music: Bent Frequency

At the Goat Farm
1200 Foster St.
Atl, GA 30318



Program:
The Innocents, written and performed by John Lane and Allen Otte
Coming Together (1971) by Frederic Rzewski
Attica (1972) by Frederic Rzewski

Performers:
John Lane, percussion
Allen Otte, percussion
Rick Clement, voice
Amanda Pepping, trumpet
Sarah Kapps, cello
Stuart Gerber, percussion
Jan Baker, saxophone
Ken Long, clarinet
Tania Maxwell Clements, viola

The Innocents was originally conceived as a performance art/theater piece in collaboration with Cincinnati director Michael Burnham and a group of actors from Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Drama Program.

In 2000, photographer Taryn Simon traveled across the US photographing and interviewing individuals who had been wrongly convicted and served time for crimes they did not commit. The individuals photographed were exonerated through DNA evidence, some after serving as much as 18 years in prison. In most cases, mistaken identification was the primary cause of the wrongful convictions. Simon photographed the men at sites that had particular significance to their conviction: the scene of the crime, arrest, or the scene of the alibi. The Innocents, which is the resulting collection of photographs, have been exhibited internationally and featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. In these photographs Simon confronts technology's ability to blur truth and fiction. In the cases and subsequent lives of the Innocents, this quality of technology had profound consequences.

The enormity and weight of the images and words of those individuals compelled us to create and to perform this work.

From the larger performance art piece, which included movement, music, spoken word, and drama, we have distilled music and words into a twenty-minute project. Through the use of non-traditional instruments, such as found or street percussion (rocks, pots, pans, trash cans, etc…), African Thumb pianos, and the use of electronics, the music and text illustrate some of the strong and complex emotions brought about by Simon's original work. The music is broken into short continuous movements-each deals with a particular issue. For instance, in Transformation the use of processed electronic sounds illustrates two key concepts, technology's ability to blur truth and fiction and mistaken identity, by taking the sound of one voice and transforming it to another.