IMPROVISED PERCUSSION

FOOLING AROUND

WARMup: Mirroring Embodiment Explored with Partners

Movement as Improvisation

Improvisation is the way we live and move and have our being in the world. We have evolved to be able to adapt and change in the moment...  Improvising means being aware in the moment... and acting to effect change in the moment...

 

EXPANDED IMAGE: M.C. ESCHER

M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was an artist who brought precision of vision and fantasy to his work. The above work entitle Day and Night illustrates how foreground and background become equal and reflect the content of each other. Is there a musical counterpart of this illusion?

Drawing Hands is another famous etching of Escher, providing a metaphor of art flowing from the hands, the flesh extended through the technology of the pen to creating an image of itself on the paper.



Ascending/Descending is the etching I referred to in class with the endless parade on the stairs with two figures who are not part of the "parade": the onlooker who stares up at them, and the figure on the stairs totally non-involved.

Escher's famous drawing Three Spheres I has been utilized in many publications including the landmark book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The concept of mass, collision, and  gravity are conveyed in this compelling image.

Escher also includes also a subtle suggestion of motion as though the sphere is shown in three frames of transformation as mass surrenders to the irresistible force of gravity.

In Escher's work nothing is left to chance.  His work in grounded in mathematics, and reveals the asethetic power of structure and precision .








In Escher's Rind, mass becomes ethereal, floating, and identity is shredded like peeling an apple or an orange. Shape establishes identity but now the rind threatens to unravel and become a floating strand without identity.


Escher's fantasy Other World challenges the imagination and our sense of the structure of reality. Nothing could be more powerful in exploring the relativity of existence.

Sharing Our Musicking (in process)

Energy and Embodiment

 

Teaching Artist Jee Yun Hong joined Expanded Music in helping to explore our own embodiment as artists and human beings.  This process is closely aligned with the imagination and how we create in the moment --- improvisation.  The process also helped us explore the embodiment of community as we sense the presence and personal projection of each other. This grew into more engaging use of our expressive range as we gave ourselves to the process. 

 Gesture became a part of our naming process. Gesture was not only the shaping of space but the shaping of sound so that our names became musical gestures. Subtly even the transfer of energy to each other begun earlier was embodied in this process of naming ourselves to each other.

Collaborative Projects in the Arts

Collaborative Projects is our parallel course that is working on the technical side of our Internet2 Collaboration.  Internet2 may be one of the ways that EXPANDED MUSIC defines itself in the 21st Century. Led by Tom Beyer the chief system engineer, composer, and percussionist, the class is currently connecting to Norway. The class meets on Monday mornings at 10 a.m., but set up starts at 9 a.m. Please feel free to join us to explore this part of the process.  The relationship of our two classes is creating a synergistic relationship in the curriculum that is existing as complementary courses that provide a seamless connection between two functions. Think of them as having the relationship of iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie which are applications that can function independently but also provide a seamless suite of applications each with a specific function. This kind of synergy of one paradigm forming the energy for another was observed and described by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media. Think of curriculum as a medium comparable to all other media.  "The medium is the message" was a phrase coined by McLuhan that became a part of the language of the late 20th century.

Teaching Artist Jee Yun Hong Joins Expanded Music

Last week EXPANDERS viewed the use of documentation to create and artistic expression. Two screens of Touching: Memories of NYC and Korea from the multimedia Internet 2 production entitled MEMORY that took place in 2010 with NYU, University of Colorado, and KAIST in Korea. This collaborative work included the dancer/choreographer Jee Yun Hong.

Jee Yun Hong is dancer, choreographer, dance educator and artist. She is graduated from Ewha Woman’s University in Korea with a B.F.A. in Dance, and she received her M.A. in Dance Education from Steinhardt School at NYU in 2011. She has been majoring in modern dance and performing various styles of dance in Korea, New York, Massachusetts, Boston, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania and Uganda. Especially, as a dancer and choreographer, she has been worked with prominent choreographers and honored to perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for National College Dance Festival in Washington D.C. Through dancing, she believes that we will encounter our true-self in being aware of sincere mind and beyond.


We invited Ms. Hong to be part of our work as we start our collaborations for an Internet2 production on weekend of December 7/8 with another class, Collaborative Projects in the Arts. Her mission is to help us become aware of our bodies in our exploration of artistic process.

EXPANDED MUSIC: Its Impact on Education

What is EXPANDED MUSIC for the 21st Century? This NYU course is offered not as an explanation but as a quest, an exploration with you as to what it might mean for a new audience with new ears and a new sensibility.  Today expanded music might be a natural occurrence rather than an experiment of stretching academic boundaries when it was offered some 40 years ago in conjunction with the Electric Circus in the East Village.

It seems historic that we should be meeting in Provincetown Playhouse (the original name) as this was an experimental group of artists in the village creating new work together. Now we share that space as historical companions to those moments of expanding the boundaries of arts until the edges were blurred and the various arts formed a continuum of interrelationships.