New Arts Collaboration Releases Recording

This morning I realized that it has been almost a year since I last wrote about the New Arts Collaboration (NAC) curated by Ting Luo. In addition, I seem to have fallen almost two months behind in accounting for the first album to be released by NAC. Given that the album is only a little more than five minutes in duration, such negligence is almost unforgivable; and there are clearly some bugs in my queue management system.

Because of its brevity, the album, entitled Fields of Repression, is available only for streaming or download through a Bandcamp Web page. The recording presents a piano duo performance by Luo and Vienna-based compose Gloria Damijan. The performance is the interpretation of a graphic score that Damijan prepared. That interpretation is realized through both a prepared piano and found objects. In other words, as was the case for many of the early works of John Cage, performance had more to do with activity than with any more traditional approaches to “music making.”

from the Bandcamp Web page for the album being discussed

The “album cover” (a bit of an oxymoron, since there is no “physical” version of the album) reproduces the graphic score. Damijan’s intention was to address the emotional issues that arise during processes of creativity. These include self-doubt, the fear of failure, and pressure. Thus, it should not be a surprise to find the word “failure” sprinkled across half of the score image, while the other half may reflect on a brief phrase from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “darkness visible.” (That was also the title of the memoir of William Styron, one of the most imaginative American authors of the last century writing about the affliction of depression and how he eventually overcame it.)

One of the interesting aspects of graphic scores is that they afford the liberty of interpretation to both the performer(s) and the listener(s). Thus, what Fields of Repression may lack in duration can be compensated by the listener’s afterthoughts, reflecting on what has just been experienced. Put another way, “invention” is a process shared by the creator of the graphic score, the interpreter(s) of that score, and those afterthoughts of the listener. In that context five minutes of listening can go a significantly long way!