Musical Chairs needs almost no introduction. Everyone has played the game before. You walk around and around a circle of chairs until the music suddenly stops and you sit down in a chair as fast as you can. Whoever can’t sit fast enough is out of the game. Then you remove a chair, start up the music again, and keep going until you have a winner. That’s exactly this piece… except now the music is live and the chairs are part of the music too! 

This is not your typical percussion ensemble ⎯ the primary instrument in Musical Chairs is the chair. Using the elimination-based format of the original game, this piece aims to explore every possible sound a chair can make. As players are gradually removed from the game and added to the mallet section, new approaches to playing the chairs are constantly introduced until a winner is finally revealed. Each round is carefully choreographed so that performers are placed in just the right position around the chairs at any given moment of a round. Before the piece begins try to guess which player is going to be the winner, then sit back and enjoy a game of musical chairs.

Links: Score

Recorded Performers: Abel Ruiz, Cameron Church, Darrion Chandler, I-Jen Fang, and Spencer Harris