THE SEASONS
2026-2027 · 46 minutes · Panoramic audiovisual work for live performance, installation, and independent cinematic presentation
Music by Sebastian Currier
Video by Paweł Wojtasik
Created for Anne-Sophie Mutter
The Seasons is a contemporary counterpoint to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, reconsidering the meaning of seasonal change in an era of ecological instability and climate anxiety. Conceived for live performance with violin, string ensemble, electronics, and panoramic moving images, it is also intended to exist independently as an installation and as a cinematic work for presentation in a wide range of settings.
Filmed over the course of a year along the navigable portion of Hudson River, from Albany south toward New York City, the work moves between natural beauty and the human systems embedded within it—industry, energy production, transportation, labor, habitation, and environmental disruption. Its four-part structure follows the seasons while tracing the river’s passage toward New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.
About the Work
Structured in four movements corresponding to the seasons, the work sets two experiences of time against one another. The recurring cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter suggests continuity and renewal, while the environmental consequences of human activity introduce another kind of time: cumulative, irreversible, and increasingly unstable.
Sebastian Currier’s music draws upon the language of the Baroque concerto while transforming it through electronics, sampling, and live processing. Familiar musical gestures become strained, accelerated, interrupted, or suspended. The moving images operate in a similar way, moving between beauty and disturbance, recognition and abstraction, intimacy and panoramic scale. Neither music nor image functions as accompaniment; each can lead, recede, or redirect the other.
For the live performance, the images unfold across a gently curved LED wall measuring 42 by 7 feet, with an unusually wide 6:1 aspect ratio. The screen surrounds the musicians without completing a full circle: its curve evokes the recurring cycle of the seasons, while its incomplete arc suggests natural cycles interrupted by human intervention. The wide visual field allows several events, perspectives, and durations to coexist, shifting attention between the larger environment and the lives, structures, and activities contained within it.
The Hudson River provides the work with a geographic and temporal current. The journey begins in Albany with the construction of a boat and moves south through cities, industrial landscapes, infrastructure, and inhabited environments. It ends at the Staten Island ship graveyard, where abandoned vessels lie partially submerged. Between these two images—making and decay—the work traces a landscape shaped by ecological processes, labor, technology, desire, and consequence.
Project Deck
A visual overview of The Seasons, including the project’s concept, narrative structure, panoramic presentation, and technical design for live performance.