The ubiquitous use of mobile devices to document and distribute our daily activities in a never-ending stream of updates, checkins, tweets and retweets is generating an ever-expanding biosphere of social information.
This advancing ecosystem is growing into an adaptive system of informational weather. Technologist Ben Hammersley calls it ‘social weather’: “I want to feel my friends like I feel the weather.”
— Read more ›
- Alvin Lucier.
On Thursday 28 April the Stedelijk Museum and Non-fiction present Hear it! – a playlist for the Stedelijk Museum, with works by Dick Raaymakers, Alvin Lucier, Mark Bain, Pierre Bastien, La Monte Young and Gert-Jan Prins, and performances by Paul Panhuysen, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Alog, Gabriel Lester, Claron McFadden and many others.
When? April 28, 2011, from 19:30 – 23:00 hrs
Location: Temporary Stedelijk 2, Auditorium, museum café and galleries
Entrance: Valid museum ticket
Language: English
Reservation: Reservation is mandatory
A playlist for the museum
Hear It! is presenting a playlist of these different types of work with sound, and is presenting different generations of musicians and artists who work with sound in their own way. This evening does not aim to provide a historical cross-section of sound in the arts, but is a personal playlist of works from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum and performances by (international) artists and musicians who are exploring the limits of the building and sound. The evening was organised intuitively by listening carefully to the building, the collection and the public, and is possibly most comparable to the way in which a DJ works, or to the musical experience you have with Soundcloud and Spotify. That is why there is a mixed succession of a Siren, a Norwegian DIY band, a Gregorian choir and the public which assumes the role of composer and performer, amongst others.
The sound of now, since 1952
It is now almost 60 years since director Willem Sandberg embraced music in the Stedelijk with his famous series ‘The Music of Now’ in 1952. Sandberg’s view was that the museum should provide room for other art forms than visual art as well, including contemporary music. Since then contemporary music has assumed many different forms and is described in various ways: as experimental music, sound art, sound performances, sound sculptures and audio culture. Some musicians call themselves ‘artists’ and some artworks are characterised as being ‘musical’. It is not always completely clear, but what is evident is that there is great deal happening at the point where the visual arts, music and sound come together.
Performances by
Aardvarck (NL) / Alog (NO) / Nathalie Bruys (NL) / Carl Michael von Hausswolff (SE) / Allard van Hoorn (NL) / Brandon LaBelle (USA) / Gabriel Lester (NL) / Claron McFadden (USA/NL) / Paul Panhuysen (NL) / Sarah van Sonsbeeck (NL) / Schola Cantorum Amsterdam (NL)
Works by
Mark Bain (USA/NL) / Pierre Bastien (FR) / John Cage (USA) / Alvin Lucier (USA) / Gert-Jan Prins (NL) / Dick Raaymakers (NL) / La Monte Young (USA)
Introduction by: Harold Schellinx / Juha van ‘t Zelfde
Programme: Michiel van Iersel & Juha van ‘t Zelfde (Non-fiction)
Advisors: Bart Rutten, Margriet Schavemaker and Hendrik Folkerts (all Stedelijk Museum)
Research: Adelá Foldynová and Pieter Willems
Live blog: VPRO Dorst
Partners: BeamSystems, Nalden, CitizenM and Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht
Another update from Juha, having just recovered from the flu. Michiel has been ill too – way to go Non-fictionites. These past days have been all about the North Sea Jazz Festival, and a little bit of balcony gardening.
Already after the first time I give up writing a weekly update. I admit, I’m not disciplined enough. I will now rename it “randomly timed update of current affairs.” See, much better.
What happened this time? Apart from discovering that it is possible to garden on a balcony on the 4th floor, and by doing so becoming a Foursquare mayor of my local garden supply store, I have spent most of my time on finishing my proposal for this year’s North Sea Jazz Festival. Although I have a background mostly in beat driven electronic music, playing jungle, dubstep and other asymmetric electronic music as DJ at festivals and club nights, in the years of working for Kadir Selçuk and Huub van Riel in Lantaren/Venster and the Bimhuis since 2005, I have developed an interest in electroacoustic improvised music. Early concerts I did were with Jacob Kirkegaard, Christian Fennesz, Philip Jeck and BJ Nilsen, who are all part of the unsurpassed London music label Touch. Later on I collaborated with Yuri Boselie on inviting abstract beat producers like Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke to the Bimhuis on the Beat Dimensions nights. And in between I worked with Alog, Stephen O’Malley and Icarus.
These experiences have led to the invitation by the North Sea Jazz Festival, to programme two stages: one with beat-driven music (Yukon), and one with electroacoustic improvisation (Volga). It’s a great honour to bring my favourite musicians to my old hometown, and I find it incredibly encouraging that such a big and respected festival is open to new developments, and reserves an important part of its line up to these cutting-edge musics. We are in the midst of booking the musicians, and hopefully within a few weeks we can present an allstar line up of stellar artists. The Yukon stage on Friday 9 July will present a new generation of beat makers, the Volga on Sunday 11 July multiple generations of electronically aided improvisors.
As for the garden, it looks stunning. I just hope the grass and bamboo will survive the heavy winds. At least there’s a Moomin looking after them.
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage playing chess (photo: Shigeko Kubota)
In an e-mail exchange with the English bassist Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) about a concert in Amsterdam, he confused me by writing that he did not consider himself a musician, and he was not even sure if he really liked music. Jenkinson is a drummer as well as a bass player, and ever since his first album, Feed Me Weird Things, released in 1996, he has been more or less idolized as an innovator of electronic music.
His music was used by filmmaker Sofia Coppola as the sonic translation of Tokyo’s lightscape in Lost in Translation. It has been presented in manic and sterile fashion by video-maker Chris Cunningham and recorded as a contemporary pendant of 20th-century experimental music by the London Sinfonietta, in a programme of such great composers as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Why would anyone of such stature not want to call himself a musician?
In search of an explanation, I called on a number of friends in the music scene and asked what their definition of music was, and whether you could make music without being a musician.
Nearly a century ago, the French composer Edgard Varèse referred to music as ‘organized sound’, a term that was reinforced in 1937 by John Cage in his famous lecture, The Future of Music: Credo. Some theorists see music as a language that enables interaction between people. Others see it as organized movement of air. Philosophers sometimes speak of a ‘practical form of philosophy in time and space’ (I kid you not). The Scottish sound theorist, Steve Goodman, speaks of music as a form of architecture that makes it possible for people to acoustically take control of their environment. As an example, he refers to South London’s dubstep producers, who want to cut off the intrusive noise of their immediate environment and the outside world and by using music equipment to carve out a space in sound.
With any of these descriptions, the question remains whether you can make music and not be a musician, as Jenkinson implies. Most people reply that, yes, you can. You can be ‘tone deaf, not master any instrument or forget to pay your membership to the Musicians Union’, as Ollie Bown of the Icarus electronic ensemble jokes. You might only call yourself a musician ‘if the context requires it and if it is less confusing to call yourself a musician, instead of an artist or theoretician’, as Bown’s cousin and composer Sam Britton pragmatically replies. You can make music and not be a musician ‘by working as an artist in the auditive domain’, adds Lucas van der Velden of the artists collective Telco Systems, or indeed, according to producers Kode9 and Cinnaman ‘by simply not caring what you call it’.
The answers vary from self-effacing to convincing and from indecisive to indifferent. If a distinction can be made between capable musicians who refine and develop their art according to a tradition, and ‘musicians’ who experiment with apparatus and instruments with no notion or interest in history, then perhaps Jenkinson is right. But can such a distinction be made?
Jenkinson also wrote, ‘I see myself as someone who clears the way for musicians and composers, brushing away preconceptions about what is permissible.’ Perhaps Jenkinson’s words indicate that it is ultimately about the experience of music, not about qualifying or analyzing it.
A final word goes to the buoyant Swiss artist Dimitri Grimm (Dimlite), whose e-mail response to my question of whether or not he is a musician was, ‘A loud no and an even louder yes. It depends on who is asking. That question almost never needs a reply (maybe for the phone book entry). The title “musician” is not really laden with a concrete association in my world. I have never learned the definition of a musician, so: I don’t know. There was a time when I used to say, “well, call me a music-maker”, out of respect, because I am not that guy who is reading or writing notes and mastering the craft of, let’s say, guitar playing. That is a musician, right? I grew up in a time when people scratching with turntables had already started calling themselves musicians. These days, we juggle zeros and ones by ear and eye, create sounds, rhythms, harmonies, melodies and good and bad ghosts of all sorts, by any means, for ears and souls, and it takes a lot of mastery. It is nobody’s right to decide who is a musician and who is not, and if they do, who cares?’
This article was published in Metropolis M of February/March 2009.