There’s a new website that you need to know about. Upload .. Download .. Perform is “a repository of scores for contemporary experimental performance.” Composers, upload your scores. You’ll keep your copyright under the Creative Commons license, while allowing for distribution. Performers, look around for new pieces. They are fully and freely available for you to perform. Other interested parties look around and see what interests you. It’s available for everyone’s use. Many of the composers who have submitted pieces are based in Los Angeles, but I trust that will change as word spreads. The idea for this site is so good that it seems wonderfully obvious…now that it exists.
Dirt
I read an essay over the weekend that dives straight into a mess and discovers things that can only emerge from a fearless dig. I admired the boldness of the piece, and started thinking about how much I love to find dirt in my music.
There are pieces that literally involve dirt. David Dunn directs a listener to ground level in Purposeful Listening In Complex States of Time. He also wrote Skydrift, described as “a large outdoor performance work for a large dry lake bed in the Anza-Borrego Desert, CA.” The first installation of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth included rusting machinery and decaying fish heads. Clay is the main component of one player’s instruments in Georges Aperghis‘s Seul à Seuls. I was transfixed by the rough beauty of that performance last year at the Huddersfield festival.
Simon Steen-Andersen amplifies very quiet sounds to bring out their fragility.
This opens up a rich micro-world of new sounds, in which normally suppressed or hidden subordinated sounds are integrated into an intense imagery of sounds.
Steen-Andersen digs beneath the surface of individual sounds in the midst of a live event to see how they are composed.
Charles Ives loved messiness for its own sake. His childhood memory of hearing multiple bands at a parade stayed with him, and affected his future work. In my experience, the sound of a marching band is rarely clean in the first place.
In my own work, I especially enjoy the alchemical reactions that can occur between sounds, or between sounds and objects. Sounds that would be relatively clean alone react with each other to make a rich sound world. Here’s one example from my enclosed set–a piece for euphonium and voice, played and sung by Jonathon Kirk.
UbuWeb
UbuWeb is an free resource that embraces experimental music, as well as other streams of what they term the avant-garde. That term isn’t the one I would choose for what they offer, but I’m not sure I could come up with a better one. In any case, the content is fantastic, and it is very relevant to the themes I’m exploring here at sound expanse.
Recently I’ve gotten interested in projects carried out with an open source methodology. Project Gutenberg (a library of over 25,000 free ebooks) was quite helpful to me as I looked up some William James quotes for my dissertation last September. I clicked on a banner ad, and quickly got involved in PG’s virtual back room, Distributed Proofreaders. The skills and conversations (not to mention the friendships) that have developed through this volunteer work have opened my eyes to other great work that is happening that has no basis in traditional currency. Here’s a relevant excerpt from UbuWeb’s FAQs.
How do I purchase something from your site?
You can’t. Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It’s all free. We know it’s a hard idea to get used to, but there’s no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum.
In fact, the whole site is a lush gift shop, with the singular omission of a cash register. Everything is available to see, hear, or download.
In Aspen: The multimedia magazine in a box, you’ll find:
- John Cage’s How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
- Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark
- Max Neuhaus’s realization of Cage’s Fontana Mix
- an entire Fluxus issue
- an article on the potential nature of music by La Monte Young that I wish I had found when I was writing a paper on him, followed by a striking Terry Riley score excerpt, in The Psychedelic Issue
In the incredible Publishing the Unpublishable series, you’ll find Tom Johnson‘s The Voice of New Music, a collection of his Village Voice reviews from 1972-1982. It is fine writing, coming from a standpoint of experience, knowledge, and interest.
The list of artists in UbuWeb: Sound will look very different from my set of links, and there are good reasons for that. I’m planning on delving into these links in any case, but here is the explanation for the difference:
Originally focusing on Sound Poetry proper, UbuWeb’s Sound section has grown to encompass all types of sound art, historical and contemporary…Categories include Dadaism, Futurism, early 20th century literary experiments, musique concrete, electronic music, Fluxus, Beat sound works, minimalist and process works, performance art, plunderphonics and sampling, and digital glitch works, to name just a few. As the practices of sound art continue to evolve, categories become increasingly irrelevant, a fact UbuWeb embraces. Hence, our artists are listed alphabetically instead of categorically.
I can’t recommend the site highly enough. If I have any objection to it at all, it’s that huge treasures are hidden behind tiny links. Sometimes I wish the scale of their offerings was at least partially visible on the front page. But when you walk into an enormous library, you know there will be some research and careful browsing involved. One discovery will lead to another. Why not approach UbuWeb in the same way?
Here’s one of thousands of examples of what UbuWeb has to offer: footage of a live performance by Maja Ratkje in Paris in 2005.