Madison Greenstone: Flashing Up

Madison Greenstone is a clarinetist, writer, and member of TAK Ensemble. Their solo practice explores phenomenological, material, and spatial expressivities of sound through richly noisy timbral actions. Greenstone will present a new work-in-progress for solo clarinet and electronics, Flashing Up, which takes its name from Judith Butler’s riff on Benjamin’s ruptures and flashes in his writing on historical materialism. As developed through their practice of “exstatic resonances,” Greenstone uses a variety of approaches to amplify the inherent moment-to-moment instabilities of the instrument: circular breathing, over-resonant cross-fingerings that radically detune the instrument, and embouchures that create feedback-like states within the timbre. As Greenstone puts it, “It’s not affective or emotive in the classical, Romantic way that relies on the rhetoric of phrasing. It’s about the meeting of vibrational forces.”