Answer Machine Tape, 1987

Tickets £19 // Concession £16 // Under 30 £5
Advance booking required

This performance will be followed by a Q&A with composer Philip Venables, presented by Robert Worby (BBC Radio 3)

Zubin Kanga piano / live video / live electronics

Philip Venables (UK, 1979)
Answer Machine Tape, 1987 (2022) 48’ UK Premiere

Pianist Zubin Kanga presents the UK premiere of Answer Machine Tape, 1987, a major new work for piano and multimedia by Philip Venables, created in collaboration with dramatist Ted Huffman and programmer Simon Hendry. It focuses on New York visual artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz and the turbulent period leading up to the death of Peter Hujar – his former lover, close friend and fellow artist – from an AIDS-related illness in 1987. The work’s focal point is Wojnarowicz’s answering machine tape from the days leading up to Hujar’s death, featuring calls from Hujar, other artists, friends and lovers, exploring his life, that period of the New York art scene, queer history and the AIDS crisis.

As part of Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg Soloists research project, the work uses new sensor technology – the Keyscanner created by the Augmented Instruments Laboratory – allowing the piano to function not just as an acoustic instrument, but as a typewriter to transcribe, comment on and illuminate the messages. Answer Machine Tape, 1987 is a work that is enigmatic and meditative, opening a door for the audience and beckoning them to take a step inside. We eavesdrop into a private world; messages are transliterated into a musical fabric, becoming character studies, becoming reflections on a community, becoming attempts to decipher meaning. Transcription, and its failure in the face of extreme difficulty, becomes a poignant metaphor for the AIDS crisis and its devastating effect on a generation.

Produced by hcmf// with the friendly support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation; also supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation

Co-commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Royal Holloway, University of London, The Marchus Trust, Time of Music, November Music, hcmf// & Festival d’Automne à Paris

Answer Machine Tape 1987 is part of the Sounds Now project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Photo: Philip Venables © Monica De Alwis