House Of Wires - For Flute, Saxophone, String Trio, and Electronic Sounds

"House of Wires" takes its inspiration from the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 psychological thriller "The Conversation". The film follows a surveillance expert, Harry Caul, in his attempt to stitch-together fragmented surveillance recordings for his shadowy clients. The film explores the surveillance expert’s growing obsession with the characters he is spying on. This obsession imbues the act of surveillance with a chilling sense of affection and poignancy. By the end of the film, Caul believes that he in turn in being surveilled, and destroys every object in his apartment in search of evidence that he's being spied on. In the final scene, Caul sits against an exposed beam of his destroyed San Francisco apartment with the only object he is unwilling to destroy, his tenor saxophone. In a slow 360 degrees pan, Coppola fixates on the destruction Caul has induced, the broken drywall, torn portraits, stripped electronics, as Caul plays his saxophone quietly into the night.

House Of Wires - for flute, saxophone, string trio, and electronic sounds, composed by David Bird, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), flute - Laura Cocks, saxophone - Ryan Muncy, violin - Josh Modney, violoncello - Mosa Tsay, bass - Lizzie Burns. Performed at Abrons Arts Center, April 14, 2018.