In this weeks workshop forum the entire class was involved in a 45 minute musical piece, "Compossible", by David Harris. It was very entertaining in my opinion. Weird, but entertaining.
The piece consisted of percussionists, vocalists, keyboardists and readers. The percussionists were given a unique piece of sheet music where certain percussion instruments were to be played once between particular intervals of time at the percussionist's own discretion.
The vocalists were to sing one note also between certain time intervals according to their sheet music at their own discretion. They had the choice of note, and whether to sustain it or not.
The keyboardists were given sheet music to sight read, but played the single notes or chords at their own discretion within the time intervals provided on the sheet music.
The readers were given sheets not containing music, but many paragraphs that were to be read in a clear voice within the time intervals at the readers discretion.
I was a reader.
In this piece of music we were not required to play, read or sing in sync with one another. We could play, read or sing whenever we wanted, as long as it was within the correct time intervals.
David suggested that we undertook a 5 minute trial run before starting the 45 minutes piece. It was the funniest piece of music I had ever heard. And that was just the trial run! All the random playing of percussion instruments, keyboards, and vocal sounds had me laughing uncontrollably. At one stage I had tears in my eyes. We were stopped at five minutes and I was told that I didn't have to "piss myself".
After I got my breath back, we started the 45 minute piece. There were times where I almost lost it again, but I controlled myself.
It was a very interesting exercise.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment