Experimental music @ Mack B

For those of you who weren't at the Experimental Music performance last night at Mack B Gallery, here's what went down: New College students performed a piece by Cornelius Cardew called The Great Learning, Paragraph 7. Performers move start on any pitch, complete the instructions at their own pace, and move amongst each other, finding pitches and sounds they want to mimic, work off of, or be a part of.

Paragraph 7 1/2 page for any number of untrained voices Duration about 90 minutes Composed 08.04.69 sing 8 IF sing 5 THE ROOT sing 13 (f3) BE IN CONFUSION sing 6 NOTHING sing 5 (f1) WILL sing 8 BE sing 8 WELL sing 7 GOVERNED hum 7 sing 8 THE SOLID sing 8 CANNOT BE sing 9 (f2) SWEPT AWAY sing 8 AS sing 17 (f1) TRIVIAL sing 6 AND sing 8 NOR sing 8 CAN sing 17 (f1) TRASH sing 8 BE ESTABLISHED AS sing 9 (f2) SOLID sing 5 (f1) IT JUST sing 4 DOES NOT sing 6 HAPPEN hum 3 (f2) speak 1 MISTAKE NOR CLIFF FOR MORASS AND TREACHEROUS BRAMBLE

The performance began on a dissonant note, and gradually moved in and out of harmony/ atonality. Audience members were encouraged to walk around/through the performers. Aaron and I were the first people to take them up on this offer, first walking around them to get a sense of what they sounded like from all angles, and then going straight into them, standing amongst the singers and becoming enveloped in the sound and the arbitrary creation of that sound. I got two impressions of my relationship to the performers while I was standing amongst them. First, that I was listening to a symphony in which I could pick out any part or sound that interested me and physically walk towards it, focus on it, get inside it. I could position myself in such ways that I could hear some voices more clearly or more faintly, and although all the voices were constantly changing in volume, pitch, content, and physical placement, I felt like I was in control of my aural intake, like my own recording and manipulating equipment. Second, if I stood still, the performers moved around me constantly and subtly, changing intensities and volumes as they moved closer and farther from me. In this respect, I felt that the performers had become sound objects and moving architecture: the structure of their voices together was constantly shifting not only in accordance to the instructions, but also to the amorphous movement of each person towards and away from other sounds. Standing still amidst them was similar to standing in the middle of a building in which all the walls were moving around you: the sounds came to you, in antithesis of the power to selectively hear what you wanted to hear if you were to take the initiative to move around within the structure (which, of course, is still constantly moving).