Claire Chase: Density 2036, part vi. The Kitchen, NYC.

Abstract

In a 2013 article Claire Chase muses on her dream to commission and premiere the ‘21st-century Density’. This performance demonstrated some of the difficulties with this idea in the actuality of twenty-first-century composition – the Work as it was perceived in the mid-twentieth century is largely displaced; the performer and her body has been rendered visible, her contribution central, and this concert is far more a portrait of Claire Chase than it is of her instrument. But Chase had in fact already accounted for this. ‘Of what will the Density of our time be made?’ she wrote, prophetically. ‘Of osmium? Of signal processing? Of wood? Of carbon? Of flesh? Of air?’