From the artists: “Co-constructing” is an improvised piece pondering the phrase “remembrance has a rear and front” in relation to our experience as collaborative, creative musicians. In this track, each player initially contributes a single sound to the soundscape, and musical ideas grow naturally and collectively from those seeds. As improvisers, we are constantly co-constructing with each other, evolving and adapting in real time, both sharing and listening. The freely improvised music we create as Virago is both deeply personal and also deeply communal. Each of our remembered pasts shape our playing-- we embody our personal listening, musical training, cultural biases, relationships and lived experiences, feelings and realizations, obsessions and personalities. All five of us bring these seeds that grow together as we co-construct in the present.

This project is part of an on-going partnership between UMMA and the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, supported by the Katherine Tuck Enrichment Fund and the Greg Hodes and Heidi Hertel Hodes—Partners in the Arts Endowment Fund.