Becoming ... Everything Else: Situating Performance in Public Space and Daily Life

BECOMING . . . EVERYTHING ELSE: SITUATING PERFORMANCE IN PUBLIC SPACE AND DAILY LIFE MICHAEL BOYD NE OF THE ISSUES that has strongly influenced my compositional activities since 2003 is the role of performers in the music-making process. Post-Romantic practices in Western art music typically segregate composer, performer, and audience into discrete roles that carry assumptions about the tasks associated with each. The composer is most often associated with the creative portions of the music-making process, and is credited with the creation of unique musical works. Performers, conversely, are normatively regarded as replicators, individuals whose task is to bring composers’ works to life without adding or altering them in any significant way. Indeed performing musicians in this tradition are limited to minimally modifying tempo and volume, incorporating a small degree of vibrato, and adding silent physical (“expressive”) gestures. Audience members are more often O 58 Perspectives of New Music than not assumed to comprise a single passive entity with uniform taste that centers on the late Baroque through Romantic Western art music canon. Such a configuration is hierarchical, essentially situating composers on a pedestal, and subordinating performers and, to an even greater degree, audience members. Since the mid-twentieth century, largely under the rubric of indeterminacy, some individuals have composed in a manner that has led to more collaborative models for music creation and reception. Prominent composers in this paradigm include members of the New York School, John Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, as well as others such as Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many more. My recent compositions extend this experimental tradition through the use of different types of graphic and text notation that examine interactions and relationships between multiple performers, performers and instruments, performers and sounds, performers and themselves, and so on. Such an approach immediately sheds many conventions of Western art music including the primacy of pitch and a roughly one-to-one correspondence between composer input and performer output, thereby increasing performer creative/interpretive agency, and enabling non-specialists and musicians with lesser technical facility to offer viable or “accurate” performances. I have also been drawn to installation art for some time, I think largely because this medium brings space, a facet of art and music typically assumed neutral and inert, to the foreground. In 2004 I decided to begin a large-scale installation project. Initially it seemed as though this endeavor would not be congruent with my interest in collaborating with and challenging live performers; most installations involve visual elements, live processed or fixed electro-acoustic sound, or both. After a period of time, it became apparent that one could essentially install performers in a space, and that precedents existed for this practice, some of which I was already familiar with. Eventually I customized and applied my preexisting compositional practices to the installation medium, creating Becoming . . . everything else (2004). In this essay, I will briefly examine a few works that mix performance and aspects of installation art, and then discuss Becoming at length, both the composition itself as well as three performances of it from 2005. John Cage’s Variations IV (1963) is a concert work for one or more performers that evokes aspects of installation art. Like other of Cage’s Variations, the score for this piece consists of text-based instructions and a set of transparencies, in this case featuring two circles and seven points. Unlike the well-known Variations II, which requires the performer to connect points and lines, measure the connecting lines, Situating Performance in Public Space and Daily Life 59 and use that data to determine parameters such as frequency and amplitude for sound events, Variations IV requires the performer(s) to acquire and use a map of the performance space to prepare each performance. Once a map of the space has been obtained, one places a circle on the map (within the performance space), drops the remaining transparencies (seven points and the other circle) on the map, and connects the initially placed circle with all seven points by drawing lines. Sound production is defined by Cage in the following manner: Sound(s) to be produced at any point on the lines outside the theatre...