Trying to dream up what exactly to research in applying for research grants to support the non living wage PhD life. So far, I’m writing about music and consciousness and find myself thinking about how John Cage’s piano piece 4″33 is exactly about music and consciousness. Many were upset that the pianist sits at the piano for four and a half minutes of “silence” and that’s understandable but others notice the piece results in everyone listening to the environment, a small alteration of the mind results in an experience of sound that might be profound, might even lead one to consider music is also everything always everywhere, separate from Liberace on stage. I’m uncertain any researcher in their right mind will indulge me but am pressing on trying to dream up what sort of situations I could create to collect data. One thing that keeps coming to mind are rappers who freestyle and the premise that what they say is both rhyming and being stream of consciousness. Another idea might be to attend an open stage and organize a performance of no ordinary song, similar the 4″33 and just see what happens and who throws eggs first. I’m open to other ideas if anyone has thoughts?
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I’m not sure if this fits the question but four thousand years ago i went to a Nexus concert: “music for 18 musicians” (Steve Reich). I’d heard the “phase” recordings, where 2 loops made of the same snippet of conversation are played back simultaneously on 2 machines, and the convolutions that result when they gradually go out of sync. So, at the concert I am hearing something akin to that ever-so-gradual slipping out of phase, except it’s not a machine, it’s a group of musicians who have to go out of sync with each other by almost imperceptual differences in time.
As cool as it was, i thought it might be a really maddening gig to play: repeating 5 notes over and over yet concentrating on minute temp variance. I wondered if it’d be a relief for a player to sit in for a jazz set afterwards, where there would be so much more room for presonal expression.
No, i was invited to consider the Reich gig as a *respite* from personal expression. There followed a description of getting “inside” the piece to such a degree that all the stuff that bobs on the surface of your mind disappears, and you’re free to tune in to the shifting patterns and sonorities