Extended Music.en - Jerome Joy website

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!!!!2. -- Shakkei Both events by Suzuki and Shiu are able to modify at the same time our participation as listeners and our perception of what music is made of, between what is being played and what is receiving these sounds played. In the first event, music is a procession and a wandering; in the second one, a distribution and a dissemination. Both events participate in an art of roaming. In his performances, Akio Suzuki creates wakes of sounds that we are led to follow during an aimless stroll. Successive sounds of stones banged together by the performer reverberate as we walk on the more or less reflective surfaces of the environment, along the narrow path crossing a grass area, then a small hamlet of houses built close together then entering an emerging forest under a canopy. The sounds transmitted while wandering successively light up echoing acoustics. Our own wandering follows the furrow and “groove”, without recording or reading a preliminary sound, and creates acoustic filtering due to the distances and our on-going movement between the transmission and the reception of the sounds struck, which come back to us reverberated and reflected. In some ways, it reminds us of a practice of ambulatory lighting as it stimulates and explores acoustic spaces thorough the soundscape. What is already there becomes real through our wandering and temporary spacing. We interpret these perceptible spaces, occasionally or by seizing the opportunity of the moment and places, when we receive what is already there and manifests itself and reverberates through its multiple fragments and variations, as if they were as many coloured and tinted plans and volumes. Such perception profoundly and permanently alters the topography: the road and the landscape are more complex than they seemed to be at first. Simultaneously, we lose our way and discover new landmarks. Kawai Shiu's work meant for five instruments (cello, two horns, trombone, violin, played by Hong Kong New Music Ensemble musicians) is played around an abandoned house. A detached house—which translates as ‘pavillon’ in French and also refers to an auricle—and a beach, such a membrane placed side by side to the sea horizon. The whole, as an extension of a small valley, becomes an open-air clearing. The auditorium is progressively built as the piece is played: the musicians move along and progressively spread themselves in the space, as electrons or in clusters. They move from the house to the beach, to the jetty and the coast, and meet together on the esplanade of the house facing the horizon. This movement, of a duration of about thirty minutes creates a powerful pulsation; the listeners divide themselves in the manner of a choir (from the Greek term, ‘choros’), fortuitously creating a ‘chôra’, which here means a temporary set-up of the space. They move along in order to set their listening on the sounds of the instruments responding to each other by phrases and through the echoing between points in the open space. Distances vary constantly between the instrumentalists and between the instrumentalists and the audience. Yet, instead of tearing apart and dissolving the music into some dismemberment and loss in the current acoustic background (the rustle of the waves and the wind), paths and expanses are created that, successively, utilize the acoustic environment (the ambiance) to blend in it. Furthermore, these sound expanses dominate the environment in terms of intensity. Such scattering in space creates an ensemble in the meaning of “playing music together” as the performers and the listeners adjust to each other from a distance, in the same way as the unison and harmonic meetings intensified in the instrumental music made unique by the response and reception times due to the distances and spacing. Let us set the scene. This art of fabrication of remote listening meets, by analogy, another art, ‘shakkei’ (which means borrowed scenery). In Japanese tradition, this art refers to the subtle practice of gardening considered as a technique of perception, construction and interpretation of the reality and corresponding to what is called ‘mitate’ (“see like”). This term could be taken to the acoustic field and translated by ‘ototate’ (so surprisingly close to the term ‘Oto date’, ritual of the listening station, designating specific works by Akio Suzuki). The ’shakkei’ allows us to become aware of the successive plans integrated in a perspective (such as an outlook, for instance). It offers a mode of conscious decision helping to place an item (for the gardener: a plant) in a relationship between the foreground and a remote background. The plant in front of you is placed in a composed layout: the bed nearby, organized, and a mountain far away for example. I suggest that extended music and distance listening serve as “clutches” for such situations: through collaborating and borrowing from the distances and experimenting with expanses. In his article Making Music Together (1951), Alfred Schütz analyzed the musical situation of a group of performers and listeners together, orienting themselves from each other using clues and reactions to the interpretation during a musical moment (this is referred to by Schütz as “syntonia”); it is the case of any concert-type event: “Each action by each performer is not only influenced by the philosophy of the composer and his relationship to the public, but also, and in a reciprocal manner, it is based on the experiences in the external and internal moments of the other performers: [...] consequently each of them must take into account what the other one has to simultaneously perform. [...] Any music chamber instrumentalist knows the extent to which a setting preventing them from seeing each other can be disturbing. […] Under all such circumstances, the performer and the listener tune to each other.” We could also refer to more ancient works such as On Listening to Lectures (from the Greek ‘Peri tou akouein’) from Plutarch and also some extracts from the Books 1 and 3 of Montaigne's Essays, including: “The word belongs for half to the one who speaks it and for the other half to the one who listens.” Whether in the case of “outdoor” music or in the more contemporary case of networked music which involves into its system of fabrication (or execution) and composition, the specific conditions of live performances and the simultaneous (tele-)presence from a distance (‘hic et nunc’, ‘illic et simul’, Latin expressions that means “here and now”, “there and at the same time”), the challenge is to explore the conditions of the allocated and distributed instrumentation and the systems of performance, composition and improvisation created in the context of distant multi-spatial configurations: the locations of the public, the audience, the listener and the musicians adjust to each other on the question of participation and syntonia. It seems essential not to ignore either the interpretative intervention of the listener as a creative and interpretative act. The listener actively participates in the transformation of music into an “environmental” experiment of a new genre, which is absolutely an aesthetic experience, performed beyond the distracted wandering in spaces. In the case of our daily listening through devices, it goes beyond the simple operation of dials and switches (Glenn Gould) and steering of listening devices or software pre-programmed functions (Christophe Kihm). {br}{br}
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