On Sunday night at Constellation, celebrated New York-based new-music group Mivos Quartet will premiere Chain Reactions/Five Events by composer and electronic musician Sam Pluta, who moved to Chicago a little over a year ago to become an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. The concert doubles as a release event for Broken Symmetries (Carrier), Pluta’s second album devoted to his own compositions. You might expect Pluta to promote the show by foregrounding the significance of Chain Reactions, which brings together his practices as a composer, improviser, and performer—or to point out that it appears on Broken Symmetries, alongside three more electroacoustic works (performers on the album include Mivos, Wet Ink Ensemble, violinist Josh Modney, and flutist Anne La Berge). But what you get in the promo video that Pluta made for the concert is shot after shot of him shattering CD copies of Broken Symmetries with two sets of pliers.
Mivos commissioned Chain Reactions in 2013, but Pluta has used that title and some of the same underlying musical concepts before—the current piece applies lessons he learned at a workshop led by Pauline Oliveros in 2002, and even adapts some material he came up with back then.
