You know the feeling of recognition without familiarity? Like a song you think you know but can’t quite place? That sort of thing. This is a concert of sort-of-things, things in the process of coming into clarity.

A new work by August Read Thomas simulates a fanfare with no precedent, a fanfare for… what? Alex Mincek clicks on, clicks off, but the logic of the system always lays just out of reach. Ashbery plays loose and fast with words and then Charles Wuorinen plays fast and loose with Ashbery, a major chord going, gone. Andy Akiho hallucinates colors, while Angelica Négron writes imaginary dictionaries no one can read.

​It’s a concert in search of a definition, every piece on the other line and just about to transfer over into speech when—.
That old alliance of winter and discontent is yearly hard to shake. This is a concert for the bleak mid, musics for the thick of snow and freeze.

David Brynjar Franzson and ​Anthony Vine's anemic horizontals of the grey and white are bone-chilled, to be sure; that doesn’t mean they’re empty. A small flicker, a “flash” Bára Gísladóttir calls it, something like a promise on the horizon of what feels like it goes on forever. Winter is "infinitive" that way, as Scott Worthington puts it. The long goodbye to the sun—in cross-cut variants from Franz Schubert and Loadbang’s own Andy Kozar—hymns an endless lullaby. But even now, in what feels like the cruelest month of the cruelest year, “spring is coming,” hums Marti Epstein: this, the hidden promise of winter’s endurance.

​Endure it with us.
Think Madlibs, or the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books:, this is a concert in which music is only a question mark. How you answer is up to you.

Two of the great authors of unanswerable questions—Samuel Beckett and John Ashbery—receive musical treatments by Scott Wollschleger and Christian Wolff that are equally as puzzling as their texts. Meanwhile, and dripping in irony, Maya Miro Johnson turns the world on its head with doubles, screens, and sneers. Alex Paxton crams sugar highs and singsong into too many layers to be certain if its pleasure or overdrive. And four new works— by Paul Clift, Mischa Salkind Pearl, Xenia St. Charles Iris Llyllth and Joanna Motouama, chosen through our partnership with Luna Lab—remain question marks in the most proper sense: what they can only wait to be seen!

​Just fill in the blank; or, press one for more options.
Like financial estates and family houses, who we are is handed down by contract. But without bureaucracy’s paper trail, how do we measure our share?  This is a concert that turns to face all that ancestral stuff that became yours when you took that first breath. Accursed progenitors, Beckett called them, because the curses, good and bad, are genetic.

​Stratis Minakakis rustles the papers of his Greek family archive, finding “mom” in activism’s echoes. Hannah Kendall, eyes shut, hears the bellies of ships on the Middle Passage, generational blood rushing to the ears. Carolyn Chen knows the spirits left behind by structured violence make for unreliable narrators, so she decides to sing instead: “live…in any skin, live.” That’s just how things are, whispers Christina Lord.  Raven Chacon is trying to figure out just where exactly we are, like a ship unsure of its coordinates, or in his native high deserts of New Mexico, without a compass. Just a handful of bones given to you on the occasion of birth, cries Niloufar Nourbakhsh of her embittered Iran. The terms of our birth certificates are never read aloud, no Miranda Rights in swaddling clothes.

Can you relitigate a fine print you never saw till now?