A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.

[ Necessary Music explores the notion of film as event and social process, treating the medium of film as a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production. ]

Roosevelt Island is a small sliver of land situated between Manhattan and Queens, intersected by the Queensborough Bridge. Formally known as Welfare Island and originally home to New York's largest insane asylum, a small pox hospital, and a range of other 19th century municipal facilities for incarceration, it now houses one of the cities most visible, yet little-known modernist social housing projects. The subject of several architectural competitions during the 1960's that employed the island as a laboratory site, proposing a range of re-imagined futures, from a floating casino, to a Museum of Egyptian Artifacts, to a cemetery, to a Disney-like water and entertainment park, its current status is the result of the winning entry of Philip Johnson. Johnson's master plan proposed a mixed income, enclosed utopian community; a bucolic concrete enclave, divided into three residential developments.

Beatrice Gibson about her film