Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
30/06/2023
for Music and/as Process 10th Annual Conference: Making Music Together
What is left if we aren’t the world is a text score for voices and instruments commissioned by and premiered at the Amsterdam Wandelweiser festival in October 2022.
"Sudden pandemonium to begin with...... Recurring occasionally as we attempt to attune ourselves to the swirling flows of our inner and outer surroundings... Until we feel or sound indistinguishable from what is there."
The text score for voices and instruments is inspired by lockdown experience during the pandemic and my readings at the time: Franco Berardi’s description of chaos, Timothy Morton’s provocative question: what is left if we aren’t the world? And Luce Irigaray’s invitation of being in the cosmos, one towards the other… sustained by an ideal.
The text score was itself inspired by a short recording of my voice playing with the wind on a stormy lockdown night (2020) for a work released on a CD compilation Sounds of Absence | Various artists (Gruen 209, Gruenrecorder, 2022).
THE WORKSHOP (3 TO 4PM)
Together, we discussed and practiced, to find out what it feels, and sounds like to provoke and sustain pandemonium, but also what intimacy can mean in that context, what distance it may require. Making what Timothy Morton calls “The sound of the end of the world but not an apocalypse, not a predictable conclusion. The sound of something beginning, the sound of discovering yourself inside of something”(2013).
The Performance (7 to 8pm)
What is left if we aren’t the world is one of 4 pieces to be performed by a large ensemble of the conference delegates. The recording of which will be included in a forthcoming CD celebrating the 10th anniversary of The RMA Study Group Music and/as Process: to be released on the Birmingham Record Company label, and distributed by NMC Recordings.
All text scores are available from Edition Wandelweiser