Ghost Ensemble at Goethe Institut Boston: Lamb, Richter, Bettendorf

Friday, May 10, 2024

7:30pm doors / 8:00pm music

Goethe Institut

170 Beacon Street

Boston, MA 02116

Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is its primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has commissioned dozens of new works by a diverse range of creators who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often draws from contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, environmental sound art, and territories in between. The ensemble’s Boston debut at Goethe Institut presents three recent works created in collaboration with Catherine Lamb, Carl Bettendorf, and Ben Richter. 

Catherine Lamb’s interius/exterius (2022) explores multi-dimensional harmonic space, investigating how collective intentions or focal points allow various and sometimes unusual pathways to emerge. As the group links together in phase, the greater web of activity aligns intention and desire within a community of musicians sounding together, the initiation of sound constantly shifting, unfolding new sonic dimensions. 

Ben Richter’s Rewild (2022), inspired by nonhuman perspectives and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life, traverses the thresholds at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time. By offering an aural metaphor for the interacting gradual processes of quantum and cosmic systems, Rewild’s pulsing, breathing sonic ecosystem aims to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life. 

Carl Bettendorf’s Variations on 4x25 Notes (2023) returns to an older sketch as an objet trouvé to explore musical material through the lens of the time that has passed, using this rediscovered sound as a means to question place, language, translation, and memory.

Critics have praised Ghost Ensemble performances as “prodigious … a thrilling listen” (Christian Carey, Sequenza21), “wonderful work … both exhilarating and a bit scary” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily), “beautifully performed and recorded … a body-felt sound mass … a multifaceted texture that evokes the primeval” (Meg Wilhoite, Sound Meets Sound), and “cloudy, mysterious, and dark … Beckettian in its slow spread … certainly a group to keep an eye on” (Brian Olewnick, Just Outside).