To sing is to make
sounds that are decaying with a body that is terminally fading. Sound
is like life itself: it is dying from the moment it is brought into
being. We deploy our memories against our fading and relive our past
experiences. But the mind is fickle. Past times are modified as they
are recalled. And memories last only as long as those who carry them.
They cannot be preserved.
Technology comes to our aid. We have the facility to make a sound
recording and militate against the transitoriness of musical activity.
Into the microphone, we give voice to our decline in search of an
impression of the living body for future approbation. Music and
recording have become inseverable. The surrogacy of recorded sound has
displaced the role of memory. And yet the mechanism of recording
vibrations of air does not emulate the weaknesses we exude. It glides
over the embodied truth of our past, our prior ways of being and
failing in the physical world of things. And so we wonder what it is
about the activity of making music that speaks so clearly of our
existence. Why is it that imperfect musical performance can distil real
sense from the muddiness of memory?
AS I HAVE NOW MEMOYRE concerns
the activity of singing, in particular, the relationship between the
condition of the body and the sounds it produces. The project examines
the effect of physiological changes upon a singer's psychology over the
course of many years. It also queries the conventional understanding of
a performer as an executor of a composer's imagination. Accordingly, it
harnesses the visual power of musical action as a kind of sounding
theatre in order to investigate the fundamental nature of musical
experience. The performance makes reference to modes of listening set
in play by the traditional concert experience (regular rows of seats
arranged for unidirectional listening) at the same time as it calls
them into question. It examines the effect of a musical work (something
previously designed, to be performed) on physical performativity
inasmuch as its notated score requires a singer (who is doing the
performing) to 'reach out' to a listener (who is not singing) in making
patterns of sounds that find their journey's end in that listener's
response.
copyright © N.G.Brown 2007