Ask other musicians to send you sound files to use in your next performance.
(My January 2011 call for sounds and duo concert with Samuel Gfeller.)
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I’ve completed Composition Exercise #51, a meta-Exercise which goes like this:
Buy a set of 50 flashcards.
Write a Composition Exercise on each one.
Go for a walk and drop the cards in public places.
It’s taken me almost a year, and many walks – much longer than intended. There were long breaks in between where I forgot to bring cards, lost my unused ones, or even forgot that I was still doing the piece. I’ve photographed and publicly shared some of the cards in the wild. Here they are for your enjoyment:
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Create a set of sound files.
Upload them to your phone or tablet.
Compose a piece with in which these sounds are triggered only through singular or recurring reminders which you set in a reminder app.
The duration can be anything from several minutes to several months.
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Setting a reminder on your phone is an act of composition: deciding and initiating that a certain thing is to happen – and, literally, a sound is to be played – at a certain point in the future.
Setting multiple, even many, such reminders creates a polyphony, a polyrhythm of intentions. Such an approach lends itself to systematization and automation.
Taking a systematic, flexible and thus generative approach to handling our intentions, commitments and observations is to move towards a life in which these can begin to resonate with each other: a move towards integrity and growth.
Davos, December 29, 2017 / Biel, January 3, 2018
Learn to create silence out of nothing.
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For one year, dedicate each month to a musical culture that is foreign to you. Listen to at least one piece every day. Go to a concert. Maybe even take some lessons. Observe what makes each culture sound like itself. What is rigid in this music, and what is flexible and improvised? What are the sonic and rhythmic qualities? As the year progresses, observe differences and similarities between the cultures you’ve encountered.
Two remarks:
1) Don’t get intimidated by the duration. Instead of twelve months you could also do twelve weeks, or twelve years.
2) “Musical cultures” could mean music from other ethnic cultures, but it could also mean immersing youself in Detroit techno, then German Schlager, K-Pop or your city’s flavour of Hip Hop.
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Take any piece with lots of breaks and fill them.
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Commission someone to ghostwrite a piece of music for you.
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Have somebody sponsor the chorus of your song.
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Write a piece in traditional notation. Cut it up bar by bar and put each bar into a fortune cookie. Hand them out to the audience.
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