The Gallbladder Sonata is an improvisation combining sound, narrative text, internet and live performance. It is one of two works I created in response to the question: what is music without sound? The other work is called starsong, and together they are called stay (tuned). The Gallbladder Sonata has been performed three times: in New York, Munich and Mainz.
The documentation on this website comes from each of the three performances, which were very different from one another. The performance text comes from Gallbladder One, the audio clips from Gallbladder Two, and the photographs from Gallbladder Three. This site was created to accompany an essay I wrote and published in a special joint issue of Leonardo Music Journal and Leonardo Electronic Almanac (both, MIT Press, 2003). See the abstract to The Gallbladder Sonata: Transmission Time on the Internet (LMJ 13, page x), on this website.
Gallbladder One in New York, New York
The Gallbladder Sonata premiered in 1998 on the internet show, Herešs Pangloss! (Heather Wagner, host, New York). Pangloss invited digital artists to talk about and/or perform their work. Gallbladder One was a strictly textual, online performance. The text of Gallbladder One is posted on this website: click here. Within the text, the main performer explains why this is called a sonata, and what it has to do with the gallbladder. Heather Wagner designed the text and logo for the website of the Here's Pangloss! show.
Gallbladder Two in Munich, Germany
Stay (Tuned), including The Gallbladder Sonata, was performed online/offline at the Maximiliansforum, Munich, Germany, in 2000, presented by the Mathias Kampl Gallery in a municipal exhibition space; this was part of the event Open Art, during which all the contemporary art galleries in Munich keep long hours to celebrate the opening of the fall season. For their help with the live event, my thanks go to Mathias Kampl, Detlef Hartung and Christian Ziegler. The online cast included Marlena Corcoran, Antoinette LaFarge and Laurent Oget. Laurent Oget also programmed the online theater we used for both Gallbladder Two and Gallbladder Three, below.
Gallbladder Three in Mainz, Germany
Stay (Tuned), including The Gallbladder Sonata, was performed online/offline a third time at the juried Mainz intermediale, Art Happens!, which ran parallel to the Performance Studies International 7 conference in Mainz, Germany, in 2001. For their help with the live event, I am very grateful to Ute Ritschel and Christian Ziegler. The online cast included Marlena Corcoran, Kari Banta, Antoinette LaFarge and Laurent Oget.