Posts tagged sit20c
Experimental Music is a Virus
A former student of mine picked up on the theme of “covers as musical indeterminacy” we discussed in my class on Indeterminacy this summer. We talked a lot about what different versions of a song need to have in common for them to be considered the “same song,” and what parts of a song are nonessential to its core “identity.”
Vicky took this to heart and rounded up a variety of videos of “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service, collecting a pretty impressive variety. I may just have to use them as an example next time I teach that class.
And, in a flight of fancy right up my alley, she suggests listening to the first three simultaneously.
Go check it out.
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Acousmatic listening is when you listen to a sound without being able to see its source. It became much more prevalent with the advent of sound recording devices (although hearing a noise in the woods is also an acousmatic kind of listening).
Acousmatic music deals with these sounds specifically, imputing a special quality to the sound whose source is obscured, although all recorded music is, to a certain degree, acousmatic.
For the first day of my summer sound class, I put together a quick and dirty collage of sounds we might encounter of the course of the course. These sounds are all at different depths of recording—some are songs released on major labels, some are field recordings, and at any moment, there are likely a few layers of mediation between you and any individual sound. These different kinds of acousmatic sounds (although one could argue that if you see the speaker they come out of, they are not entirely acousmatic) acted as an introduction and teaser for the students.
I had my students fill out a “listening worksheet” while listening to this, to try and write down what they heard. It was interesting to see the kinds of categories they identified: “a bird,” “techno music,” “T-Pain,” “record noise.”
It’s not a particularly good collage, but in retrospect it seems that I managed to cover a lot of what we would end up discussing in it. (It also contains a large chunk of the sound collage I put together about a year ago to introduce myself to my new classmates.)
Piano Piece #13 “by George Maciunas”
As you may know from casual mentions on the blog or elsewhere, I finished my summer sound class last weekend with an in-class performance of George Maciunas’s “Piano Piece #13 (For Nam June Paik).” In that piece, made more recently popular by a performance by Sonic Youth, the performers nail down all the keys on a piano.
Conceptually, it is a very rich piece, touching on political, social, and compositional issues with an impressive economy of means. To prepare for our group performance, we had a discussion about possible motivations for such a piece. My students came up with a variety of reasons, ranging from “to make room for the new” and “to silence the piano” to “euthanasia for a dying instrument” and “permanent sustain.” One of my favorite constructions took the language of the piano’s mechanism—the hammers hitting strings at the behest of the keys—to create a narrative where, by turning it around and hitting the keys with hammers, we were balancing out the violence inherent in the instrument.
Of course, in the context of a high school summer class, there is also room for the pleasures of wanton destruction. I am glad to report, however, that the predominant feeling in the class as we set to the performance was regret—sadness at the destruction of an instrument that students characterized as “beautiful,” “historical,” and “helpless.” The actual performance of the piece, as opposed simply reading about it, was a very powerful experience.
There are also lovely photos on a student of mine’s Flickr page.
Conspiracy?
One issue came up in my preparations for the class that I thought might be interesting to share. Since the final day of the class was about “Scores”, I wanted to find some primary source for Maciunas’s piece. These process-oriented pieces (like Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music”) tend to be passed around without scores—the instruction to “nail down all the keys” is not terribly hard to remember. But, looking in the MIT Libraries’ copy of Fluxus Codex, which supposedly is an encyclopedic reference of the “official” Fluxus works, “Piano Piece #13” was nowhere to be found! There are piano pieces #1-12 for Paik, published in 1962, but no #13.
A Google search on the piece turned up varying descriptions and dates, and, interestingly, continuous reference to the Sonic Youth performance and video on SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. Every reference to the piece I found referred to the Sonic Youth version. One source mentioned that the piece was commonly confused with a similar piece by Tomas Schmit, “Sanitas 151, Fluxvariation 1,” which instructs to nail down all the keys of a “chromatic scale.” This piece, while not in the Fluxus Codex, is in the available-online Fluxus Performance Workbook [pdf link].
So, I’m not saying that Sonic Youth made up George Maciunas’s “Piano Piece #13,” but I’d sure like to know where they heard about it.
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Steve Reich: “Pendulum Music”
Performed by Nick Seaver
(photo via vickyzmr)
Here is a recording of me performing (“setting up?”) Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” in my summer sound class. There is a little pedagogical interlude in there as I answer some questions from the class, and I stop the piece before it is technically done, but hey, now it’s only 1:34 of microphone feedback instead of 5:00. (At the end, I say we’re going to do another version, with a different angle for the speakers, but it appears I managed to not record that one. Oh well.)
A great photo from my summer sound class of an in-class performance of Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (you can see my stick figure John Cage in the background). Making me nostalgic for class already!
Seeing this in her Flickr stream reminded me that I’ve yet to upload the audio recording of this performance. Maybe tomorrow…
(via one of my students, vickyzmr)
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I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^! - Nick Seaver and the Summer Sound Class
Related to the last post. A version of I Am Sitting in a Room where the max patch failed so the looped audio is: a few of the students saying “I am sitting in a room,” some silence, me hitting my head on the desk, and the kids laughing.
I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^!
This weekend, my sound class topic was “noise.” The class was split into three parts (in my ongoing attempts to make sure I always schedule in too many things to do): unwanted sound, noise/signal, and linguistic noise. One thing I wish I could have included was a discussion of noise and skill—whether assessments of “noisiness” have something to do with inferring intention, or intention well-constructed. But, time, as usual, was not on my side.
I knew I wanted to try a live version of Alvin Lucier’s extensively discussed I Am Sitting in a Room for the class, so I hunted down a Max patch to do the dirty work for me, adding in a function to record the whole exercise for posterity. I recorded each student saying “I am sitting in a room,” and then got ready to load it as the first iteration in our little recursive performance. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, in I Am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier records his voice, plays it into the room while rerecording, then plays that while rerecording, etc. until the recording turns into a room-mediated feedback orgy.)
Technology gremlins punished me for not figuring out how the patch I was using worked beforehand, because the setup that had worked perfectly in my pre-class test totally failed. Well, not totally—for some reason, it played a few of our “I am sitting in a room”s, went silent, I bashed my head on the table (having already screwed it up in a variety of ways before this try, including a version that appeared to change our voices into a mashup of Simian Mobile Disco and Sufjan Stevens all of a sudden…), and the class laughed. Then, it started playing again!
I decided to let it go, and see what would happen. The sound of my capitulating head-desk, laughter, and a bit of speech, went through the feedback wringer, and, for all the catastrophe, was not that bad! You can hear what we ended up with: “I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^!” (I’ll post an audio post version of it after this for good measure.)
I felt like I was the Portsmouth Sinfonia of sound art.
Sound in the 20th Century (etc.)
This summer, I’ve been enjoying teaching a course in MIT’s High School Studies Program called “Sound in the 20th Century.” (It technically goes into the 21st century, but since we’re mostly talking about developments from last century and it sounds cooler, I went with “in the 20th.”)
For my students, I put together a little website that serves as our syllabus, to collect the various links, youtube videos, etc. that I use to teach. The class pages are more like collections around a theme than a proper syllabus, but I go through them as examples to discuss in class, and they stay up as a way for interested students to share with friends or delve deeper. After class, I go back and revise to add things that came up during the day, adding things about the mosquito ringtone or the hearing stones of fish, for example. More things from class will undoubtedly end up on this blog as the program progresses.
I thought it might be a useful or interesting resource for people outside the class, so I’m sharing it here. From the index page you can check out the various classes and their themes. At the moment, the themes are: silence, tonality, voice, noise, indeterminacy, sampling, and scores. Any class that hasn’t happened yet only has a placeholder youtube video at the moment, but if you check back around the date listed in the index, the page should be live. Keep in mind that this is a pretty casual summer course for high school students with no homework, so there is a little bit of simplification for the sake of fun/breadth.
Follow along, let me know what you think, and certainly share anything you think I really need to include or got wrong.
(and a little bonus: the teaser page for the course I made on “How to Play the Piano in the 20th Century (and beyond)”)
