Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Music / Graphic Scores



Though it is intended that the residency will have several outcomes, its main aspect will be the creation of a piece of experimental music based around the idea of a football as a performance. Below is some background information and links to a few of the artists and composers who have influenced our thinking on the project so far:



Dick RaaijmakersPing Pong. This is a piece of music made by attaching two contact microphones to a table tennis table. Each side of the table is pitched a semi-tone apart and the piece is performed through the act of playing a game of table tennis.
Graphic Scores - examples of many of the most pioneering graphic scores can be found at the Pictures of Music site.


One score we have been particularly looking at is Treatise by the english composer Cornelius Cardew.“There are few more impressive-looking conceptions than Cornelius Cardew's Treatise (1963-7), a 236-page graphic score of exquisite intricacy. Questions of what to play and how to play it are left to the performer(s)' discretion; though, as here, a degree of pre-performance planning helps reinforce the very definite continuity in texture and dynamics that the individual pages suggest. ”
"Robert Rauschenberg's Open Score was performed on October 14th, 1966. It began with a tennis game between Frank Stella and his tennis partner, Mimi Kanarek, on a full-scale court laid out on the Armory floor. Rauschenberg had adopted one of the oldest forms of performance that everyone recognizes, a tennis match, and made it into dance. He also used the game 'to control the lights and to perform as an orchestra.' Each time Frank or Mimi hit the ball a loud BONG vibrated around the Armory and the sound of each BONG switched off one of the lights illuminating the court..."



Trevor Wishart “began working with recorded sounds in 1969. In reaction to death of father, a factory worker, abandoned conventional composing, bought small portable tape-recorder and collected sounds of machinery in workshops, foundries and power stations. Set up directed improvisation route-map (Machine 2) for small chorus to imitate, then transform, these sounds. Recordings of the improvisations, plus machine sources and contemporary news items (Apollo 11 moon shot) formed basis of Machine, an electronically preserved dream (1970).”
French composer Eliane Radigue's graphic scores for Trilogie de la Mort are a set of logarithmic curves printed onto transparent paper then overlaid onto manuscript paper to create a series of sustained rising tones.
Alan Tomlinson is a trombonist who performed from a mobile chip van in Yorkshire. "In November 2003, artist and promoter Simon Thackray created a new duet. He put London based Improvising trombonist Alan Tomlinson together with a Fish and Chip van. Alan was booked to blow the horn to herald the arrival of the van and perform a short concert to the Fish and Chip van queues in each village."
We have also been looking at other pieces that use the human voice in innovative ways, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung and Gesang der Junglinge and Einstein on the Beach by Phillip Glass.

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