THE
SOUL FINDS REST IN UNITY returns musical activity to the
practice of
everyday life. Through visual documents, video, sound-works, and
micro-performances, it makes an enquiry into certain encounters a
violinist must face as she seeks to perform a new musical work in a
concert environment. What physical trials must she surmount to reach
maturity as a skilled agent of a composer's imagination? How must she
adapt her body to master its stringed, wooden prosthesis?
The skills performers engage on concert platforms are those once
privately cultivated at home. By leading musical activity off-stage, to
the domestic and the ordinary, THE
SOUL FINDS REST IN UNITY rekindles intimacy between music as a
human activity and concerns as fundamental as the daily quest for
subsistence. It obviates the structures of concertizing and issues a
challenge to the typically twentieth-century view of the musician as an
artist of the city. The installation provided a temporary homw for
violinist, Monica Germino, while she participated in Huddersfield
Contemporary Music Festival. It made a frame around issues concerning
the creation and performance of THE BRAVERY OF WOMEN, a new
work by Nicholas Brown that Monica performed in the festival on
Saturday 17 November, 2007.
Amidst the subjectivity of its domestic context, intertwined with daily
experience, the visual and aural elements of the installation coalesce
according to a historical tension between music as text (or recorded
sound) and music as embodied action. The project addresses the role of
the musical work (and its vessel of the imagination, the score) in
establishing the difference between 'rehearsal' and 'performance',
between 'composer' and 'performer'. And it queries the notion that in
listening to patterns of sound, while sitting in static contemplation,
we may fully understand the depth of music's meaning.
copyright © N.G.Brown 2007