For Crickets, artist Mungo Thomson has collaborated with composer Michael Webster to transcribe field recordings of crickets from around the world into a musical score. The result is a dynamic composition for a 17-person classical ensemble: violin, flute, clarinet, and percussion. The score contains 25 chapters, or “movements,” such as “12. Reunion Island, the Cirque de Cilaos at 1,300 m altitude, February 1998, nightfall in a banana plantation.” “Crickets” was performed in Los Angeles as part of The Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival (2012), and this year a concert will take place on the High Line in New York. 

Mungo Thomson is an artist whose work frequently touches on silence, blank space, and cultural motifs around reception. Crickets sums up Thomson’s interests in ambience and in audience succinctly: crickets are such a ubiquitous aural backdrop that they have come to stand in for silence, and in the realm of performance, crickets are what is heard when a performance bombs. - JRP Ringier