On May 19th, an assembly of 80 or so musicians traveling from 11 states will assemble at the Botanical Gardens of the Ozarks with a panoply of percussive instruments to perform John Luther Adam's Inuksuit, an expansive piece named for the Inuit landmarks fashioned from raw stone, with Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion as part of this year's Artosphere Festival.
Like the inuksuit itself, the performance will serve as a monument, albeit a temporary one- a way of marking and re-experiencing the beauty of nature through sound.
"It's never the same piece twice, because of the changing of the locale and the soundscape," explains Sean Connors of Third Coast Percussion. "This group of musicians will probably never be able to be gathered in the same permutation again, so it's a unique experience."
