Landscape scores //
A site‐specific summer workshop on verbal & graphic scores
Ano Syros, Cyclades, Greece
3‐8 July 2012
For over half a century now, the practice of free improvisation practice holds a dynamic, ever‐ changing tradition of collective music‐making and substantive dialogue. This musical tradition, which has largely evolved outside the traditional concert hall context, manifests itself in intimate as well as public spaces, in permanent and transient sites, indoors and out‐ of‐doors. It is a tradition that revolves around the constant renegotiation of boundaries and points of relation between “I” and the “other”.
In a similar fashion, over the last sixty years verbal and graphic scores have constituted the most accessible and malleable form of composition for artists that wish to open up their practice towards non‐expert performers and to embrace variation, subjectivity and the everyday. Such scores, developed not just by established composers and visual artists, but also by non‐professionals from other fields, use texts and images to provide broad outlines of sonic situations and modes of listening, without necessarily specifying pitches, rhythms, melodies and structures as standard musical notation would.
How do these two practices combine on an everyday practical level? What could they tell us about the way we listen to one another and perceive our surroundings? During this intensive five‐day collaborative workshop, we will improvise together and interact with the unique natural and built environment of the Ano Syros medieval settlement and its surrounding areas. Through group discussions and improvisations and small‐scale projects that will be set up and presented on‐site, we will perform historic and contemporary scores that deal with landscape, listening, sound‐mapping, place as entity and as a memory space, and we will create our own “landscape scores” & personal sonic imprints of Ano Syros.
The workshop does not require any previous skills, expertise or experience and is aimed at anyone who feels like experimenting with sound in unusual indoor and outdoor spaces, and is keen on improvising and conversing with others.
Workshop coordinators:
Αlexis Porfiriadis, Danae Stefanou
Guest participants:
Andrew Raffo Dewar (U.S.A.), Sabu Toyozumi (Japan)