Medium Specificity

For my medium specificity assignment, I was inspired by John Cage's song "4'33", as well as his song "Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano".  In "4'33", Cage emphasizes the role that silence plays in music.  In "Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano", he toys with the idea of tonal uncertainty by putting screws and nails inside of the piano.  By doing this, the musician has no way of knowing how the notes are going to sound when he plays them.  I decided to do something similar to this with my project.  I wanted to focus on the limitations and, paradoxically, the endless possibilities of music.  In technical terms, there are only thirteen different musical tones (excluding quarter tones), yet with these thirteen tones, all kinds of sounds can be made.  My idea was to write out a rhythm section (shown at the beginning of the video) and to play as many songs on as many instruments as possible using only this rhythm.  Some of the melodies are happy, some are sad, some are fast, some are slow, some are all high notes, some are all low  notes, and some are just random notes being played.  By doing this, I was able to explore the possibilities of musical limitations (such as adhering to the same strict rhythm) and endless musical possibilities created through different combinations of the thirteen tones. 

            I originally planned on using multiple instruments, such as trumpet and guitar, as well as multiple musicians in order to see how they would work creatively under the rhythmic limitation.  I wanted to show how even if you play the exact same melody and rhythm on two different instruments, you are still going to get a completely different, unique sound.  However, as time went on, I ended up simplifying the project so that I play all of the instruments used in the video.  This is why piano is used predominantly in the project.  However, while filming, I realized that I didn't need to limit myself to just playing the keys.  Percussion is also a form of music, so I experimented with pounding out the rhythm on top of the piano at various tempos.  While playing the harmonica, I decided to experiment with an aspect that is unique to the harmonica, which is the ability to create music by blowing and sucking in air.  During one take, I decided to play a melody by only sucking in air through the harmonica.  On another take, I did the exact opposite.  All of these experimentations helped me to explore the endless possibilities as well as the structural limitations of music.

           In Scott McCloud's comic "Setting the Record Straight", he discusses the importance of defining, or redefining, a medium.  He elaborates on the difficulties in convincing mainstream audiences to consider comic books as an artful medium.  But when he sits down and tries to define what makes up the medium of comic books, he comes up with a broad definition that not only opens up the possibilities of what a comic book is, but comes to the realization that comic book storytelling has existed for millennia and is, in fact, an art form.  In many ways, music is very similar.  Some of the songs in my project are not pretty to listen to, and some may not consider this project to be music.  However, it is only because people can  have a very limited, preconceived notion of what music is and what it can be.  By focusing on just the rhythm and the idea of unlimited combinations of tones, I was able to attempt to do what McCloud suggests in his comic: redefine how I see the medium of music.

Historical Piece

Rabbit Baby Screenplay_here's the link

        Our story was based off of the strange tale of Mary Toft, who in 1726 convinced everyone in England that she had given birth to a rabbit baby, or sooterkin.  She eventually admitted that it was all a hoax and was arrested for fraud.  Despite this,  Doctor Nathaniel St. Andre, surgeon to King George I, confirmed that it was indeed a genuine case.  We were intrigued by the idea that not only regular people, but medical doctors were so convinced that this impossible situation was plausible.  At first, we did not know in what direction to take the story.  We approached the project from many different angles, but we finally decided that the most interesting story would be found by assuming that the fantastical elements of Mary Toft's story were in fact real.  Despite being a fantastical story about a half-rabbit child, the story focuses on human elements and the difficulties of being a young woman in Rural England in the 1700s.  The way that the character Wiley treats our heroine, Arley, is characteristic of the sexist attitudes of the time.  Indeed, their very species, one half-rabbit and the other half-wolf, can be representative of the class distinctions that were also enforced during that time period.  Just like in "The Veil", our protagonist is a young girl dealing with obstacles over which she has no control or influence.  In "The Veil", the protagonist is oppressed by the cultural revolution in Iran, whereas in our story she suffers from her mother's bizarre actions that have affected her life since birth.  By using the fantastical but fraudulent tale of Mary Toft as a template for our story, we were able to analyze the difficulties of class structure and gender roles in 1700s England.

         As for outside media, the project reminded us of the web-series-turned-Comedy-Central-serial, Drunk History. Basically, Drunk History is a project that consists of an intoxicated narrator recounting some historical event from her/his foggy memory. Meanwhile, actors in period costumes act out what is happening according to the drunk storyteller. First of all, the Hi(Stories) and Memories exercise in screenwriting made us think of Drunk History because of content, obviously. In Drunk History there is a person trying to explain something historic as matter-of-factly as they can, but it gets muddled and fictionalized because of their state of inebriation. Our assignment did something (sort of) similar to this, because we also started with a moment of historical truth but then extrapolated fabrications as we went along and made up fictitious characters and scenarios. 

Moreover, this project was also reminiscent of Drunk History because of its collaborative nature, and the way two ideas of an event or a story don’t quite line up perfectly when two or more people are trying to portray the ideas in the biased way that they think they happened/should happen. In Drunk History, it’s the collaboration between the actual historical event and the drunken storyteller and finally the actors attempting to kind of enact both things at once. In this assignment, it was two writers trying to wrestle two different views of what a story should look like into one space.

Works Cited

"Mary Toft." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015

"Sooterkin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015.

Haslam, Fiona. "2." From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-century Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996. N. pag. Print.

Sound Piece

For our process piece, we decided to film Ian’s band, “Riveter’s Son”, during one of their practices as they worked on new material.  Filming a band writing a new song was an interesting experience.  There were so many different elements that were involved in the process.  Every member of the band contributed something essential to the process, whether it was setting up equipment, commenting on how the song should be played, or simply playing their instrument.    Listening to our audio recordings reminded me of the video “scriptures” by Dean Duncan.  In the video, even without looking at the video, you understand who is talking and you can picture all of the processes in your head simply by listening to the audio.  You can turn off the visual element to the video and still understand exactly what is going on.  We strove to do the same thing for our project.  We wanted the process to be presented unambiguously.  It wasn’t necessary to see the band members warming up or talking or playing their instruments because the sounds told the story.  By focusing on the audio elements of the songwriting process, we were able to create an image of a band at work solely through audio storytelling.

Editing the video together was exciting and introduced me to a new type of media I was unfamiliar with but enjoyed immensely. The advantage of audio editing, is that there is a great deal of freedom with how the clips are arranged, as the listener cannot notice discrepancies within the timeframe. This allows the audio editor to completely tell the story, often doubling up tracks or adding in pauses for emphasis, and I discovered in our case that one could actually make the audio more ‘realistic’ within its two minute restrictions by editing. It reminded me of my childhood, listening to Prairie Home Companion, especially the ‘Guy Noir’ line, and being enthralled with stories that are just words, music, and sounds. Other shows, like ‘This American Life’ and ‘Radiolab’ have absolutely brilliant editing, and epitomize audial storytelling at its greatest.

https://soundcloud.com/riveters-son/apartment-practice-january-29th-2015