Celebrate the winter solstice with an immersive soundwalk along the High Line. Participants become performers as your footsteps are turned into sounds, creating a collective, whimsical music piece including twinkling metallic sounds, electric guitar chords, dulcimer notes, and water splashes. Inspired by Phil Kline’s annual Unsilent Night, the original score was composed by Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, Daniel Iglesia, and Cameron Britt for the High Line.

Download the iPhone or Android application and join the fun starting at 5:30pm when we’ll be registering participants and distributing small wearable speakers* for the duration of the event to the first 100 participants. The walk begins promptly at 6pm on street level below the High Line at Gansevoort and Washington Streets, moves through the park, and ends at West 30th Street.

*If you own a small portable speaker, bring it along to use during the soundwalk. Also, if you own a phone that doesn’t have a headphone jack please make sure to bring an adapter.

This High Line public program is free and open to visitors of all ages.

Presented in partnership with Make Music New York.

Video credit: I Care if You Listen.

ABOUT MAKE MUSIC WINTER
Make Music New York’s third annual Make Music Winter features 12 participatory, musical parades throughout New York City on December 21, the first night of winter. Inspired by composer Phil Kline’s annual Unsilent Night, which has drawn thousands of participants since its launch in 1992, Make Music Winter includes innovative projects for bells, brass bands, electric guitars, iPhones, percussionists, singers, strings, and more. Like its summer counterpart, Make Music Winter is free, outdoors, and profoundly participatory. All are invited to join in. Details are available at makemusicny.org.

ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Lainie Fefferman is a composer, performer, and experimenter in the performative application of emergent music technologies. Her most recent commissions have been from Tenth Intervention, So Percussion, Make Music NY, Experiments in Opera, ETHEL, Kathleen Supové, TILT Brass, James Moore, Eleonore Oppenheim, JACK Quartet, and Dither. Her one-woman voice & electronics feminist song performance project “White Fire,” an electroacoustic meditation on the heroines of the Hebrew Bible, premiered at Merkin Hall in 2016 and she has been touring it internationally ever since. She is a co-founder and director of New Music Gathering, an annual conference/festival hybrid event for the international New Music Community. She got her doctorate in composition from Princeton University and is programming/performing member of Princeton-based laptop ensemble Sideband. She is currently a professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology and an artist in residence at Nokia Bell Labs. For more info, visit lainiefefferman.com.

Jascha Narveson was raised in a concert hall and put to sleep as a child with an old vinyl copy of the Bell Laboratories mainframe computer singing “Bicycle Built for Two.” Awash in the sounds of chamber music recitals in his parents’ house-concert series from an early age, he spent his high-school years playing in improvisatory un-music bands and listening to increasingly esoteric music from various corners of the globe and subcultural strata of the industrialized world. These influences mixed with intensive traditional training in North and South Indian rhythmic traditions, a summer residency with Bang On A Can, and degrees in acoustic and electronic composition from Wilfrid Laurier University, Wesleyan’s MA in experimental and world music, and Princeton’s doctoral program. His music is a vibrant testament to these influences, combining the Western composer’s love of novelty with an unshakable devotion to rhythm, physicality and “flow” inherited from everywhere else. His music has been played in many places by many people, some of them famous, others deserving of fame, all of them deserving of thanks.

N. Cameron Britt is a percussionist, composer, and instrument builder. He invented the EMvibe, an electromagnetically actuated vibraphone. As a percussionist he has performed extensively with the North Carolina Symphony and is active as a creator and interpreter of new music. His compositions have been performed by the Brentano String Quartet, So Percussion, Ensemble Klang, janus, NOW Ensemble, and the electronica duo Matmos. He has worked with the laptop ensembles Sideband and PLOrk and is interested in creating new electronic instruments in both hardware and software. He received his PhD in Composition from Princeton University and currently teaches percussion at Duke University.

Daniel Iglesia creates music and media for humans, computers, and broad interactions of the two. His works have taken the form of concert works for instruments and electronics, live audio and video performance, generative and interactive installations, and collaborations with many disciplines such as theater and dance. He co-led PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra) for three seasons. He plays with Spirograph Agnew and Sideband. He made MobMuPlat. He currently works at Google.