Critic’s Choice
Sarah Cahill. Photo: Marianne La Rochelle
Some of the most beautiful music of the past several decades is also some of the most unusual, as with Mamoru Fujieda’s large-scale piano work, Patterns of Plants. Fujieda used a device called a Plastron to read the electrical activity in plants, then transformed the data into notes. Listening to the results, he extracted patterns that he found musical and set them into an extended suite roughly based on Baroque dance forms. The result is a series of gentle and lyrical pieces that are full of unexpected details and changes in direction.
Pianist Sarah Cahill, who has made the most extensive recording of this work to date, will be playing this music at the Noguchi Museum in Queens today through Sunday during all museum hours. The circular nature of the music will make it ideal for both sampling and concerted attention.
Sarah Cahill plays Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants at the Noguchi Museum, today through Sunday during museum hours. noguchi.org
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