“Recital” is an installation based on the artist’s discovery of a book, The Atlas of the Brain of a Pianist, Chiyo Tuge, By Dr. Hideomi Tuge.  The book is the record of the study of his wife’s brain; in this study he searched for the correlation between structure of biological matter and the talent she had as a composer and pianist.  The result was inconclusive.  Besides the scientific diagrams and photographs, Tuge presented a small biography of her life as an artist.  He also posthumously published her music, written when she was 26 at the Coombs Music Conservatory in Philadelphia and released a phonograph record of this music.

The installation, “Recital” is based on the relationship between Chiyo Tsuge’s life as a composer/musician and her husband, Hideomi Tsuge’s research as a brain pathologist.  While the book itself represents itself as research, one could understand this science to be a monument to her life and his refusal to lose her.  Chiyo’s compositions are played on a special piano which recorded the movement of the pianist and replays it automatically.  The “score” in this case is the book her husband published, turned automatically by an ingenious page turner created at by an MIT Engineering professor.  One views the microphotographs of her brain as the music plays.

The room consists of a stage, curtain, piano and an audience seating area where one can sit and listen to Chiyo’s contrarily happy and melancholic compositions.