Artefact Creation
The Body Project
The Rules
- Compose a piece of between 3 and 5 minutes duration for eight of the members of the composition class. Don't personalise it, just write for eight 'humans'. You may denote male and female, but try to allow for flexibility in the performance.
- You may only use sounds created by the human body, including, for instance, clapping, whistling, slapping, mouth sounds and any form of vocalisation excluding those mentioned in the item below.
- You may not use words from any known human language, although you may use parts of words. You may, however, construct your own language.
- You may not use any other materials or instruments at all (apart from scores/parts, etc. and these must not be used to make sounds).
- Your event should not be narrative in nature. In other words, it should not tell a story in a time-based, sequential way.
Some Ideas
- Use notes of a general pitch (low/mid/high) or contours rather than specific pitches, but make this clear in the parts.
- Try to use a mixture of rhythmic ideas as well as melodic ideas.
- Don't be afraid of using more 'conventional' musical ideas, such as contrast, texture, etc.
- If you use pitched sounds, or even choir like ideas, make sure you have a method for giving people the pitches, or at least accept that there may be some difficulties in this area. People are usually very unsure of pitched material.
- If you use a limited variety of vowel sounds only, for instance, just 'ah' or something, you will miss out on a surprising number of variations of vocal timbre. You may use different vowel/consonants, just no words... (you can use words of one syllable!)
- Listen to some of the following music for inspiration:
- Berio: Sinfonia and Laborintus
- Ferneyhough???
- Wishart: Vox cycle
- Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus, opening half an hour or so.
- Stockhausen: Stimmung
General Notes from the last time this was done
In general I felt that I should have given more guidance on this one. On the other hand, people came out with all sorts of things and this isn't necessarly bad.
Problems included experimental usage that did not work in practice. This is always a part of experimenting but you need to ensure that it stands the best chance possible of working in practice.
Related to this is the amount of experimentation that went on. I was surprised, and this is good. However, too many people almost entirely rejected standard musical ideas or even concepts like melody, rhythm (apart from lots of clapping), contrast and texture.
These are just as important here, if not more so.
Next time I'll be more explicit about this....
Many people wrote for every voice all the way through. This is quite unusual...
A few other general points:
Not everyone can made every noise possible. Be careful. Avoid presenting a catalogue of effects. Allow for variable group sizes and sex memberships. Check the viability of all sounds. Remember, music can be humorous.
Pulses tended to be forgotten, apart from passages with lots of rhythmic clapping, for instance.
Notice how everyone became very excited with some of the easier, more strictly rhythmic passages.
Good luck!