Seattle Open Orchestra Presents: In the Open

In Seattle Open Orchestra’s inaugural concert, the group will explore unconventional, experimental, and improvised music with radical inclusion and collaboration as its guiding ethos.

Seattle Open Orchestra (SOO) isn’t a typical community orchestra. There are no auditions. Musicians of every age and experience level come together to play experimental, contemporary, improvised, and otherwise unconventional music of the distant past. For its inaugural concert, In the Open, the ensemble hands new roles to everyone in the room: performers become composers, the audience becomes performers, and the space is treated as an instrument.

The program spans nearly a thousand years. It opens with James Tenney’s In a Large Open Space (1994), written to dialogue with the natural resonance of the room, followed by one of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations (1971), where the audience becomes part of the ensemble, listening and responding together. Cornelius Cardew’s massive graphic score Treatise (1963–67) gives the group a purely visual map to interpret, before the program moves through György Ligeti’s Ricercata No. 7 (1951–53), arranged by ensemble member Harry Ni, and Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972). A collectively reimagined version of Hildegard of Bingen’s O viridissima virga (c. 1160) reaches back nearly a millennium, and the evening closes with Julius Eastman’s propulsive Stay On It (1973).