Posted by: michael-karr

The project is entitled 'The Symphony that's beginning to end', in light of the recent budget cuts to the Dutch fund for artistic development. What was once a thriving cultural destination for all the world is now caught in the midst of a near-death experience. It is said that when an individual dies, their whole life can flash in fragments before their eyes within a very short time. In this tradition, on 21 December 2012, the entire train of musical history will make its trip from the middle of the Bronze Age to the literal present day; a life which has lasted 3800 years, compressed into the final sixteen hours of this day. Provided that we survive these final hours, the concert will go on international tour in 2013.

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From the first primative notations in cuneiform of approximately 1800 B.C. to the garage bands of late 2012, some 10,000 fragments will be layered into a polyphonic epoch timeline for 9 musicians (the longest symphony to date in performance and recording, with the smallest ensemble respectively). 9 CD's, more than 400 years development per disc (on average), will be produced and released in a limited edition between June 2012 and November 2012. When the Maya calendar ends, a performance will be given in full (16 hours) at a later to be determined location in the Netherlands.

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I am actively pursuing many regional and international partnerships to make the symphony accessible to as wide a public as possible. This is crucial as the project scopes all the musical cultures of the world (Ebenezer Beesley's Mormon hymns included). The nine CD presentations will be hosted at venues in the Netherlands and abroad; with each presentation I will hold an artist talk and a fragment of 45 minutes from the CD will be performed live by an ensemble of three musicians.

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All forms of music will be used. Each century will consist of three musicians who play a reduction of the collected material. These trios will be assembled from all 9 musicians based on the average call for instruments from that period. However, the musicians will not always keep to their own instrument; virtually every musician is capable of playing more than one instrument and many have even studied multiple instruments. By taking advantage of this as a composer, I make virtually every kind of music possible with as few hands as possible.

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The earliest works will consist primarily of vocals and hand-crafted percussion; flutes and bowed instruments will also appear. I will collect various shells, reeds and such from beaches with which to construct these early instruments. I will work with instrument builders and hobbyists, with the available historical evidence, to build these primitive instruments. Later on, the guitars will be invented and much, much later Hip-Hop will be born. The music will be arranged through a research period starting on 15th of March at the Sibley Music Library at the University of Rochester in New York. Here I will collect the fragments of data from 10,000 scores during a 2 month stay. Works that belong to the public domain will simply be photocopied. Copyrighted works will be converted into a spectrogram (a graphical representation of complex sound) and used as a score, a method that I have proved successful in previously performed compositions of mine.

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All of these fragments combine to 9 wall-sized collages which are easily readable by and useful to all musicians involved, myself included. All original markings on the score by the composer will be kept. However, the less knowledge there is available about a certain work (anonymous composers, 'unfinished' works, ambiguous or bad notation) the more freedom the musicians have for interpretation. The musicians work together to finish the collages by transferring the notes they took in their study scores.

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I have chosen for collage as the visual form for a symphony as these traditions both make (shameless) use of cut-and-paste techniques from old, stolen and foreign sources. The layered characteristic of a collage relates to simultaneous layers of sound (symphony).


Source: http://www.michaelkarr.nl

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