A staircase performance by MUSC 300
11/11/11 AM
Olin Library | Music Staircase
‘Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears’, instructed Pauline Oliveros, in her Sonic Meditationsfrom 1970. As well as pushing at disciplinary, social, and institutional boundaries, the experimental initiatives of the 1960s and ’70s sought to cultivate greater sensory awareness. This was achieved by using everyday objects as musical instruments, collaborating with the musically curious (not just those who had received a musical education), using chance techniques, and celebrating the sounds considered marginal by others. Yoko Ono notes, ‘the only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind … In the mind-world, things spread out and go beyond time’.
MUSC 300 invites you to step into an introspective listening experience in a hidden staircase. The following pieces will be performed with overlaps and juxtapositions, so please reserve any applause until the end.
Programme
- Michael Parsons Mindfulness of Breathing (1969)
- John Cage Aria (1958)
- Scratch Orchestra, ed. Cornelius Cardew Nature Study Notes (1969)
- Yoko Ono Grapefruit (1964)
- Nye Ffarrabas Paper Event (1966)
- Pauline Oliveros In Consideration of the Earth (1998)
- Alvin Lucier Gentle Fire (1971)
- Oliveros Wind Horse (1989)
- Parsons Just Water (2017)
- Robert Ashley She was a Visitor (1967)
- Oliveros Rock Piece (1979)
Audience Participation
Celebrating the participatory ethos, you are invited to join in the following works:
(3) Scratch Orchestra, Nature Study Notes
Complete or join an improvisation rite.
(5) Ffarrabas, Paper Event
Crumple scrap paper with your left hand, matching the mood of the performer.
(10) Ashley, She Was A Visitor
Copy the chorus, picking up and echoing the phonemes they are extracting and lengthening.
(11) Oliveros Rock Piece
Using two rocks (or other resonant objects), establish an independent pulse and maintain your pulse steadily without any interpretation or accents. If you find yourself synchronizing with someone else, stop, listen, and begin a new pulse that is independent from all other audible pulses.
Biographies
Robert Ashley (1930–2014) was best known for his operas and other theatrical works, many of which incorporate electronics. She Was A Visitor is the Epilogue to his opera that morning thing, written after the deaths of three female friends. It was intended to be understood as a form of rumour. A lone speaker repeats the title sentence throughout the entire performance. The separate phonemes of this sentence are picked up freely by others, who sustain them softly and for the duration of one natural breath.
John Cage (1912–1992) studied liberal arts at Pomona College. His work has had immeasurable influence on 20th- and 21st-century music and art. He led the way in the field of indeterminate composition by means of chance operations, some of which emerged during his time teaching at Wesleyan. His Aria consists of colourful, graphically-notated wavy lines of music and black squares denoting ‘non musical’ vocal noises. The colours corrolate to different singing styles, which are determined by the singer prior to performance. The text has isolated vowels and consonants, as well as words, from Armenian, Russian, Italian, French, and English.
Cornelius Cardew (1936–81) studied piano and cello at the Royal Academy of Music and electronic music in Cologne where he worked as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assistant. He pioneered performances of Cage, Stockhausen, La Monte Young, Riley, and Wolff. Cardew studied graphic design and worked intermittently as an artist/researcher. In 1966, he joined the free improvisation group AMM. While teaching an experimental music class at Morley College (1968) he formed the Scratch Orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton. Nature Study Notes was the group’s first publication.
Nye Ffarrabas (born 1932)(formerly Bici Forbes Hendricks), is a central figure of the Fluxus movement. She creates intermedia events that push at the boundaries of established norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music and theatre, erasing distinctions between art and life. Nye’s materials include words, mobius strips, ice, flags, eggs, diapers, electric lights, Camel cigarette packets, and the bones of oxtail soup. ‘I work with what I find around me’. Paper Event was written for the Black Thumb Summer Institute, an imaginary programme of study she devised in 1966.
Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) spent a lifetime exploring the material properties of sound. His work often comprised actual experiments — amplifying his own brain waves, producing auditory maps with echolocation, or teasing out the resonant frequencies of enclosed spaces. His famous 1969 work, I Am Sitting in a Room, sets up an elegant system of resonance and decay. All his works betray a curiosity – not just about what music is, but what it can be. His Gentle Fire is a philosophical and poetic play on subjectivity, transformation, and shifting auditory landscapes. It requires close listening to the materiality of sound.
Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was a pioneer of electronics, meditative music, improvisation, alternate tuning systems, contemporary accordion playing, and multimedia events. Her work with myth, ritual, and the environment had a profound influence. In Consideration of the Earth invites performers to play according to the feeling of the East, the South, the West, the North, finally interacting with the qualities of the Centre. Each is a psychosonic meditation, with the cardinal points representing a kind of mandala. In Rock Piece, participants choose a pair of resonant rocks for use as percussive instruments. After listening for environmental pulses each participant establishes an independent pulse with their rocks. The pulse is to be maintained steadily without any rhythmic interpretation or accents. Oliveros instructs those who perceive that they are synchronizing exactly, or in a simple multiple or division with someone else, to stop, listen, and begin a new pulse that is independent in rate from all other pulses.
Yoko Ono (born 1933) is a Japanese-American multimedia artist, singer, and activist known for her avant-garde work. A pioneering figure in conceptual and performance art, Ono emerged in the 1960s with works that often invited audience participation, blending art with social commentary. Her collaborations with John Lennon, including the Bed-Ins for Peace, positioned her as an outspoken advocate for world peace. Ono is celebrated for her boundary-pushing installations, experimental music, and commitment to social and environmental causes. In 1964, Ono published Grapefruit, her foundational book of instruction works. These concise texts, somewhere between poem and score, aim to unlock the mind.
Michael Parsons (born 1938) was co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra. While teaching in art schools in the 1970s he was associated with the Systems group of visual artists and wrote participatory pieces for untrained performers and environmental works, such as Echo Piece (performed on a frozen lake in Finland in 1976). His Mindfulness of Breathing explores the practice of Ānāpānasati, or breath awareness, in Buddhist meditation, also drawing on techniques of prolation canon and chant traditions. Just water is a round that sets a text by Andrew Stevenson, from a translation of a Chinese poem.
MUSC 300: Stuart Conrad, Gavin Cui, Ellington Davis, Jolene Jiang, Sydney Lurie-Firestein, Samvit Singhal, Lola Cortez, with Jane Alden
Hosted by the World Music Archives & Music Library.