Sound Matters, Tours

Sketch for a Program Note:
"I have always been interested in the experience of listening, and experimental music as a space for exploring what sound means, in different ways. This evening I am presenting a series of audio pieces from the last ten years, and mixing them into new configurations. They each investigate different ways of making sound, and how sound generates personal and social space. In addition, I have invited some special guests who cannot hear, or hear only a little. During the concert, I ask you to introduce to them your experience of the sounds you are hearing tonight – to describe to them what you are hearing, as best you can. I hope you will take the opportunity to enjoy this special kind of sharing, and to explore this conversation together as part of the concert."

drums & boys, as transformative matrix? or the little drummer boy storms the nation

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum
A new born King to see, pa rum pum pum pum
Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum
To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

So to honor Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
When we come.

Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum
I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum
That's fit to give the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum,
On my drum?

Mary nodded, pa rum pum pum pum
The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my drum for Him, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my best for Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Then He smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum
Me and my drum.

http://www.answers.com/using

http://theuse.info
theuse.mp3
theuse.jpg

Mobile Museum in Curitiba, Brazil

Reading about the artist Bruno Lechowski
His portable exhibitions presented in Curitiba in 1926
Bringing art directly into public space

A portable object is made for the presentation of an "Exhibition of Frequency": a collection of experimental audio works by different artists and composers from 1950 to the present.

The object is imagined as a mobile museum of sound art circulating through the city. Built from wood and including audio speakers and playback system, the museum acts as a mobile collection locating audio within public space, opening up the city to the signification of sound.

The mobile exhibition is proposed as a permanent addition to the network of museums in the city of Curitiba.

Exhibition of Frequency

David Tudor, “Rainforest Version One” (1968) 21:50
Iannis Xenakis, “Concret PH” (1958) 2:47
Terry Riley, “A Rainbow in Curved Air” (1967) 18:48
Gordon Mumma, “Music for the Venezia Space Theater” (1964) 12:01
Luc Ferrari, “Tautologos 1” (1961) 4:27
David Behrman, “Runthrough” (1967) 12:11
Carl Michael von Hausswolff, “Rotterdam Canaries Or A General Attempt To Conquer A Specific Model Of Migration” (1998) 7:13
Pauline Oliveros, “Beautiful Soop” (1966) 27:46
Vladimir Ussachevsky, “Metamorphosis” (1957) 5:27
John Cage, 4’33” (no. 2) (0’00”) (1962/1991) 4:38
Microstoria, “Quit Not Save” (1996) 2:51
P16.D4, “LLL/RRR” (1987) 5:37
Christophe Charles, “undirected 1986-1996” (1997) 3:03
Hiroyuki Iida, “E.M.I. document of Yukarigaoka Line” (1996) 14:24

Silence

This from http://www.popcrunch.com/lily-allen-shh-tattoo-regret/

"Lily Allen is already regretting her latest ink.

Last week, Lily and partner in crime Lindsay Lohan got “Shhh…” tattooed on their index fingers after a drunken night of partying in Los Angeles.

Perhaps the Tequila shots are to blame for Lily’s failure to realize that she was actually copying “Umbrella” singer Rihanna, who had the tat etched on her own pointer finger last year.

“I’ve since found out Rihanna’s got the same thing, so it’s not really - I mean she’s very cool - but I thought I was being original.”

music and violence

Dating back to the 7th century, the early Turkish military band (Mehter) exerted great influence on the subsequent development of European and American military music. The colorful exuberance of the Ottoman regiments, with their combinations of kettledrums, cymbals, trumpets and bells, and riding upon Arabian stallions might come to act as an embodiment of the sheer force of a musical action: to mediate the chaotic energies of military force and provide a coherent, and no less threatening, image of its ordering. Marching music might be heard as a music designed to both stimulate nationalist courage as well as to harness the dynamic spirit of military might - that is, to give thrust to the agitations of collective force while disciplining its necessary aggressiveness. Marching music then might articulate a fundamental base of musical expression overall, that of stimulating a radical emotional and physical response while reassuring the listening subject of the possibility of its organization. Musical pleasure is thus based on witnessing or experiencing the coupling of creation and destruction, harmony and noise, conflict and resolve within a single expression - with military music, such intensities are made bluntly clear as they play out within the barbarous field of war, placing music firmly within the historical repertoire of violence.

As Attali has proposed, music is a simulacrum of murder - it performs a symbolic cut onto the social order by always already introducing noise into the structures of language; it provides a ritual space for the enactment of various disordering movements and sensations, from the ecstatic motion of dance to the sonic identification with heroic sentiment or certain role playing and its reversal. Music opens a space for the inclusion of psychic energies that de-sublimate and re-sublimate at one and the same time the vocabulary of social possibility, thereby becoming an instrument of power. Yet, following military music, I might add that music does not do this only through the introduction of noise (what Attali calls "the channelization of noise") - that is, through dissonant or disharmonious elements, but also, already within the form of music: the reassuring familiarity of even the oldest tune serves to potentially revitalize or charge psychic identification and uncover buried passions. Even hearing "I Will Survive" while walking through the Alexa mall in Berlin the other day pushes an extra beat into my step as I stroll through the shining corridors - thus already music grants dynamic exhilaration always on the edge of embodied aggression, an experience that glides along the line between unabashed fervor and its total ordering. The recent ruling in Jamaica to ban the broadcast of any form of music that makes explicit reference to sexual acts or promotes gun violence, rape, etc., both reveals the inherent intensity music performs while inadvertently undoing the fundamental offering music makes: banning music is like taking the sugar out of lollipops, it rids the beauty of the form of all its subliminal meaning. The Jamaican ruling finds curious parallel in Brighton, with the Green party calling for an earlier ban on "homophobic reggae music" from its pubs, which they say leads to a steady wave of violence against gay Jamaicans.


Uniting music and the military uncovers a deeper history then, which interweaves psycho-sonic understanding with national campaigns, sublimating the beating of an enemy onto the beat of the drum. I might suggest that in the hearing of any drum we can find the Ottoman kettledrum still resounding.

MUSIC OVERHEARD OVERHEARD

edited by Damon Krukowski
edited by Jarrod Fowler

An audio/visual response to the audio response to the exhibition Super Vision at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, December 10 2006 to April 29 2007

Music_Overheard_Overheard.mp3



Left Channel - CD 1 : Curated by Bhob Rainey





Right Channel - CD 2 : Curated by Kenneth Goldsmith





Full tracks, liner notes, biographies, & essays can be found here:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/mo.html