In relation to the pieces performed at the concert, Professor Goehr will address some of the tensions that enter the musical domain when concepts of power, electricity, and wire are used in literal and metaphorical ways to pull music beyond its traditional idioms. She will set the works performed against ones more traditional one to broaden out the contemporary perspective. She will also draw on some ancient relations between (white) silence and (red-blooded) violence to give a different sort of meaning to the judgment we make when we speak of music and its performance as having a “cutting edge”.