Weeks Feel Like Days

Weeks Feel Like Days, Months Feel Like Years: Is a generative sound artwork in which performers are invited to interpret a series of 5 text-based scores responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The scores were composed to be performed by individuals or groups in isolation, and welcomes performers to reflect on their own experiences during the pandemic. Participants record their interpretations using an online interface which are then compiled into larger audio compositions that uses layering and temporal effects such as time-stretching and compression, through a custom designed audio processing program. My experience in isolation and its effects on perceiving time are the organizing principles in the compositions that transform the recordings temporally—expanding and contracting them as the listener moves through the compositions. In this work: Weeks Feel like Days = Time ÷ 7, Months Feel Like Years = Time x 12. Generative in nature, there is no fixed final version of the pieces and multiple iterations will be issued during the month of June 2020 and possibly until the end of the pandemic.

Text Scores, also known as Verbal Notation, Event Scores, Instructions, and other names, are a method of giving directions using written language instead of symbols as to how an event or object may be realized. This method of scoring came into prominence in the 1950s particularly amongst artists of the Fluxus group many of whom took or sat in on John Cage’s Experimental Composition class at the New School in New York. Yoko Ono, a member of Fluxus, popularized the form with the publication of Grapefruit in 1964 which contained scores dating back as far as 1953. This method of scoring has had a wide influence in the fields of art and experimental music including the work of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Sol LeWitt, and Alison Knowles, among many others.

In my own work, I use this method of scoring when the goals of the work are less specifically musical, more conceptual, scientific or indeterminate. For this work, I’ve written the scores using this technique to make it accessible to a wide range of performers and personal interpretations.