Week 3 - Forum - "There's no noise or sound that isn't music."

This forum involved the students performing a 45 minute piece written by David Harris called “Compossible with Nineteen Parts.” It involved the use of different instruments and voices playing set notes, chords or spoken words freely within different set timeframes as written on the score. It created a random mingling and overlap of notes and sentences that, as David put it, creates the “intentional removal of beat.” The way I understand it, it introduces randomness by if it were played a hundred times the composition would be performed differently a hundred times thus sounding completely different a hundred times. If that is a good thing or a bad thing I guess is up for debate. From a compositional and musical perspective, it was great. It was interesting and fun. Dinging the bell was a highlight for me. Some of us probably had a little too much fun judging by the murmers and giggling that regularly occurred from different corners of the room throughout the performance. With so much laughter it was difficult to distinguish whether this was to be taken as a serious musical piece. Personally, for me it was more like playing a game than a performance.

When the piece concluded we were invited to ask questions or comment on the experience. This is where the forum was spoiled for me. I got the distinct impression he was not impressed by me asking how the performance was relevant to music technology. I was slightly annoyed as the only “answers” that I received seemed to question my intelligence to understand why we were doing it in the first place and that “the use of traditional instruments to make noise was to open our minds as to what music can be.”[1] To use the argument that it was to open our minds was a stretch as I strongly believe that as tech students we should already have open minds as to what music can be. My other comment, which was ignored, is that instruments always make music. It would only be noise if an individual wanted it to be. I didn’t appreciate someone telling me how I should discern between noise and music. That is for the individual to decide. This piece was not noise to me. It was music in a random fashion, but music nonetheless.

-

[1] Harris, David. 2007. "Forum - Music Technology" Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 15 March.