Electric Guitars Amp Up New Classical Music
Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail isn't technically a symphony, it is a sweeping, massive work for large electric guitar orchestra. And I really mean"massive" — when it was performed at Lincoln Center's Out of Doors Festival in the summer of 2009, the performer count was 200 electric guitars, 16 electric basses, five conductors and a percussionist.
What you can't see in this video is this: In the piece's final moments, the entire audience — of roughly 10,000 people, including me — rose up spontaneously as a single ecstatic entity.
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