Instructional Scores!

Children creating their own text and graphic score

Last year we visited by Tony Whitehead (RSPB South West and freelance workshop leader who has worked with us on Sonic Postcards and Sound Source – this is him on the BBC). Tony had been doing a lot of reading into text scores and instructional pieces and seeing if it could be applied in much the same ways as Sonic Postcards to the context of learning and participation.

At the same time Sonic Arts Network were just staging Cut & Splice, which for 2008 was based around Stockhausen's instructional score 'Aus den Sieben Tagen'.

There is a strong history of artists and composers using text to encourage people to consider sound, for example the work of R Murray Schafer and his book 'A Sound Education', Pauline Oliveros' book, 'Deep Listening' and 'The Listening Book' by WA Mathieu.

Ideas

To encourage young people to use creative writing to produce their own written guides to sounds at a specific site. These guides would be aimed at encouraging other visitors to the site to use their ears to experience the many and varied sounds of the specific site. This idea could then be developed into more abstract instructions that aren’t related to a specific place.

Then would follow a visit to a specific site (a nature reserve is a good example) and time spent listening using some of the exercises discussed.

Then each child would be given the opportunity to write his/her own 'listening guide to the nature reserve’ back at the classroom which would be made into a book.

This way of considering sound places both the creator and interpreter of the text in a position of artistic control. This process could be extremely empowering for young people taken out of a site specific context. This could be developed into mass participation acts of instruction using mobile technology among other applications…

We are also looking at digital responses to the subject through platforms like SMS, twitter and Facebook – mediums that are instantly accessible to young people.

Project Status

This is an untested project and is still in the development phase

Research

This is a collection point for quotes, reading material, links and anything else which might support the project. Please feel free suggest more by leaving comments below.

George Brecht was responsible for the development of the ‘event score’. The event score implies that the occurrences of the ordinary moment can function as the stuff of art, they frame the world as art in itself whilst shifting the perceptual viewpoint of what art and music are.

Incidental Music, 1961
George Brecht
Five Piano Pieces

Any number playable successively or simultaneously, in any order and combination, with one another and with other pieces.

The piano seat is tilted on its base and brought to rest against a part of the piano.
Wooden blocks
A single wooden block is placed inside the piano. A block is placed upon this block, then a third upon the second, and so forth, singly, until at least one block falls from the column
Photographing the piano situation
Three dried peas or beans are dropped, one after the other, onto the keyboard. Each such seed remaining on the keyboard is attached to the key or keys nearest it with a single piece of pressure-sensitive tape.
The piano seat is suitably arranged, and the performer seats himself

Incidental Music highlights the accidental, the chance event and the universe of potential sound. It presents a move away from physical object of artistic contemplation towards the performative, the humorous and the playful.

“Music starts in the mind. A sense of music is as individual as the individual mind. Music is a name given to a certain kind of perception of events in the world of sound. To be aware of sounds is to be aware of oneself; to be aware of sounds as music is to experience something capable of being shared. An experience shared is one that can be verified. It becomes more real”

Robert Maconie

This coupling of sound and self operates in the social field and is experienced as a shared event. Fluxus, in creating sound events that leave behind any traditional sense of the musical asks the listener to consider not only music itself as sound but things incidental and accidental, even visual, as pertaining to the domain of sound, such as photographing a piano. Fluxus is about perception.

Language functions increasingly as material for production within Fluxus. The Fluxus event score operates not only to give instruction but to function as a text in itself.

George Brecht
Five Events (1961)

eating with
between two breaths
sleep
wet hands
several words”

The score twists language into an event in the mind, it is both poem and instruction, reading the event score is to implicitly enact the score itself.”

La Monte Young’s Composition 1960, no.10 (for Bob Morris) “draw a straight line and follow it” raises the question: is it truly necessary to draw and actual line, in real time and space? Here language is an instructional game or musical score that situates the reader in the position of maker. Language becomes the artwork.”