Saturday, November 20, 2010

CCRMA Musicircus

Last night CCRMA was taken over by the Musicircus, an annual, John Cage-inspired experimental concert featuring overlapping spaces filled with music, interactive performances, and installations by CCRMA students and faculty.  I had the privilege of performing some of the material I've been developing over the past couple years in the student lounge on the third floor.  It was a wonderful gift to be able to share my music with so many other like minded individuals, and I was really pleased with everybody's reactions to my set.  I was especially happy to hear that multiple people fabricated connections between the video and audio (assuming that they were controlling each other in some way), when, in fact, these pieces were totally independent.  Any correlation between the two was completely random.  John Cage would (hopefully) be proud...


Michael Wilson (one of my fellow MST students) was incredibly generous to offer some of his time and a few gigabytes of SD card memory to film my entire set (see below).  Thanks Michael!  Some high quality video of one or two excerpts from the evening should be making its way onto the internet soon as well.

cloud veins @ the ccrma musicircus (november 2010) from Christopher Carlson on Vimeo.
Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel.


Setting up earlier in the day...



Since I was projecting on a bed sheet in the window, it was possible to
see my video projections from outside the building.  People seemed to
notice this as they approached on foot.





Thanks to Bruno, Sasha, Carr, Jay, and everybody else involved in making this concert happen!  I can't wait for the next one!

1 comment:

  1. Nice man, glad it's up here so I could finally see the whole set (even though I was just in the next room!)

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