Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Every Room in the House on the Seventh of May

For portable instruments or voices playing or singing in houses or apartments with more than one room. Chose a reference tone in a comfortable register that can be sustained for the length of a long breath. Moving leisurely, play or sing that tone in each room of your house, attacking the tone firmly, sustaining it, trying to avoid variations in pitch, amplitude or timbre and then releasing it with a gentle diminuendo, perhaps with a slight fall in pitch as well, with pauses between tones as you move from room to room.  If you must cross through a room more than once in order to enter rooms not yet played in, then the reference tone should be repeated, but with at least one significant variation in either pitch, amplitude or timbre.  Each new room visited is then accompanied by a return to the reference tone. If more than one player or singer perform in the same house or apartment, then the tones chose should be chosen independently and their paths through the apartment should not be coordinated with one another. A complete performance of this work is the sum of all the individual performances occurring within the 47 hour global span of the the Seventh of May.

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