CoLab - Day 4 (Thursday 18th February 2021)
At 11am, we started day 4 of CoLab and began with a discussion on the work we had completed the previous day. The groups concluded that the contemporary scores required more time to edit and record. As a result, Georgina and I decided to prioritise the first half of the day to finish the editing of ‘Reverse racism, does in fact not exist’. After going through masses of material and experimenting with different combinations of it, we finally finished our interpretation of the piece (see the video below). This was a very empowering moment as the three of us are classical trained and in the past we have been ‘preached absolute fidelity to the score: do what the composer wrote and nothing more’(1). This time we had complete autonomy of the piece in correlation with the instruction from the composer.
After we completed our editing, we regrouped and were split into new groups to work on improvisations on a topic of choice. For this task, I was placed into a group with Laura Marquino Falguera, Magdalene Joyce and Kirsty Clapperton. As the majority of us formed the group that worked on ‘Addio del passato’, we decided to do continue on this theme and create an improvisation on sex work. We agreed that we would prefer to focus on an audio recording as the filming was particularly time consuming. In order to build a picture of sex work, we spent the day building testimonies from real sex workers, finding negative tweets about the matter and exploring media reporting on sex work. We explored a number of vocal sounds from the use of breath to direct quotation to sustaining words. We also looked at the possibility of using our instruments and created robotic speech by entering text into Google translate. After recording these sounds, Laura volunteered to create an audio improvisation, combining all of our separate recordings (the audio recording is below).
References
Alex Ross, ‘Taking liberties: Reviving the art of classical improvisation’, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/taking-liberties-2> (accessed 7 March 2021).