
Hi Tumblr!
I haven’t been active on Tumblr in a while, but I really wanted to share my Kickstarter project with as many people as possible. My name is Jess Tsang, and I’m a percussionist in NYC. Through this Kickstarter, my boyfriend Chris (far left), and our friend Rich (center) are looking to perform a percussion trio called Dressur.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1100872552/dressur-mauricio-kagels-music-of-the-absurd
Now, Dressur is an extremely unique piece of music for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it’s written for about 50 wooden instruments and set pieces - the chair, coconuts, and Balinese angklung in the picture are just a sampling of some of the crazy instrumentation.
Dressur also stands out from other pieces in its theatricality. The composer, Mauricio Kagel, felt that mechanical replication of music should be eliminated - that we need to see performances as well as hear them. As a result, Dressur contains countless instructions to perform theatrically - acting lost, calm, angry, and everything in between. He evens asks one performer to dance!

So what’s the point? If you couldn’t tell, Dressur is a rarely performed piece of music, mostly due to the costliness of the instruments and set. Through Kickstarter, we’re asking for donations to help us fund and record this piece, and we’re inviting everyone to the concert! We’ve already been funded, reaching our goal of $3000, but we can always use more pledges to give you the best possible result.
What’s in it for you? The great feeling of knowing you’ve helped support contemporary music! Seriously though, there are a bunch of rewards lined up, and if you’ve gotten this far, I’d like to draw your attention to our performances of Staatstheater. Staatstheater is an opera written by the same composer as Dressur, Mauricio Kagel. It consists of multiple short vignettes that are hysterical to musicians and non-musicians alike, as we’ve found out. Each $25 donation unlocks a performance of one of these vignettes, and can be found in the “Updates” section of our Kickstarter. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1100872552/dressur-mauricio-kagels-music-of-the-absurd/posts
There are only 48 hours left to pledge to the Kickstarter - no donation is too small! So if you love percussion, or theater, or music, or comedy, or absurdity, or even me (if you happen to be one of my friends) - please reblog, pledge, and/or attend the performance on March 20th at SUNY Purchase!



Piece of Traveling Sideshow Mummy Elmer McCurdy’s Headstone, Guthrie Oklahoma 






