Hosted by Andrew Fink, Katie Salmon, Carl Schoonover

Date: Saturday, November 15th
Time: 1pm to 6pm
Admission: $5 ( Ticket Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY
To enjoy the session fully, bring a cushion or yoga mat. Complementary drinks and food will be available.

“Catholicism at the end of the middle ages was in large part a cult of the living in the service of the dead”. — Neal Galpern

Over the past few years, a small group of friends has come together in someone’s living room to listen to recorded music. Sharing a musical experience with friends in a comfortable space has been so enjoyable and interesting for us, that we have decided to try doing it Joanna’s living room, the Morbid Anatomy Museum. Our theme for this session is, fittingly, requiem masses-Western Christianity’s prayer for the dead. What is a requiem? Broadly defined it is the text used during a mass dedicated to the repose of souls, a collective prayer with the specific aim of ensuring that as many of the souls of the faithful departed end up in heaven. Our experience of the Requiem, however, has evolved dramatically over the last 1,000 years, running the gamut from high renaissance polyphony  and strictly secular performance, to explicitly political works , and experimental forays such as one requiring the fog horns on fifty vessels stationed in the North Sea. Perhaps the best-known examples are concert pieces (Mozart, Brahms, Verdi) rather than purely liturgical performances. But at their core, all are meditations upon the afterlife and ultimately the mystery of Death. Over the course of a November afternoon we plan to explore a selection of requia and related music, including some old favorites, and also many more obscure but no less interesting and beautiful highlights of the genre. We will be bringing to the Museum our high-end LP record sound system in order to share these recordings at the quality that they deserve. Einstein on the Beach Rules will apply (people should feel free to come and go as they please), and we will post the detailed schedule ahead of time. This will be a BYOC event. (Bring your own cushion or yoga mat !)

Katie Salmon and Carl Schoonover are senior programmers in the Classical Department at WKCR 89.9 FM; when they’re not wading through their LP collections, Katie Salmon is a Promotion Associate at Boosey and Hawkes, and Andrew Fink and Carl Schoonover are postdoctoral fellows in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University.