FLUSHING?To honor the 75th and 50th anniversaries of the two World's Fairs that NYC hosted, which are coming up in 2014, the Museum of the City of New York and the Queens Museum of Art are collaborating to catalog every bit of ephemera that they have on file about those two milestone events. Organizing everything related to the 1939/40 and 1964/65 New York World's Fairs will take about 18 months, and includes poring through guidebooks, photographs, postcards, maps, exhibition designs, explanatory pamphlets, and more. To keep tabs on what bits and bobs they're discovering along the way, check out the Tumblr they're keeping throughout the process. [CurbedWire Inbox; official]
DUMBO?How do you take a solid archway under the Manhattan Bridge and make music from it? Simple, if you've got composer, artist and percussionist Eli Keszler and the percussion So Percussion on the case. In a one-time-only show called Archway this Friday at 6:30 p.m., the group will attach piano strings, some as long as 380 feet, to the side of the arch and connect them to the ground, using their varying widths and varying degrees of tension to perform. Part of Make Music New York, a daylong festival that hosts 1,000 concerts across the city in one day, there are motors and bows in the mix, too.
From Make Music New York's website: "Some of the sixteen wires used in Archway will be stretched directly from the bridge itself; the rest will be strung from nearby lamp poles and strummed by automated mechanical beaters, creating shifting harmonic overtones in the resonant space. Contact microphones will capture the resulting sounds and feed them into a PA system in the Archway. The entire piece will be built, activated, and disassembled on the 21st." Sounds complicated, but very cool. [CurbedWire Inbox; official]
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