New York City Opera artistic director George Steel hopped out of the rowboat and reported that “the geese were very interested in the bass section.” This is as it should have been for the aquatic sound test of R. Murray Schafer’s Music for Wilderness Lake and Credo a few weeks before their New York premiere on June 21 at the 7th Make Music New York (MMNY) festival. Based on France’s Fête de la musique, MMNY began experimenting on Central Park Lake in 2010 with Iannis Xenakis’s sextet Persephassa, written for an audience surrounded by percussionists. They performed it with the musicians on rafts and the audience in rowboats and have used the lake every year since.
This year, the daylong festival presents more than a thousand events in all the boroughs.