here.here | Concept ventriloquy | Cage, Ellis, Oliveros, Reage

ewaeckerle
Mon, 11 Apr 2022 14:12:42 +0000
Events, Latest News, Other, Alexander J.Ellis, Artur Vidal, bookRoom, Ed Shipsey. John Eyles, here.here concert series, John Cage, Marjolaine Charbin, Pauline Oliveros, Pauline Reage, seamus cater, Sonic Meditations, UCA

Thursday 5th May 2022, at 8pm

Live from London IKLECTIK
Buy tickets here – £10 Advance / Students £6 | £12 otd / £8 Students

This is the 11th iteration of the here.here concerts series after Space ventriloquy | Mike McEvoy, Plangency, Sea of Cables (March 2022), Seamus Cater & Alexander J. Ellis (February 2022), Parkinson Saunders (May 2021), Voice & Electronics with Sadd, Moore, Waeckerlé and Ziv (April 2021), Greg Caffrey (IE, March 2021), Marie Cécile Reber (CH, Feb 2020), Gildas Quartet (UK, Oct 2019), Marcus Kaiser (DE, May 2019), Stefan Thut (CH, April 2019), Jessica Aslan and Emma Lloyd (UK, March 2019).

With Seamus Cater, Marjolaine Charbin, John Eyles, Ed Shipsey, Artur Vidal and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé

Programme
Teach Yourself to Fly (Pauline Oliveros,1970)
A length of time (John Cage,1960)
Checking (Seamus Cater, 2021)
O(nly) (Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, 2017)

For the three concerts of this 4th season, we have chosen works that rely upon the voice and other sonic events coming from elsewhere literally, metaphorically or through technology. Works that operates a certain kind of ventriloquy of text, of space and of concept, but also a metaphorical severing of the hegemony of the master (score, text, composer) over its (voice, instrument, performer) puppet. For this last concert Concept ventriloquy | Cage, Ellis, Oliveros, Reage, we are going back to Seamus Cater and his resounding of Alexander J. Ellis that prompted our theme, alongside three other works (Cage, Oliveros, Reage) that also tend to give agency to their performers. The scores don’t tell us what sounds to play, proposing instead something for us to practice, ways to create together what we hear that can only be different each time.

Teach Yourself to Fly (Pauline Oliveros, 1970).

With Marjolaine Charbin, Seamus Cater, John Eyles, Ed Shipsey, Artur Vidal, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé

“When breath flies the nest (body) and becomes sound”. This is Pauline Oliveros’ first Sonic Meditation (1974), part of a series of text scores intended for group work to reach heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness. Here we are invited to play with thresholds of gravity and attention awareness.

A length of time (John Cage,1960)

Marjolaine Charbin (piano), Artur Vidal (Saxophone) Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice)

“Just attention to the activity of sounds”. This seminal work provides a framework for listening to our environment instead of adding sound to it. The score indicates that “the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time”. The duration will be determined with a throw of dice before we begin. In the 3rd and final version (Tacet,1961) Cage describes David Tudor first performance of it, 4’33” (Woodstock, N.Y 1952), making it the definitive version mostly replicated ever since.

Checking (Seamus Cater, 2021)

fixed media recording of double bass (Koen Nutters), skhismic concertina, 20 tuning forks.

“…Ellis might have used a double bass to check each ‘A’ he encountered, to compare them to his own ‘A’ string”. A (re)sounding of historical ‘A’ tunings gathered by Alexander J. Ellis and presented to the Royal Society in 1880 as A History of Musical Pitch. Ellis listed 223 A’s ranging between F# and C#, cataloguing details, locations, anecdotes, instruments, and pitch collectors. 17 measures of a pitch history are presented, checked at length by double bass or concertina in a way that Ellis might have checked their tone himself. An inversion of his more common habit of checking instruments with tuning forks.

O(nly) (E.Waeckerlé, 2017)

Seamus Cater, John Eyles, Ed Shipsey, Artur Vidal (voices), Marjolaine Charbin (piano)

“Echoes of O, unbound for moment, of O, of you”

One of four Ode (owed) to O works (Wandelweiser editions, 2017) based on minimal narration and musical translation of Pauline Reage’s infamous erotic novel Story of O (1954). Here O, the character, is released vocally from her fatal story while instruments are invited to read her as a note or chords on a stave of words.

with Iklectik Surround Sound System powered by AMOENUS operated by Isa Barzizza.

here.here concept ventriloquy Press Release

here.here concert series
A collaboration between bookRoom and the Audio Research Cluster at UCA Farnham, led by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Harry Whalley, around their common research in extended, textual, visual, gestural and object scores and ways to integrate or experience technology in text / music / film / performances. The project is supported by UCA research fund.