More Music...
“Music is something one takes before or after the meal, but never the meal itself.” Giorgio De Chirico, No Music (1913).
Below are some of the ideas we have come up with so far for creating a piece of music for the ground with the aim of exploring an overall concept of football as a performance involving players and spectators. Utilising a mixture of field recordings, music and spoken word, we are looking at ways of using the ground as a place to experiment and ultimately as a stage in itself.
1) One idea is to develop a piece of music based around the team’s history and current fortunes. This would involve creating a series of simple musical motifs derived from past and present league tables, resulting in a compressed musical history with each group of notes following league positions for each month of every year of the team’s existence. Breaking each season down into a series of mathematically generated musical modules with major and minor keys representing success or defeat. An alternative (and perhaps more manageable approach to this would involve creating a smaller set of musical narratives based around famous players, events and goals in the club’s history. This draws upon the idea of an ‘Oracular lyre’ featured in the story ‘Ka’ by Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, using a pythagorean correlation between musical tones and historical chronology. Taking this one step further, it may be possible to generate a short piece of music that changes every week with the team’s fortunes throughout the year, and is performed at each match by a volunteer instrumentalist/soloist drawn from the supporters, reporting musically on the previous match.
2) During the residency so far, we have been experimenting with using contact microphones to record otherwise undetectable sounds. “By attaching it to a flat surface, the mic transforms vibrations in materials into audio signals and, just as the positioning of an acoustic mic will affect the sound picked up, so the sound from the contact mic can be changed with different positioning.” (We got these from Bugbrand.co.uk – a great site for anybody interested in analogue effects units and circuit bending). As well as applying these to instruments, we have been using them to record the sound of everyday objects and recently led a series of school workshops in which we created an entire orchestra with items from Wilkinsons’ gardening section. Over the next month we intend to apply these to a game of football, including feet stamping on the terraces, the ball hitting various surfaces and the monitoring and sound experimentation of players’ heartbeats/respiratory systems as well as the possibility of placing a device inside the ball itself during a match or training session. The resulting sounds may then be manipulated and/or looped in real time before being relayed back to the tannoy for live playback.
3) A third idea would see us recruiting an amateur orchestra (i.e. anyone who owns an instrument – they don’t necessarily have to be able to play it) by handing out leaflets at a match. We would then line up two sets of musicians along opposite sides of the pitch (East and West, not goal ends). They would be asked to play a certain note or a specified key corresponding to the movements of their team. The emphasis would not be on melody, but on the back and forth motion of the music and the instruments would be tuned or chosen to avoid ‘virtuosoism’.
4) Miscellaneous ideas:
a) Sound experiments with crowd recordings – Chants and songs.
b) Make a list of every player ever to play for the club. Ask fans to recite them.
c) Old adverts for defunct local businesses – sing/recite these.
d) Scarves with texts woven in to be chanted by the wearer.
e) Pitched rattles / pint glasse.
f) Use specially designed ground markings to paint a graphic score directly onto the pitch.
g) Find early silent films of football and perform live soundtracks. E.G. Die elf Teufel / The Eleven Devils (1927)
Below are some of the ideas we have come up with so far for creating a piece of music for the ground with the aim of exploring an overall concept of football as a performance involving players and spectators. Utilising a mixture of field recordings, music and spoken word, we are looking at ways of using the ground as a place to experiment and ultimately as a stage in itself.
1) One idea is to develop a piece of music based around the team’s history and current fortunes. This would involve creating a series of simple musical motifs derived from past and present league tables, resulting in a compressed musical history with each group of notes following league positions for each month of every year of the team’s existence. Breaking each season down into a series of mathematically generated musical modules with major and minor keys representing success or defeat. An alternative (and perhaps more manageable approach to this would involve creating a smaller set of musical narratives based around famous players, events and goals in the club’s history. This draws upon the idea of an ‘Oracular lyre’ featured in the story ‘Ka’ by Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, using a pythagorean correlation between musical tones and historical chronology. Taking this one step further, it may be possible to generate a short piece of music that changes every week with the team’s fortunes throughout the year, and is performed at each match by a volunteer instrumentalist/soloist drawn from the supporters, reporting musically on the previous match.
3) A third idea would see us recruiting an amateur orchestra (i.e. anyone who owns an instrument – they don’t necessarily have to be able to play it) by handing out leaflets at a match. We would then line up two sets of musicians along opposite sides of the pitch (East and West, not goal ends). They would be asked to play a certain note or a specified key corresponding to the movements of their team. The emphasis would not be on melody, but on the back and forth motion of the music and the instruments would be tuned or chosen to avoid ‘virtuosoism’.
4) Miscellaneous ideas:
a) Sound experiments with crowd recordings – Chants and songs.
b) Make a list of every player ever to play for the club. Ask fans to recite them.
c) Old adverts for defunct local businesses – sing/recite these.
d) Scarves with texts woven in to be chanted by the wearer.
e) Pitched rattles / pint glasse.
f) Use specially designed ground markings to paint a graphic score directly onto the pitch.
g) Find early silent films of football and perform live soundtracks. E.G. Die elf Teufel / The Eleven Devils (1927)
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