Gary Schultz is a composer/artist and is a guest blogger. Islands of LA invited Gary Schultz to create a soundscape as part of an exhibition at G727 that Islands of LA participated in called Soundscapes, curated by Tiffany Barber.

Furthering
2009

The following Tenney score is the kind of piece that performs itself.  It was first printed on a postcard, and I could imagine Tenney describing the mailing of it, a performance, and with that description as the score, initiating further performances, a bit removed from its point of origin.

In this sense, the performance begins with a letting-go, destined for, I don’t know, perhaps Harold Budd.  It is exposed, without an envelope, to be read, maybe heard.  And the sound it makes has to do with the feeling of it, when it comes in contact with something else; similar to the word “soft,” how it describes a touch or a timbre rather than a dynamic such as “quiet.”

Along its journey, it mingles in the mailroom, with the elements, the stillness overnight, an invisible conclusion, and all it asks is that upon its receipt, something be done with its contents.

When I first came in contact with this score, I was planning to perform it later the same evening, unsure of how, but as soon as I finished performing a piece of my own.

Four of us had been out playing an hour of hushed, contrapuntal drones on a somewhat desolate courtyard-balcony space at CalArts.  Tearing-down afterwards I came back for a second trip to find the doors had been locked.  In addition to the residue of our performance, the equipment and furnishings we left behind included a tall, still-lit lamp, a nearly empty bottle of gin, a few scores in a paper bag, a powered-on keyboard, and a few miscellaneous cords.  I immediately recognized this as an on-going performance of the Tenney, especially for it appearing to be empty of performance.

Standing there with my head to the glass, I felt taken up in a symbol of unintention.  It gave me a sense of freedom to be looking back at an event and citing it as the performance of a composition.  It involved observation and witnessing, and maybe even necessitated my being too late.

What I wanted to do after receiving this performance was more than share my experience.  I wanted others to share their experiences, in whatever medium.  It felt like another layer of infinity, outside the lens of a composer’s intent, and beyond that of a performer’s.

I soon came into an opportunity with the Islands of LA where I could stage a performance-finding activity, somewhat like a treasure hunt.  While this would have been fun and engaging, I was still after a form for the score (a way to trigger my imagined find-and-share piece) that was made in the image of the performance.  So I couldn’t force this unintended performance into an intended activity.  That would have isolated the score in a way that the performance was not.  My initial discovery sprung up on me without that sense of “here comes a performance,” and so at least one side of that bubble, that which separates the performance from the rest of my mental landscape, the surroundings of where I found it, was a nearly invisible delineation.

What I could do is tag the Islands of LA, or traffic islands in general, by citing them:

Something about these islands intrigues me; how they are thinly set both apart and within their surroundings, inspiring a sense of adventure amidst an everyday context, and how they are made-up of leftover interstices from a past intention.

Between this and the Tenney finding, I have 2 performances from which to generate a score, one that can perform itself and that is made-up of letters drawn from the word.

I am convinced, however, that the score cannot be pinned-down to a medium such as language, just as the finding of these unintentional performances cannot be propped-up or assumed to be running wild anywhere in particular.  If the score was a set of words describing or encouraging an activity or a performance already in mind, then maybe Tenney could have just written, “mail a postcard, if you please,” or in other cases, “use whatever senses you can and take note of your surroundings.”  But I do believe that someone, like stumbling onto an unintended performance, can have an encounter with what the score is truly asking.

What I found is that there are more or less 2 indicators of this encounter:

The first is that you find yourself tracing layers within your perception.  This could be the outline of a piece gone-by or the sense of being in contact with an ongoing performance.  In either case, you are in 2 places at once, so to speak.  Not only are you a part of the apparent, say, reading of a text, the text is shaped in the delivery of a personal message.

The second is a transfer of energy: the message.  At the conclusion of any performance a person feels the need to do something with her newfound energy.  She might applaud, boo, talk about it, try to cover it up by doing something else or any number of digestive actions.  With this score, the feeling is perhaps heightened because it is most likely impossible to assume that anyone else could read your personal message.  No one but you knew it was a performance of a particular piece because you made it so.  Nonetheless, this is the question, the feeling of furthering, now that you have traveled through the piece and come to know the whole of it.

GS
February 14th, 2009