PRISM Quartet
Breath Beneath

The New Yorker
Even by the ambitious standard this engaging saxophone quartet has established, “Breath Beneath” is a bold venture: a program integrating new music with video art and interactive technology. Along with a première by the composer Dan Trueman and the filmmaker Mark DiChiazza, the concert features multimedia works incorporating music by Julia Wolfe (with the filmmaker Bill Morrison), Kati Agócs, and Jacob ter Veldhuis.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns

Interactive technology has been around in various shapes and forms (including lighting designs at stadium concerts), and this “Breath Beneath” concert is intended to be a cross section, with five pieces showing different states of interactive audio-visual evolution, many of them embracing chance elements.

“We’re hoping to discover something we hadn’t planned,” said filmmaker Bill Morrison, who is employing 1920s film footage of dance (ragtime, Charleston, etc.) in varying states of black-and-white decay, for Julia Wolfe’s 2015 composition Cha. The music itself is about the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s Latin-dance upbringing in Montgomery County — so the video isn’t illustrating the piece but going for a synergistic incongruity.

Other pieces include Hymn by Kati Agocs and two works by composer/videographer Jacob ter Veldhuis (aka Jacob TV). His Heartbeakers includes clips from The Jerry Springer Show with tales of broken relationships. Body of Your Dreams deconstructs an infomercial about some sort of waist-slimming device.

Though the team admits to extreme weariness of staring at computer screens, PRISM’s audio-visual endeavors are part of a long-term artistic conversation that Levy hopes will evolve into a new, full-evening piece that will make this week’s concert look like what it is:  a pilot for something far bigger.

“Tech is getting smaller, easier, and fast,” says Trueman. But if there’s a godfather in this concert, it’s not some audio-visual guru, but the late John Cage (1912-1992), who was once thought to represent the lunatic fringe of classical music but whose concepts of embracing chance elements in performance are increasingly mainstream.

“And that’s a good ghost to have in the room,” said Morrison.

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