Bring your own cushion, take a glass of complimentary wine and make yourself comfortable for an intimate and mesmerising evening of sound and light. 

Crippled Symmetry takes its name from the work of the iconic Morton Feldman: a composer renowned for delicate quiet works cast over large time-frames. Influenced by the New York abstract expressionist painters, Feldman proposed a music that was liberated from pre-existing musical forms and devoid of any systematic planning. Rather, he used large canvasses of time to intuitively paint a gentle music floating mysteriously between chance and order.



The concert begins with Feldman’s famous work for solo percussion The King of Denmark. Performed by Claire Edwardes, one of Australia’s leading young soloists and Ensemble Offspring’s Associate Artistic Director, The King of Denmark is far removed from your typical beat-oriented percussion music. The soloist uses only her hands to caress a palette of sounds that exist weightless and detached in time. 

The headline work, Crippled Symmetry, refers to the patterns of ancient middle-eastern rugs, repetitious but imperfect and distorted. The work is “minimalist” in that it is characterised by repeating fragments of music, however, the music does not sound like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Feldman instead slows down the listeners’ perception of time with an unassuming ambience that one commentator has likened to capturing “the sight and sound of a snowflake melting”.

Crippled Symmetry presented in association with Eastside Arts and Arts NSW

Sydney Stone Gallery 395 Oxford
 St Paddington, 8pm Saturday 25th August 2007


Download concert program here