And you know, there is also something interesting in relation to the idea of hungry listening, that may make many of our learners think of consumerism. So, there is this bridge that connects colonialism with contemporary consumer culture. And in that regard, another really important aspect of many of the colonial thinkers and activists and artists, is an insistence that we can't focus all of our concerns on the human. Like for many of these thinkers, the human is part of nature. It's kind of in a sense Anti-Western or de-westernized mindset. So, this idea of of taking the human not out of the equation but making the human part of this much larger world picture is central. So that's also where we can rethink sound in those terms. Yeah. And with that, I think you can bring in a lot of thinking and writing that's been happening around what is called the anthropocene. The anthropocene is the argument that the dimension that we live in right now is incredibly human centred. So we live in the moment of the human, where we're transforming everything, where we're transforming the environment, we're transforming economies. We have such an influence on nature that we are really at the center of that. So how do we displace that? And one example that you were just saying I think is very important. So for many indigenous societies, but also other societies, there was a deliberate emphasis to displace the human from the center of all of this. For example, you have early representations of human beings in Anishinaabe, birchbark scrolls for example and the human is often seen as the middle but the smallest figure, because they're the ones that are acted upon by the forces of nature. Not the ones who are the main actors on nature but are acted upon by nature. So the forces of the Skyworld and also the underworld. And with this, I think that it's important to consider that the voices that we hear are not just human. I think we need to tune ourselves to the voices of the non-human as well. One person who did this is a Sami composer named Nils Aslak. He was from Finland, and he was a writer, poet, musician, performer. And he started this very ambitious project in 1993, 1994. Where he created what he called the Bird symphony in the end. Where he was recording sounds of birds, of nature, of stones, and of the Reindeer. When you listen to those birds symphony that's over an hour long, you understand the musicality of the environment. And that's also what Pauline Oliver was speaking about particularly in a score called dissolving your ear plugs. So she really was trying to push us to understand everything around us, within its musical dimension. Even within the human, we can de-center it from the individualist perspective, to the idea of the mass, which we've done in some of our other lectures, with fan culture and in sports and so on. But composers have given a good amount of attention to this idea of the mass. And we wanted to highlight specifically, the collective mass not just as a source of voice but also as gesture. The several projects we're discussing now also have a strong dimension of gesture. Cornelius Cardew, is a really great composer from the UK and he founded what was called Scratch Orchestra. He was not just a radical composer, but also very politically radical. He wanted bridge avant-garde practice, with some of the most radical political ideas of the time, in the 60s. So, this Orchestra was founded in 1969 and basically anyone could join. So, you trained and untrained people, anybody could join this orchestra And the way he actually described it in one of his early writings was, as a large number of enthusiasts pulling their resources and assembling for action. Very open definition. This could describe a lot of things. It doesn't even use the word music in it. Resources could be anything, from skills to objects. But this is beautiful idea that captured a lot of people's imagination. Over the long run, he ended up abandoning some of these approaches, and becoming a kind of a composer that wanted to bring up more obvious direct revolutionary ideas to the people. But these were great experiments at the time and they really relied on graphic scores, which also brings us back to our previous lecture. Because he actually trained himself as a designer, even worked as a designer in that period, to produce all of these graphics course for the Scratch Orchestras. And the great thing about graphics course is they create a space for improvisation. So there isn't always a very deliberate or very confined way that something can be played, but it actually gives the players agency within that. And so, a lot of scores like Cardew's are able to do that. And with Cardew's idea of mass participation really extending this, there are movements that incorporate this now. One example in 2012 and 2013 in Canada is the Idle No More movement. Which was deliberately staged and placed as a capital to disrupt consumerism, but also because those places end up being places of public gatherings. So, they were taking place in shopping malls. So people were staging round dances in shopping malls. First in Canada, the movement spread to the United States and then throughout other parts of the world. But I think the question for them was, is there a kind of universal song that people know? Is there a universal dance? And what they were doing through song and dance was protesting, but this wasn't seen as a protest initially, it was seen as a celebration. But through that again, through the awareness, through bringing people together in these spaces, it became a kind of media sensation and spread very quickly through the use of Twitter and social networking and Facebook. And they were able to call attention to specific laws that the government was trying to enact at the time that were taking away voice and taking away rights. Within the context of this particular lecturer, remember, we are thinking about listening. So while as musical performance, these interventions of the dances but also of the Scratch Orchestra were quite radical. The reason we're bringing them up because they directly transformed the role of the listeners who kind of came to these spaces. In the case of the Scratch Orchestra where as we always assumed that a trained musician comes with a trained listener. And here just like anyone could show up to perform, you didn't have to have any previous listening experience for this. So the question for people and I don't know more, is how do you transform an audience or a passer by into a listener? Like a shopping mall, there's the specific sounds that come with consumer culture. And what happens when you transform, it highlights that kind of soundscape and transference of listeners. In terms of this idea of both scoring and listening to kind of bring these two lectures together, there's a fantastic project from actually the same year 1969 that was put together at the MCA in Chicago. The curator was David H Katzive. And he basically invited all of, it was kind of like the early who's who of conceptual art of the time. Not just the U.S, it was international, but still relatively Eurocentric, U.S. centric. But it was a facile exhibition, because basically the concept was inspired in moholy-nagy's constructivist era, telephone artworks. Where he telephoned then the instructions into the factory, so that they could build and his argument was that the artist doesn't have to be involved with his hand. What this curator did is he invited all these important artists, some of them younger than others, and there were very specific rules. The artists had to leave the instructions for making the work on his answering machine. They would be recorded, and then they were fabricated with those instructions, and they would be shown to the public at MCA, and at the end of the exhibition all artworks were destroyed and the only thing that remains to this date of that exhibition is the catalog. But the catalog is this LP record, is vinyl, where you have all the original recordings of the artist's instructions. And we are not used to hearing the voice of Sol LeWitt saying, "Draw a line at a 30 degree angle" or of Hans Hacker saying, "Decrease the temperature of the gallery by 30 degree." And so, it brings the voice of these artists that have been kind of dis-embodied, because they were a conception and they were supposed to be so surreal in it. And so, I think it's a fascinating example of articulating this idea of listening. The first artist. [inaudible] Okay. I make the description right now? Yes. Okay. One of the room of the museum at the exhibition to have the corner redone, to be filtered with rag proper paper of different order, things like that. And there's so many other products we could talk about in the second half of the 20th century, that really focus on sound, even within the sphere of the so-called visual arts. And as a reference, I think many of you will be interested. It's a difficult book to read, it's very philosophical and a bit dry at times. But Martin Jay who's a great author wrote a book, I read it about 20 years ago, It's called Downcast Eyes. And in this book he kind of narrates this intellectual history mostly within French philosophy but also other important philosophical movements in Europe, of denigrating vision or being highly skeptical of what the eye can do. What some people call oculis centrism. And within a lot of these, this goes from Sartre to all kinds of other figures to the present Elusity Garay, feminist philosophers, who have basically argued that Western culture has relied almost blindly on site and on text. And so for many of them, for many visual artists who read thinkers like that, that in itself is a reason to go for sound as an amazing tool for expression and liberation. And that brings to mind a final example, which is a new project by an artist named Mel Chin, who is originally from Texas. And thinking about what are the devices in our everyday life that transmit sound, receives sound and wear our captive audiences? And certainly for anyone who's ever been stuck in rush hour traffic, you are absolutely a captive audience. So he was trying to think of, how can we use sound to not only have that captive audience but enable that audience to interact with one another? And so he has a project where he's working with another composer that's called Jam-d-Jam, where using your radio, you can start to create the sounds that then gets mixed by other producers. And essentially when you're in the middle of a traffic jam in Atlanta, Georgia, you can listen to a new constantly evolving composition. This is an opportunity to transform boredom. Anxiety. Aggravation and entrapment. Transforms it into a. Collective, creative, musical production.
