Addressing Social Issues Through Sound

On March 26, Danielle Goldman's Politics of Improvisation class and Ivan Raykoff's New Ears for New Music did everything from scratching pens across backpacks to playing African instruments in interpreting page 183 of avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise." This score follows no conventions, featuring lines in various directions and images new to music notation. This combined class was the first in a series of workshops called the "Cardew Object," aiming to provide an arena for non-musicians and virtuosos alike to spur change through free expression.

Evan Rapport and Ivan Raykoff, the primary music faculty at Lang, have toyed with the prospect of an experimental music workshop. The idea failed to take shape this fall when they invited the New York based Either/Or ensemble to be Lang's artists in residence, but discussions with the visitors revealed how charged current popularity is for Cardew's experimental work. Raykoff and Rapport then met Robert Sember, fellow at The New School's Vera List Center for Art and Politics, who took part in the "Cardew Object" at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The New School's "Cardew Object" was then planned for March 26 and the weekend of April 9. The workshop will collaborate five classes and be "an open-door event and sound party," as Raykoff described it.

"We wanted to find a way to engage students with a wide range of abilities in making sound," explained Rapport, whose classes Punk and Noise, and Improvisation in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, will participate.

"This isn't a symposium on Cardew," Rapport added. "We aren't celebrating or critiquing him, but tapping the energy over his ideas for social change through participatory experience."

Despite major ideological transformations, Cardew never lost the goal of creating a "scratch orchestra," in which anyone, with any level of skill, could collaborate and creatively explore social issues individually and collectively. "The scratch orchestra is meant to be a fluid collective in which solos can be made, and people can come and go," explained Raykoff. "Cardew takes the idea of political action and considers how to make a sonic different."

Before the event, students will collect sounds representing issues they are concerned about. "We're asking people to consider what issues like pollution, same-sex marriage, high taxes, etc. might sound like," said Raykoff. "We will then explore what's required for collective listening and action in light of Cardew's models and reflect."

Simonetta Moro's Lang class Image/Text will also work with Sarah Montague's students to feature Cardew's work in the "Skybridge Curatorial Project." 

"Throughout the semester, we have investigated the intriguing and ever-evolving relationship between word-based and image-based art, and Cardew complicates the relationship quite a bit," Moro said. "On the one hand, he uses text to give instructions or directions for playing music, or engaging in a sonic type of activity. On the other hand, he utilizes drawing (and a rather abstract kind of drawing) to redefine what a musical score is." There will be an opening reception for the exhibition in Lang's third-floor Skybridge on April 14.