Southland Ensemble: The Koan Quartet & Christine Tavolacci present works by Carolyn Chen for string quartet, bass flute, speakers, and singers — exploring nature and how we invent it. Human voices converse with the voices of machines and objects to investigate ways to rearrange furniture in a small space.

First commissioned by Southland Ensemble as a companion piece for David Tudor’s Rainforest IV, Other Forests is a string quartet played occasionally with mobile transducers, surrounded by resonating everyday objects. Instruments alternate between their traditional musical identity and their physical reality as sonorous objects, projecting collected sounds of the local environment, real and fictional rainfall, and explanations of imaginary trees. How to assemble a features six readers presenting assembly instructions with different goals in overlapping, sometimes conflicting patterns. In breathe out clouds, the bass flute acts as a resonating chamber for talking and singing, reworking patterns of words and musical motives from Hildegard’s Antiphon no.44.