into a large-scale ensemble work, Philbrick is developing the project through a series of small-scale iterations. The first of these will take place on Wednesday, October 1st at CTHQ and will feature sonic investigations from Philbrick, Keir GoGwilt, Joanna Mattrey, and Nicholas Nauman, and readings by Laura al-Tibi, Isaac Jean-Francios, Sara Nadal-Melsió, and Avgi Saketopoulou. Symphony No. -1 is informed and inspired by a web of already existing works that create the conceptual, political, and aesthetic conditions of possibility for this iterative symphony-symposium. For more, please see Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on “being the negative,” A.K. Burns on “negative space,” Rizvana Bradley on “negative inhabitation,” Julie Rishe on “negative psychoanalysis,” and Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Steven Swarbrick on “negative life.” More Info below.