Laura Glen Louis at The Hudson Review:
Written in 1947, Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony has been performed in Paris, New York City, and most recently, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., for a total of some ten performances—occurrences more rare than a solar eclipse. Now at a cathedral near me. A few years ago, wanting to branch out from the Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire that I had been singing, I joined an a cappella chamber chorus that performs only new music, nothing written before 1980. I love dissonance, crunches, uncommon intervals, uncommon and shifting meters, cascading tritones, so when an email came from a music blogger not to attend the Klein but to sing in it—I jumped.
Yves Klein. Painter. Creator of the vibratory International Klein Blue (IKB), 1960. An orchestra struck up the D major chord in the Parisian premiere. Nude female models strode into the gallery, coated their breasts, bellies, thighs with IKB and pressed themselves full frontal onto canvases spread on the floor or mounted on the wall, years before the 1967 Off-Broadway debut of Hair.
more here.