Two remarkable works of sound art will materialize in Seattle this
week: Ruth Anderson‘s I Come out of Your Sleep and
Annea Lockwood‘s Thousand Year Dreaming.
“I’ve been interested in the connection between sound and healing
for quite some time,” says Lockwood by phone from her ranch in rural
Montana. In Thousand Year Dreaming, wind instruments dominate
and the musicians take breaths as overlapping, thrumming drones make
gradual entrances and exits. The audience hears and sees the musicians’
respiration, and, done right, a collective breathing begins
between performers and listeners.
Among the all-star musicians set to the task is trombonist Stuart
Dempster, who was an inspiration as Lockwood wrote the piece. “He’s
embedded in there already—to have him play it is fantastic,” she
says.
Lockwood will perform, too, projecting large-scale images of the
prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux. The images are a kind of
mandala, a visual aid to induce a meditative state.
The second half of the concert presents Anderson’s hypnotic I
Come out of Your Sleep in quadraphonic surround sound. Sleep gradually exhales a cloudlike bed of whispered vowels culled
from the poem “Little Lobelia” by Louise Bogan. Elongated by digital
processing into the sound of distant wind, the voiced vowels hover in
midair: frozen, haunted, yet calming. Sleep lulls you into a
netherspace between waking and sleeping, where dreams still seem real
while they’re evaporating from memory. Don’t miss it. 
See Lockwood and Anderson Sat Oct 4, fourth floor Chapel
Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave N,
789-1939, 8 pm, $5–$15 sliding scale donation.
Thurs 10/2
SEATTLE SYMPHONY
“I cannot stand Richard Strauss,” decrees my mother by phone from
Spokane. “He’s loud and a bit obnoxious.” Which is precisely the point
of Strauss’s tone poem “A Hero’s Life.” A brawling autobiography for
orchestra, our hero fights his way into the world, preens, dukes it out
with critics, finds love, and ultimately settles into sweet, saccharine
peace. Also: Lynn Harrell in Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No.
1. Benaroya Hall, 200 University St, 215-4747, 7:30 pm,
$17–$105.
Fri 10/3
NORTHWEST SINFONIETTA
This concert pairs Stravinsky’s chamber fable A Soldier’s
Tale with Michael Daugherty’s Dead Elvis, which casts a
bassoonist as Elvis, a latter-day Faust. Will he sell his soul for
success and a grueling schedule making terrible movies in Hollywood?
Also Sat Oct 4 at the Rialto Theater in Tacoma. Town Hall, 1119
Eighth Ave, 888-365-6040, 7:30 pm, $26–$40.
Sun 10/5
ORCHESTRA SEATTLE
George Shangrow and the band unfurl the epic German Requiem.
More a serene cantata than a thunderous, heads-bowed requiem, Brahms
chose the texts himself from just about everywhere in the Bible.
First Free Methodist Church, 3200 Third Ave W, 800-838-3006, 3 pm,
$10–$25.
Mon 10/6
MESSIAEN ORGAN CYCLE
The organ music of Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) dazzles with
quiet monodic lines, burbling ambience, cataclysmic chords, and roaring
fanfares that herald an imminent galactic apocalypse. Inside a
stone-walled cathedral, the music shimmers, rattles, and swerves around
you. For the best listening, sit near the center in the transept and
tilt your head to the ceiling. In this installment you’ll hear the
Offrande au Saint Sacrement, The Celestial Banquet,
Verset pour la Fête de la Dédicace, and Livre
d’Orgue. St. James Cathedral, 804 Ninth Ave, 382-4874, 8 pm, $15
suggested.
