On Wednesday, a shakuhachi player named Kojiro Umezaki gave a presentation at MusicNow, which is part of my composition class. He's probably most famous for playing in the Silk Road Ensemble, which is coordinated and led by the famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He played some shakuhachi on Wednesday, but the focus of his presentation was interacting with the audience not only in a musical performance, but in the compositional process as well.
He started with a work called "In C," composed by Terry Riley. I'll put up the music here:
The idea is to start on number one, with whatever instrument you're playing, and to move on whenever you feel like moving on. Ideally, all of the musicians stay within three sections of the average so the piece doesn't drag on or blend themes that weren't intended to be mixed, since similar numbers share similar ideas.
He and some of his colleagues took this idea to a whole new level. They created an app for iPhone that plays "In C," with buttons to move on, slow down or speed up your tempo, change your instrument, jump octaves, even play with the timbre. This allows for multiple things that Terry Riley could have never done with his acoustic version:
- Performances don't have to be planned, or even rehearsed.
- Performers need not be musicians, just slightly knowledgeable with an iPhone.
- Performers don't need to stay for the whole piece, or start with the rest of the ensemble.
They ran into a couple of dilemmas as they were writing the program:
First of all, should performers be able to play every note, or just move onto the next loop? They decided that in order to maintain the integrity of the original piece and to avoid potential saboteurs who would play wrong notes on purpose, they made a button to move onto another loop.
They also discovered that it was challenging to hear what you personally were contributing to the ensemble. The original app was configured with four speakers, so that you could adjust your sound to which speaker you were closest to and the speaker would act as a monitor; in the future they're toying with using headphones as an in-earmonitor.
And the last problem, which changes the perspective of music for a lot of people, was: how do first-time users learn the system quickly enough to perform on their first go, and can people that don't have iPhones (Android and others coming soon) contribute? They included a simple set of instructions with the app, and put hints and a status feature into the app so you can monitor your own performance, and they brought additional devices with them to their premiere concert so that strangers curious and daring enough to want to perform can easily do so.
They premiered it in a little strip in between some busy streets in New York City as part of a festival called Make Music New York in June of last year:
This idea is pretty revolutionary for a few reasons. With this piece and this app, anyone can venture onto this performance, download the app and join in; all of a sudden it's easy to become an equally important part of a musical performance as anyone in the rest of the ensemble, even if you've never touched a musical instrument before. Anyone can do it, given you have a device compatible to the app, and if there are extra devices, then literally anyone could perform. They're also working on syncing it to wifi so that, potentially, you wouldn't even have to be in the same place as the other performers. One performance could feature people from all over the world, with varying musical backgrounds and from all walks of life. This app and this idea might be the start of something really big.
Umezaki's colleague at UC-Irvine, Chris Lavender, is developing an app to be used with a piece he's composing called "Fourth Wall," and it's meant to incorporate the audience in the performance not as the sole performer, but alongside trained musicians playing something composed. That sounds pretty darn cool as well.
I contacted Umezaki yesterday because I didn't take notes and I wanted to see his slideshow so I could learn more about it, and he was very courteous and let me access the document so I could sum it up for anyone who knows me. I hope he's okay with my own summary of the slideshow, and I hope I'm allowed to put it up here. I think it's one of the coolest ideas I've come across in a long time, and I'll be spreading the word to anyone who'll listen to me.
M
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