thanks Alan, for your response, this is helpful and allows more conversation here perhaps - especially since your extended review [Thursday, December 13] - if anyone is interested in the longer review, we should perhaps post it again. I had not reflected enough in the past on long durations performance improvisation; i only participated in very few marathons, once a 24 hour reading of the Iliad, with actors, and once a sleep over in a music/sonic arts festival where the musicians played all night and we were invited to sleep on mattresses in the performance space (i was in the audience). I filmed a long durational drone music concert with Phill Niblock but have not musically performed in a collective space of the kind you mention for these 96 hours (but for you the playing was intermittend, not ongoing -- I often wondered about Hsieh, and how he was able to perform for a year? Marina Abramovic's House with the Ocean View lasted for twelve days, I remember going one afternoon, in November 2012, it was just a year or so after 9/11 and the mood was dejected and yet oddly sanctified (?), that installation in my mind did not create a communal space of improvisation, togetherness, exchange and experience of consonances and dissonance but was dissinance, in my view, a faux-ritual, set up for us to admire the daring of the fasting performing up there on her pedestals.
Now the concert you described in December seems to have been complex and exciting and difficult also, in terms of how we receive or can receive , say, continuous music.... how musicians combine and sustain their playing, how instruments meet and how vastly differing music styles can enter confluence. Still, Susan was as puzzled as I was by your dejected comment on music being dead once released, or dead already when not received and feedbacked or discussed? surely here people on the list, and the many who know you, listen to or watch what is posted if they have time, or save it as i do for a good moment to ponder, and there is reception. How is radio received? how we we feed back to radio? and why did Benjamin or Brecht write radical radio theories back then? And the dead, of course, are in the majority; so they are hardly useless but with us. respectfully Johannes Birringer ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 18, 2013 6:14 AM To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] consonance Hi Johannes and thank you, There was only verbal feedback mainly from the participants - we had 50-70. It was an odd event, because musicians came in at different times and played in different groups; I think I mentioned I was there in the afternoon and so played with very few people - most of the musicians came in at night. But I logged 28 hours. What I really want to do now (working on it) is a 24-hour event, which is a lot shorter, but the concept is that the musicians who participate would remain for the duration. Jackson Moore who with Chris Diasparra and Edward Schneider (and me) ran the four day event at Eyebeam, talks about sonic citizenship, and I relate that to Alfred Schutz' writing on musicians playing together - there are complex feedbacks and phenomenologies at work in all of this, of course, but there's also the grace of withdrawal or silence at times. So if we have a group running and working for a day (with sleep when necessary), I think a really interesting organic form will emerge - and in fact I can imagine this in dance, stand-up comedy, all sorts of forms that might lend them- selves to improvisation. So we're thinking through this, which is really about thinking through the body in a situation or situations, perhaps prosthetic, perhaps as raw as iat its moment of birth, etc. etc. And maybe a dialog will emerge out of this, not a long form and not a long formlessness, but a long in/formation. I was just reading something by Eve Fox Keller on slime molds (one of my favorite organisms) in Sherry Turkle's Evocative Objects, and she touches on these issues, these modes (or modelessnesses) of organization. And tuning is continuous and difficult for me, always another form of feedback, always moving from in- to out-of tune, which is reminiscent of catastrophe theory's notion of the fragility of the good... Again, thank you! Alan - +++ [Suzon Fuks schreibt] Yes, Alan, so many things dead, without counting those on hard disks! Dead things lose their pulse in the ether? So many cells dying all the timeŠ. Are there uselessŠ? Are dead useless? No ceremony for these dead. Šthinking about it, but mostly feeling this strangenessŠ I meant to wish you happy birthday, long ago!Š Bzzzzz Suzon +++++ On Sun, 17 Feb 2013, Johannes Birringer wrote: > > > thanks Alan for sending your music to us > - i am listening to, and enjoying the consonances > and it is good that you have passed them on, > so they won't die and are not already dead or unheard at all. > I am in fact listening to them and will take them > to the dance studio later, greetings to all of you here from > Zagreb and the Dance Center in the old part of town. > > need to talk to you about retuning ("retuned sarangi > / retuned tamburi") and how this works for you. > > > your long review of the improvisation concert you were involved in, > the 96 hour continuous performance at Music Factory (back in December), > was so inspiring to me, i was trying to imagine it all, > also as the "unbroken collective statement " that you called it thinking > of the particular shape of this "durational event." > > did you receive feedback after your writing on this event? > > with regards > Johannes Birringer > > > ________________________________________ > From: [email protected] > [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim > [[email protected]] > Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 8:35 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [NetBehaviour] consonance > > consonance > > http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/conson1.mp3 > http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/conson2.mp3 > http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/conson3.mp3 > http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/conson4.mp3 > > alan sondheim with viola and retuned sarangi > azure carter with retuned tamburi > > i realize the uselessness of these pieces; for > a long time, there's been little or no comment > and they tend to die. these are made to die, > these are already dead, slipped into consonance > of one sort or another, gathered together like > dead boys and girls in the woods, listening to > grandmothers' and grandfathers' tales before > the blow of the axe, these are just unheard > pieces of music, like me dead before they were > born, disliked and abandoned miscarriages. > > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > > == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rt.txt == _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
