METABUSKING
About the Work
METABUSKING imagines four buskers and their repertoires colliding upon their return to public music- making. The performers begin as individuals emerging from pandemic isolation into competition for a prime space, but gradually become an ensemble by collaboratively recombining their materials. The piece depicts and also creates the messiness of busking, from the cacophony of a busy summer day in Prospect Park to the shifting power dynamics of musicians working with each other for the first time. The repertoires consist of crowd favorites from our own busking experiences and the 2020 hits stuck in our heads, whose street and park premieres were cancelled by COVID. Text and game pieces combined with notation and memory guide the musicians to work with and against each other in different ways, creating improvised and aleatoric mashups that embrace the frustrations and then joys of being together again.
Meet the Composers
