PRESS PLAY Episode 63: The Flypaper

June 19, 2025
The Flypaper* (2005/2012)
Steven Kazuo Takasugi (US), composer

Leslie Newman, flute
Sara Constant, flute

Programme Note:

Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s Das Fliegenpapier / The Flypaper is a meditation on the short prose piece with the same name (Das Fliegenpapier) by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. The text, both in English and the original German, are recordings of the recitations by the composer/poet Wieland Hoban, the two languages fragmented and inter-braided. Other sound samples are employed including the recording of a fly realized in the composer’s studio. The piece understands that the objective gaze of the scientist, almost sadistic in his observation of a fly dying on poisoned glue, can easily be turned toward himself as he observes his own extermination with the same scientific objectivity and focussed attention to factual occurrence and details.

* Canadian Premiere