This week Declassify welcomes onboard polymath, the composer, artist, broadcaster and writer Julian Day. Yet another familiar voice as an experienced broadcaster for ABC Classic to BBC Radio 3, Julian is now living in New York pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Columbia. So, if you catch any ambient honking, it will give you a sense of the adventure he’s on right now. His work has proactively and deeply considered the relationships between the social, spatial and the sonic, particularly his co-direction of Super Critical Mass (since 2007), an ongoing participatory sound project. In this episode, Julian and Victoria explore the questions of: is the regimented essence of the orchestra model affecting or too closely prescribing our experiences of music? Is the space of the concert hall prohibitive to an audience having a higher level of agency in their experience? And how can we think about working with a new or more dynamic social models in which art-making and music-making can be participated in and experienced?
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RESOURCES (selected; for a full list please visit the episode transcript)
Julian Day
http://www.julianday.com/
Super Critical Mass
https://www.supercriticalmass.com/
Oliveros, Pauline. 1974. Sonic Meditations. Smither Publications: American Music. Downloadable at this link: https://monoskop.org/images/0/09/Oliveros_Pauline_Sonic_Meditations_1974.pdf
This week Declassify welcomes onboard polymath, the composer, artist, broadcaster and writer Julian Day. Yet another familiar voice as an experienced broadcaster for ABC Classic to BBC Radio 3, Julian is now living in New York pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Columbia. So, if you catch any ambient honking, it will give you a sense of the adventure he’s on right now. His work has proactively and deeply considered the relationships between the social, spatial and the sonic, particularly his co-direction of Super Critical Mass (since 2007), an ongoing participatory sound project. In this episode, Julian and Victoria explore the questions of: is the regimented essence of the orchestra model affecting or too closely prescribing our experiences of music? Is the space of the concert hall prohibitive to an audience having a higher level of agency in their experience? And how can we think about working with a new or more dynamic social models in which art-making and music-making can be participated in and experienced?
-----
RESOURCES (selected; for a full list please visit the episode transcript)
Julian Day
http://www.julianday.com/
Super Critical Mass
https://www.supercriticalmass.com/
Oliveros, Pauline. 1974. Sonic Meditations. Smither Publications: American Music. Downloadable at this link: https://monoskop.org/images/0/09/Oliveros_Pauline_Sonic_Meditations_1974.pdf
DECLASSIFY
Episode 3: Social, Spatial, Sonic: Inverting the Orchestra
Guest: Julian Day
Host and Transcription: Victoria Pham
Date of publication: 26/08/2020
CHAPTER TIMECODES
0:00 - Welcome and Introduction to Julian Day
0:40 - Julian’s Experiences
8:27 - The Ensemble and Social Practice
14:13 – Super Critical Mass: An Orchestral Inversion
16:59 - Moving from the concert hall
25:22 - Excerpt of Critical Mass (2008) performed at Carriageworks, Super Critical Mass
28:25 – Precedents to Super Critical Mass
29:04 - 24-hour choir – Process, Experience and Performance
40:00 - Excerpt of Moving Collected Ambience performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), Super Critical Mass
41:57 – Accessibility and Civic Spaces
46:28 - The Orchestra: A Militaristic Archival Form
55:25 - Excerpt of Discovery Season performed at the Library of Birmingham (2013). Super Critical Mass
01:08:00 - Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations
01:12:04 - Wrap Up
SUMMARY
This week Declassify welcomes onboard polymath, the composer, artist, broadcaster and writer Julian Day. Yet another familiar voice as an experienced broadcaster for ABC Classic to BBC Radio 3, Julian is now living in New York pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Columbia. So, if you catch any ambient honking, it will give you a sense of the adventure he’s on right now. His work has proactively and deeply considered the relationships between the social, spatial and the sonic, particularly his co-direction of Super Critical Mass (since 2007), an ongoing participatory sound project. In this episode, Julian and Victoria explore the questions of: is the regimented essence of the orchestra model affecting or too closely prescribing our experiences of music? Is the space of the concert hall prohibitive to an audience having a higher level of agency in their experience? And how can we think about working with a new or more dynamic social models in which art-making and music-making can be participated in and experienced?
TRANSCRIPT
Victoria Pham (VP): And hello, we’re back for another episode of Declassify. Thank you to everyone who’s been tuning in so far, we’ve got another great guest in store for you today. Once again, it might be another familiar voice to many of you. I’m very glad to introduce the polymath that is Julian Day. Julian is a composer, artist, broadcaster and writer having worked extensively for ABC Classic FM, currently living and studying in New York. I don’t think I’ll be able to give him much justice in just this intro as we’ll soon hear from him, so welcome Julian! Thank you so much for being on this episode of the podcast.
JD: Thank you, it’s a great pleasure to chat with you.
VP: In light of my probably underwhelming introduction of you, I thought a good place would be for our audience to get to know you a little better, for some of them who don’t know your practice, to talk about your experience in the classical world and where you’ve branched out since then?
JD: Yes, so my experience in the classical music world goes back a number of decades now. I studied contemporary classical composition and piano at the Queensland Conservatorium and subsequent to that… well, I should just quickly say that I was involved in couple of composer initiatives at that time including a 7-year composer collective called COMPOST where we decided to try and put matters into our own hands as composers because we figured that composers are kind of at the bottom of the power chain, in terms of you don’t want to wait around on the phone for a gig that never comes, so we actually put on several dozen events over several years, and that was really foundational. After that, I went into Classical music broadcasting and I spent many years being associated with ABC Radio and for quite some time was presenting and programming major new music particularly, but also mainstream classical shows, and that brought me into a lot of contact with orchestras, chamber ensembles, individual musicians and got to know a lot of what the music activity is in Australia in any given year. And more recently, I guess after feeling like I had done as much support as I could of my peers and getting my creative itch back myself, really decided to start making my own work a bit more central again. So, I’m now living in New York where I am pursuing some graduate studies and just trying to make a career for myself, not only as a composer but also as an artist that is driven and informed by his classical and experimental music past. So, I make a lot of work that would broadly be described as art, but involves the lessons I have learnt from other things. So, some of it is sculptural, some of it is video and a lot of it is performance and tries to get into the nut of what it means to be in social formation with other people, so I think that’s ticking off most of the things off the list.
VP: You know what, mentioning all your broadcasting, I used to listen to you regularly when I was in high school.
JD: I always feel both good and bad whenever I hear that because some people have said that, even here in New York, and on the one hand I go ‘Oh, that’s so lovely and wonderful that you’ve listened to me,’ and then it also immediately dates me. Oh god, if the people I’m hanging out with listened to me when they were in high school, gosh, I really am over the hill. But I’m delighted so thank you.
VP: Yes, but you’re very youthful so no one will ever be able to tell your age, so no need to worry about that. Well as for, you mentioned earlier having an awareness of how the composer sits in terms of hierarchy, did your experience working with orchestras or understanding how the orchestral world functions when you’re working at the ABC reinforce that and inform your work now which is more delving into a sound-art or visual art medium?
JD: I think so, I mean the blueprint about how I think about orchestras was set during my compositional training. I think all of us who are involved in classical music, but particularly if you are a composer, I think. You’re trained almost without question to think of the orchestra as being the top of the cultural mountain. It’s the inspirational embodiment of western art music ideals, this large flank of people who work collectively and together and make very inspiring unified sounds. That is fine as a consumer of music, you know it’s amazing to go listen to an orchestra or to listen to a recording, or whatever it is, but as a composer you’re in a very powerless situation because you’re training to aspire to it, but there’s almost a statistically insignificant chance of ever getting to write for one. Of all of our orchestras in Australia, there are only really one or two that really open the doors to training programs and one of them has got an age limit anyways, so bad luck if you’re over 30 or 35. But in general, there’s no real need for composers in the orchestra. The repertoire is all sewn up and all public domain material that has been decided upon a good century before any of us were born, and they don’t really need any new news. It’s kind of antithetical to the business model. So, I sort of assumed that here I am training for something that I’m almost never going to actually partake in.
Of course, over time working in radio, that shifted a little bit because I came into close contact with orchestra and a lot of my friends are in orchestras, some of the musicians I studied with at the Conservatorium have gone on to have prominent positions in orchestras, I have nothing against orchestral musicians, they’re amazing people, and I got to understand through hanging out in green rooms, or hanging backstage, just getting to know their repertoire really well, to build a huge fondness for what they do, but always from this sense of ‘there’s nothing any of us can really do who aren’t in one of these things,’ and remember that’s a tiny, tiny sliver of the musician world let alone the general populace. There’s nothing that we can do that actively participates in that. So, it just gave me a foundational way of thinking that if I’m going to be an artist trying to make their own way in the world and to try to sort of treat the social practice of music with any seriousness, that I might have to start thinking outside the orchestral paradigm exclusively.
VP: Did that lead into compositionally working with smaller groups, like chamber groups, mixed ensemble groups and individual soloists?
JD: I think initially, and to try and be self-sufficient as much as possible. So, over the past decade or so, I have amassed quite a bank of synthesisers and I’ve made recordings and performances around Australia and around the world as a solo synthesiser/organ player, so if all comes to worst, I can just dust off some synths and go buy some C-batteries and play music myself. I think there is a long history of composers, probably increasingly over time, of forming your own connections and close-knit relationships with musicians and basically becoming your professional network, but over time what has become really important to me is rethinking music not as the product, as not as the piece or the recording or the concert. But really, what is this social dynamic and this social interplay that’s happening when people come together to either listen or to make sound, or to make music together? So that really drives my way of thinking, and there’s so many relationships between a soloist and a listener. It’s kind of a one-way flow, really. It starts to get very interesting and meaningful, starting to think about and configure your relationship to other people in a broader sense, when you think on a slightly larger scale. So, I’ve really tried to think of the ensemble as a conceptual and practical laboratory for thinking about social relations which starts to get you to think outside of the soloist model.
VP: So, when you use the word ensemble, do you mean not just in a musical sense but making art, in terms of the process being accessible with the community that’s going to perform it and the community that’s going to access it?
JD: I guess so. I think that’s one thing that radio taught me actually, which is that the act of making radio is the act of putting yourself into the listener’s ears or shoes. Everything you do, it’s a lot of sleight of hand and after a while you can start to get a bit cynical about the theatre of radio, but the benefit of it is that you’re always thinking “well, what am I doing that is going to actually sound a certain way for the listener? What am I doing that is going to make their lives a little bit better? Or aid in their appreciation of music or an idea?” It’s always that empathetic positionality, it’s not about me but always about how that hits a listener. So that’s always driven me in my practice too, I think it’s meaningless for me to sit in my studio for 12 hours a day and come up with sculpture that please me alone. It’s not about pleasing the other person but it’s about engagement and interaction, and building hopefully a complex and generative relationship with another person. So, I guess that’s one way of thinking about it and then also making it so that there are a lot of ways in which all the people in the chain can get a certain amount of agency. So, if I’m making an artwork that involves an ensemble – so to speak – and for me ensemble is a pretty loose word. It can mean the people who come along to experience an artwork, it can be those who actively make it. I want to make sure that there is a lot of agency for all of the people. So that I am making decisions and I am doing something as an artist, but so that the people who are listening can make their own choices, the people who are building it with me can make the choices. Also, the idea of an ensemble, as I mention, of being a kind of laboratory or kind of like a framework of thinking about social dynamics. For example, if you have an electric duo, that’s a certain kind of social dynamic, if you have a string quartet that’s a kind of social dynamic, if you have an orchestra that’s a dynamic. And the dynamic itself and the sorts of possibilities if what really drives me as an artist.
VP: I see, so if we’re thinking about social dynamics in a working context, do you think there’s a difference in working in the visual art realm than there is in the classical music realm? Just thinking about my own experience when I’ve worked in the visual art world, having now started to do what in some sense what you have done, and started to disengage with composition and moved into sound-art, I found doing the projects in that world that there’s a lot more communication between everyone who’s involved in this collaborative project at every level and say when you’ve or when I’ve written music for something like an orchestra, say MSO, there’s very little engagement you get with the actual musicians, and there’s always a mediator. So, you have either the orchestral librarian or an admin person, so you don’t actually, in terms of making that art that is what you see one stage, you have one or two rehearsals and it happens in a day or two.
JD: Yeah, those mediators you get in classical music in particular were one of the reasons I started a project like Super Critical Mass with good colleague Janet McKay, to try and actually reduce some of those layers that prevent you the artist from engaging with the end product. The traditional model of being an orchestral composer it’s very, very detached from what the ultimate sounding result is for the listener. On the positive side, you put a huge amount of time into research. So, the orchestral composer has to spend years if not decades learning all the nuts and bolts of the orchestra. You’ve got to know what note a flute can’t play, you’ve got to know what playing those chords with those instruments is going to sound like, because you don’t really get a lot of practice. You spend a lot of time writing alone, in your studio or with your laptop, you’ll put it down into a score and then the score goes off into the ether, and then at some point you get invited to a rehearsal, and hopefully to a premiere and maybe if you’re super lucky a repeat performance at some point. But there’s a great sense of hierarchy and distance because there are so many steps between you and the work, so I’m very interested in reducing those steps.
And I think you’re right in that the contemporary art world, there are maybe a few less steps, but we shouldn’t be too rosy-eyed about that because it really depends on what you’re doing in the contemporary art world. I thought that being a musicians that there were too many limitations and that I would look towards the museum or the gallery or the Biennale or art fair as an example of anything goes and you realise very quickly that there are some fundamental difference just in history and general purpose in the performing art versus the visual arts, because whilst a biennale or museum might look like a circus from the outside, there’s a lot of performance going on and social practice, there’s sculpture and video, there are all sorts of things. Really, they are collecting institutions that really work best when displaying an object of some kind, just like in music you get scores, you get records et cetera, and concert halls but really, it’s about the action and dynamism of doing. I think that the sort of midway space is participatory art, social practice where the very nuts and bolts of what you do are about actually engaging with people. So a big part of my thinking about being a musician moving into contemporary art is to really think of music as part of that conversation about social practice and about participation. It’s about what people do together in relationship to other people is what actually sits at the heart of the work
VP: And you’ve really brought that together with Super Critical Mass. Because you are creating a huge work that is entirely performance-based because it’s inside spaces like galleries, like museums and more public spaces than say, a concert hall.
JD: Yeah, I have a lot of problems with concert halls. They’re amazing acoustically. Is it the Elbphilhamonie in Hamburg which is this incredible world-leading space, Melbourne Recital Hall is amazing acoustic space. I noticed when I was doing a lot of synth work in galleries that as soon I got gig to play at the Sydney Conservatorium in one of their small recital spaces, not even one of the bigger ones, I suddenly went “Oh, I know why you play music in these spaces, they sound so good!” So, part of the reason they sound so good is that they are really tailored towards the listener and the listener kind of being at the centre of experience because all of the sound baffling and the shape of the space is tailored for the listener, so you can sit in row F or whatever and it sounds great. But it’s at the expense of any freedom for the listener. You have to sit in Row F to get that experience, you can’t kind of wander around like you can in a gallery or park or in a public space.
So, concert halls are great for the purpose of sounding good. But I am much more interested in spaces that are specifically designed for more rhizomic relationships. For gathering and congregating and a sense of relationship of being in flux, and that’s why I’m really drawn to town halls, town squares, parks and any place where there is greater porosity in what you can actually do. I really like these spaces, I guess I call them civic spaces, where there is a multiplicity in terms of what you’re allowed to do. Like if you’re in a park surely there are rules about what you’re not supposed to do, there are still some social contract rules and legal rules that are going to harm other people if you do them, but there is a great, raw multiplicity beyond that. You can kind of have a sleep if you can get away with you, you can read a newspaper, play a game, you can chat with friends, you can walk through, you can sit and listen, you can organise concerts, they’re very dynamic in that sense. And they’re specifically designed for multiple groups of people and multiple individuals to do lots of things cokletivet. Concert halls are really designed for one thing which is a certain hierarchy of musicians to get on a platform and tell you what they think as musicians, and for you to sort of sit and experience it. But I want to unlock that sense of freedom and agency, and talking back and communicating at a two-way flow at the very least and that’s why I tend to go towards these other public spaces.
VP: Well, it’s a lot more accessible to a wider audience. Because there is something ritualistic, kind of, associated with going to classical music concert in a concert hall. In fact, I think the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has… let me pull it up… So the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has this page on their website “What to do if you’re new to a concert?” Let’s see. They list things like “Will I recognise a lot of the music? What do I wear? When do I clap? When do I arrive?” And there’s just like a list all these protocols you kind of need to know in order to feel accepted by the rest of the audience that is there in the concert hall.
JD: I mean, those things exist in other spaces too, so again we can’t be too universalising with this kind of argument. I discovered, to my surprise actually, going into a pretty major music or art gallery in Australia which has huge thoroughfare of the public where you can just walk off the street or from the parklands into this space and if you do one thing that seems mildly antisocial like clap, which most composers and sound artists like to do in a space to test the acoustics, the security guards will come down on you like nothing else. There are things you just can’t do unless you’ve been legislated by the custodians or the security staff. But it is true that there are less things you can do in a concert hall I suppose.
I mean, Super Critical Mass, just to rest on that project for moment, that was partly built as a total resistance to that kind of one-way power dynamic. I’ve been to concert halls at Carnegie Hall here in New York, I’m 6’2’, I’m not especially tall but I’m taller than average, and I find it really difficult to be jammed in, in a long row of chairs for a 2-hour concert, I just have to occasionally move my legs or I’ll start to really lose feeling in them. You start doing that a few times in a piece of music that’s 20 minutes long, you just gets glares, you get someone that’s going to tell you off afterwards, you’re just breaking this total social code and breaking this idea that you have agency. These days I can’t stop thinking about concerts in the classical tradition as almost being a weird sort of BDSM. You’re putting yourself in such a position of subservience that all of the heavy weight, not only of culture and history, but just of architecture and social dynamics is such that you can’t do anything but the narrowest of cultural responses; clap at the right time, walk out at half-time but never before, there’s literally so little you can do except absorb the beauty and majesty of this music. Luckily the music is really good, so you can have that experience but there’s a really limited way in which to respond to something.
VP: You mean physically?
JD: Well, just that you know you’re not ever going to change Mahler Symphony. You’re not ever going to have the opportunity to listen from different parts of the room. You can’t talk back to it. It can only talk to you. So, luckily there is a great deal of depth, majesty and controlled built kind of meaning that another artist from another time has done for you, and has done a lot of work so that you can get this very rich and powerful experience. I just resist the idea that I have to be locked down in a chair and have to hear it from beginning to end because that’s the cultural dynamic we’ve set up.
VP: And Mahler is really lengthy, so if you do want to stretch your legs, you really don’t get the chance to do that. [laughs]
JD: Best to detach your legs, go into the seat, and then reattach them after the concert.
VP: Well, I suppose that’s what Super Critical Mass also does. You’re pulling it out of this space. Actually, I listened to one of your interviews and you said that you’re exploring the sonic, the spatial and the social all in the one.
JD: Yeah, I mean any ensemble does that to. An orchestra explores those three things. It explores the spatial by playing in a concert hall, it explores the sonic by playing an orchestra and it explores the social by having a group of people play to another group of people, the orchestra vs the listener. But Super Critical Mass was an attempt to rethink what the benefits of these large groups of people coming together and how it might be rethought moving forward. So, all of the frustrations I had with that a traditional orchestra does. For one thing, there’s a huge sense of hierarchy, there is a top-down approach. The composer, in some people’s minds, is at the top of the pyramid. I think that maybe the orchestra CEO is probably at the top of the pyramid, followed by the conductor and sometimes that composer is way down below the back desk of the violins, I mean in terms of power that is. But it is a huge triangle, and even the sections within the orchestra conform to that. It’s very rigid, spatially. Not only in the arrangement of the musicians on stage but the fact that you have a stage, an elevated space that really doesn’t change. You have the occasional orchestra that likes to do a pop-up ad where they go to appear in a mall or on a bus, as a kind of cute social media tactic, but they really don’t like playing outside of concert halls, I think. There’s also a great sense of linearity. The piece starts, end and that’s it. There are all of those points are things that I wanted to invert.
So, Super Critical Mass brings a large group of people together. It’s very, very open as to who can participate. Pretty much anyone can participate, if you have the time and inclination. So even over time we’ve gone from people being required to play a kind of musical instrument to really just being able make any kind of sound. The space is very open and porous and it tends to be a space, like what we mentioned before, is a civic space that has a lot of mobility in it already, like a public arena, a town hall or a town square. But it’s built into the piece and ensemble intrinsically. The group of people have to relate to that space acoustically, socially, historically and culturally. There is a really reduced sense of hierarchy, so everyone is effectively doing the same action collectively but with their own sense of nuance, their own sense of body architecture, their own response, their own real time response against the other people and the place. It’s very ephemeral. It’s also not particularly heterogenous – so the orchestra has all these different kinds of sounds and instruments – and Super Critical Mass ensembles tend to have one type of sound at a time. But it basically does everything upside down and tries to present this much more porous, embedded, spatially aware, utopic way of bringing people together in an ensemble that is inclusive and generative and full of back-and-forth power dynamics between listener, performer, composer, commissioner. Everyone’s kind of on the same level, really, even to the point where I don’t usually like even putting my name to the pieces. It’s part of the project which is inherently a collaboration with all the people involved with it. So yeah, it’s a little utopic way forward perhaps, which has had a bit of a life over the last dozen years or so.
VP: It’s really amazing. Was it in 2007 when it first started?
JD: Yes, so Janet McKay and I came up with the concept in 2007, so shopping it around, and within a year we got a commission to do a piece at Carriageworks in Sydney which really had just opened at that stage. And so here was a great test case. Janet, who is an incredible flautist, knew huge amounts of flute players in Sydney and we were able to chorale about 80 of them to run a few workshops and to basically come up with very simple instruction-based scores to find a way to engage spatially with this incredibly rich post-industrial space. If you’ve not been to Carriageworks, the ceilings are at least 8m high, the main foyer space is about 80m long. It creates a hugely rich ambient sound. We had about 4…5… 600 people turn up to the event, so suddenly there was this incredible integration between listener and performer. Sometimes we didn’t quite know who is who except that the performers were the ones with the flutes, and it’s been going strong ever since.
Musical Excerpt:
Follows 30minute excerpt of Critical Mass (2008) of 100 flutes at Carriageworks, Sydney
JD:I should also quickly note that there were precedents, not only broadly culturally to this as it’s not a particularly original concept, but precedents close to me I will name Damien Barbeler as a starter to this idea. He came up with a very similar concept about five years earlier, a project I was involved in where it was also algorithmically behaviour-based ensemble making with very simple objects, and he’d also come up with conceptually striking ways even years earlier than that. So there’s a kind of continuation but this just helped formalise it into a project shape.
VP: So since then you’ve obviously been commissioned for several things, also internationally. I thought we’d actually focus on one of the pieces which has been written about a lot and it happened when I was at university in 2017, the 24-hour choir. I thought that would be an interesting one to unpack, how that became an idea and how the process of actually performing that occurred?
JD: So, the earlier years of Super Critical Mass were really focused on instrument playing. I suppose Janet is a flute player so that made sense. But we did orchestras of flutes, orchestras of brass instruments, orchestras of clarinets. We found an amazing rich repository of beautifully tuned handbells, the Federation bells in Melbourne, so that was one way of getting people together. We started to realise quickly that just limiting it to musical instruments started to counteract the more inclusive purpose of the project because after all, even though the flute at the cheapest end of the cost spectrum is pretty accessible to people, I mean you can kind of pick up one for a couple hundred dollars. The idea of having time, resources, access to space and even access to lessons even, suddenly starts to narrow in the level of participation to a certain class of person. So, we wanted to find a way where anyone who had the time and inclination to be involved in this could partake and the human voice became one of the obvious mechanisms for that. Now another of really significant artists decades earlier have done work in this vein. Pauline Oliveros is one really striking precedent, Cornelius Cardew is another, with both of them using voice as way to kind of think collectively in works from the 60s and 70s, and I guess the whole choir model is another version of this, particularly the broader community choir model where you just kind of turn up and make songs together each week and it’s an incredibly socially enrichening way to operate with your peers.
So, 24-hour choir was just a simple prompt of how to do a collective breath across a bizarrely long amount of time, in this case a 24-hour cycle. What would that mean? I mean one person can’t just sing notes without a break across that amount of time. You need at least one other person who will help share the load, and then suddenly this kind of ethics in terms of sharing and duty to others comes into being. Ideally, you’ll have more than 2 people. You might have 3, 4, 40, 400, however many choose to participate. I think across the 24-hour cycle we had about 150 people join in. The setting was a really powerful place in Sydney which was right at the apex of the Rocks, called Observatory Hill which is right next to the Observatory. And significantly, you’re also surrounded by buildings which for many decades prior to this piece in 2017 had been allocated as social housing. There’s a really long rich history of The Rocks which, of course, goes back to Aboriginal people in the area and then a sequence of other forms of society from sailors through to the social housing days of the 20th Century. Significantly at the time that this happened, those people were basically being booted out and forced off to the outskirts of the city, and what had been this space of the most disenfranchised becoming a space of privatisation. And we wanted to not only do this abstract form of social building across the time but to also find a way so that those who were departing could potentially partake. There was no need for anyone to learn any words, learn any tune, you just kind of had to find a way to collectively solve the problem of keeping the sound going. So, to my great delight, some of those members of those houses that were on their way out were able to participate. It kind of became a wordless requiem, in a way, for the Rocks changing beyond all recognition.
It also became this study about how humans relate to their environment because over the course of a 24-hour cycle you get every shade possible of ambient sound, you get the thick hot air of the late afternoon where all the sounds close to you are meaningful, the sounds of birds and trees, the traffic beside you, you get the cold cool air at 3am that means sounds from the distant horizon across the water will come to be very real, the sound travels in a different way. So, we had everything from 2 people – me and one other person at 3am – through to around 30 people at any one time. So, it became this really interesting study into how sound relates to its environment, and it also became a really powerful means of me giving up any last vestige of control because virtually no one really followed the instruction that I had very carefully designed for it that would make the process easy. It was with the spirit of generosity in mind, but almost everyone showed up and went “Ok, yup! I’ll find a way to make the sound keep going.” And after about 12 hours of continuously singing, I gave up feeling frustrated and went, “You know what? These other people are sharing in the responsibility of making this work. I can rely upon and give over to peers. There’s no sense that I need to be the author of this piece.” So, that was a really profound shift for me as an artist, to delegate shared responsibility to things to those who are involved.
VP: So, then you’re trying out or kind of exploring a new model in which the process itself is the performance and the experience of the piece?
JD: Yeah, and whilst there were a few workshops prior to this where we drafted up some ideas and maybe 20 or 30 people met up in the lead up to this, pretty much anyone could show up in the 24-hour cycle and join in. You just had to step into this sort of rotunda on the hill which gave you some shelter from rain, not much shelter from cold or hot air, but kind of also provided a focal point for the performers. And once you stepped into the rotunda then you were just tasked with, “Ok, you have to find a way to keep this going.” There was kind of like a contraction of rehearsal and performance and composition all at once. I really like that, it wasn’t so much a theatrical thing where you just present the product. The product is the process and vice versa.
VP: Do you think that this is a potential way of producing new music or new art for the future, or is that your aim?
JD: Definitely for me. I mean, there’s a long history of this revealing the back end as part of art, particularly more in the contemporary art and museum world. But definitely for me, it started to see me say goodbye to the idea that I have to rehearse. There’s something valuable about rehearsing because you’re basically saying I am going to do the work involved to give you the experience so I’m going to basically put myself at your disposable in a certain way. But I think that there’s something beautifully transparent in saying every point in an artistic process is open to negotiation, it’s a social process, one that is open to the implements of all the different factors around so there’s no kind of before, during and after. It’s all interaction and social production. So, I just like that, that the best you’re doing in this is starting and ending that social production. It’s never saying there’s bits you can’t see and definitely not saying that once the musicians stop playing, and walk off stage, they’ve had their applause and go backstage that suddenly the art is over. So, it’s kind of just trying to make art just an everyday social process, which has obviously long histories but this is my way of doing it.
VP: Well, when you talk about the musician’s kind of packing their instruments up and they do that bow, and then walking in board to the two sides off stage, well when you go and book a concert they often have 3 or 4 nights where they play the same rep or the same setlist, whereas in this case with the 24-hour choir, it happens once. So it’s this kind of large-scaled, temporary experience in a public space. Is there a reason why they don’t tend to have repeat performances, some of the works in Super Critical Mass?
JD: There’s probably a few answers to that question, none of them especially compelling to recount, except that maybe in a way it falls into the logic of the museum and the contemporary market in a way where exclusivity and one-offs are actually the way that you make value. And that’s actually the opposite of what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to make the experience of something right here and now where are absolutely needing to factor in everything that’s happening, so it’s a kind of risky, vulnerable and provisional way of being that has no set outcome, which I think is a really powerful way to engage with the world right now. But it’s certainly not about if there and if you’re not there you’ve missed it and you missed out because you didn’t get the chance to come along. A lot of the works are reproducible, and one example is a piece that was designed not for a very, very specific, but for a type of place.
So, it was a work that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia commissioned in conjunction with Performance Space in Sydney. So we made a work for all the people collected in a contemporary art museum which typically has a lot of artworks on different walls and different spaces, and it’s basically if you want to come and learn the process ahead of time, you can basically come to the build dressed as you normally would, viewing the art as you normally would – looking at that painting, standing and observing that sculpture, chatting to your neighbour. You’ve just got a certain set of behaviours involving the voice that kind of shift the social atmosphere somewhat. So, I’ve given you a few things to memories, like if you’re this far away from an artwork, if you’re going to sing a note it has to be a lower note or a higher note. If someone joins you who is part of the process, you’ll start to synchronise the voice, if 3 of you join, you’re going to do another kind of synchronising, not so much humming but more an open voice. These are very simple parameters, it’s just a way of sonically articulating this kind of way we collectively inhabit a museum.
45 second EXCERPT OF MOVING COLLECTED AMBIENCE, Super Critical Mass, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2014)
JD: The point of this story is that we did that in 2014, it was quite successful. The museum actually bought it which is a whole long story in itself, the fact that they bought the score, an Action as opposed to something to put on the walls is interesting and very worthwhile of them, I thought. So, we redid it again in 2016 when they had acquired it, and the piece worked just as well with 50 other people who weren’t part of the first one. And then another museum, Shepparton Art Museum, borrowed the work to do it in 2017 about a month after the 24-hour choir and again it worked really well with a different set of people in a different location. So that’s an example where the internal dynamics of the composition and then the instructions are kind of to be aware of the environment you’re in, but it doesn’t depend on the fact that there are 4 contemporary art rooms versus 10, or that it’s indoors or outdoors. But I really want to ensure that there is definitely an indexation to the immediate environment because you’re actually paying attention to all of the factor involved, it’s not this abstracted concept of the stage. It’s that there is no stage, the stage is just the domain you happen to be in.
VP: So, would you say these performances or works are more accessible? Being in spaces like contemporary art galleries, or libraries, or town halls?
JD: Well, kind of, because they are particularly public spaces. But a museum has its own set of politics and sets of inclusions and exclusions. I long ago realised that you can’t just go to a museum and assume it’s a utopian space. It’s subject to the same kind of power dynamics as much as any other space, but it’s true that I tend towards spaces that are designed for mobility and interaction of some kind or other. And so in that sense, they’re more accessible than of you had to buy a ticket to a very locked off, acoustically specific space like a concert hall, but I guess part of the realisation of the project is that nowhere is free of power dynamics, it’s just that they have a wider degree of permissibility or a lesser degree. I’ve tried to go with social spaces and assembly rich spaces as opposed to those that are really strictly codified like concert halls or theatres.
VP: Exactly, and like you mention before, there’s a financial aspect that’s related to being able to run a concert hall that’s a bit different than an art gallery. That they need to fill seats, to some degree, in order to make it viable.
JD: Yeah, I mean they’re both very expensive cultural spaces. I mean, the cost of maintaining a museum just keeping the air at the right temperature, guarding precious works. Neither of them are particularly cheap spaces to run. So, there is something about the critical mass in ticket sales that is a factor in all of this. I mean the point of accessibility is partly for the listener in some of these projects, but just positioning the listener as someone who can actively partake in a certain degree of decision making, even if it’s on the simple level of ‘I can go and listen to this’ and then choose to go away. Like if it’s happening in Kind George Square in Brisbane, in a sense if I and my peers decide to do an event there, then you are co-opted into having an experience of 50 people playing bells. So, it’s, you know, having to capture, you a little bit but you can choose to not be in that space and go away or come back in 10 minutes when the piece is stopped. You can’t do that as easily in a concert hall. So, it’s always about not just giving the listener agency, but that we really couldn’t re-conceive of these cultural vehicles like orchestras as being people-led.
So, in every Super Critical Mass work, there isn’t the sense that I’ve gone away and thought about this meta concept that you then have to perform. It’s almost always a series of workshops, or at least a workshop, or an open workshop if the piece is the workshop, where I want to listen to what everyone who’s turned up is capable of doing. I want to learn about what their tendencies are and what they’re enjoying, I want to prod that a little and push it and rethink it, sot here’s a certain progression so that we’re all moving into some different space together, we’re having a shift in our perspectives. But it’s really led by what people can and can’t do, so there’s never a wrong way of doing any of these pieces. It’s totally build on the collective possibilities of that group. You just don’t get that in an orchestra. You have to have trained from age, I don’t know zero? You have to had the right kind of resources at your disposable, whether it’s a very expensive instrument, lessons the right kind of space, parents who cared enough to help you into that space in the first place and then there’s still a gazillion other barriers to entry. If you think about how many orchestral musicians there are in Australia, there are some hundreds, I guess that’s somewhere between 500 and 100 musicians. How many music students are there in conservatoriums alone? I mean, there’s the tiniest proportion of possibility that you’ll get into one of these things in the first place, they’re not inclusive spaces. So I want to open up a much more inclusive space so we can do a version of collectively that is not determined by your position in society, certainly not your economic position.
VP: Do you think the model you’ve adopted in which you’ve programmed – I use the term program loosely – but programmed for the public, you’ve had more diverse participation and thus, access and more diverse an audience comparative (we keep talking about orchestras) so comparative to an orchestra?
JD: I’d like to think so, for one thing, the performance is almost invariably free so there’s no economic disincentive to coming along. I think there’s a little bit of a illusion in terms of the diversity of who participates and it’s just an inbuilt problem which just has to keep being thought about. Which is that no one’s ever charged to be part of it or paid to be part of it either, but there’s a certain kind of politics of access about who has the time and the means to actually volunteer and be part of one of these things. So, I open it up as an opportunity to do something collectively but, I mean, there’s still only a certain sub-section of the populace who can take a day out to come and be part of it, there’s childcare, there’s a need to earn a living, there’s time on your hands. So, you do tend to see a pretty wide variety of faces and bodies at these things but, there’s almost always a hidden economic underpinning. You know, busy overworked parents are rarely going to come along if they can’t also bring their kids. There’s a bit of an over-preponderance of music and art students who just tend to want to get out and do something participatory because they have a bit more time on their hands. And then a fairly solid senior level of participation, again people who typically have more ability to turn up. So, I don’t really know the answer of that, so I’ve got a lot of performance theory and participation theory books always coming to my door during this period of lockdown, to keep thinking about these problems and at least try to do something to try and open up the degree of openness to cultural meaning making together.
VP: What I also like is that it doesn’t sit in any category. That it’s not visual art, not necessarily just performing art, it’s not classical music. You’ve kind of created a series of communities around the world through performing these pieces and somewhat rehearsing them.
JD: I’d like to think so. The core concept behind this way of working are not particularly discipline specific, and I think that’s something I try to keep adding to music in general and it’s getting there. But traditionally, music has kind of locked itself off a little bit from the rest of the world, and certain thinkers will aggressively tell you that like the theorist Seth Kim-Cohen for instance who’s a pretty major deal in the sound study world. He has a long-standing argument that music lags behind the more plastic or visual arts because the contemporary art realm and modernism have had a century of the likes of Marcel Duchamp and conceptualists who have really tried to deeply integrate conceptual, contextual, societal and political ways of thinking into art practice. Music has maybe not done the best job of that; hence, we have orchestras that kind of don’t allow anyone in. So, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do in a very small way keep contributing to music as a conversation that there are ways of thinking about it that are about power dynamics, that are about cultural forces, and the act of making sound is in itself a political act. And that we need to keep turning that critical lens upon the power structures that we adopt as our emblems, because the orchestra is an emblem of what we value socially in Australia because orchestras collectively get the biggest slice of money. I love orchestras and I would love for them to retain the money, I just think we should add onto that money, all the other things that are equally deserving of support. But the fact that we are at the moment, at least, we’re valuing the input and the life of a violinist who’s not particularly tethered to making contemporary music, making the music of now in Australia. We’re basically saying that we value them enough to give them superannuation, a wage, all living costs covered, but we’re not going to do that for anyone who’s not going to play violin and not be in an orchestra who wasn’t even going to accept them in the first place. Bring critical, I think, is really valuable as the first step to being a much more responsive musical landscape.
VP: Do you think that this covers the entire industry as a whole? Say you’re starting out as a young musician or a young composer, you’re going to be a freelance musician and often when that happens, the finances are already stacked against you. There’s a public perception, even within our industry, even with older musicians, that you can just work for exposure and that you don’t deserve any financial support, moving up to the big MPAs in Australia that get most of the public funding, then do they then carry the responsibility – because of the financing they have access to – the responsibility to program new music and engage with more diverse practitioners?
JD: I think that they do. I think that any organisation that is given a large amount of public funds has to be entirely accountable to its constituents. And I feel like, it’s just bizarre, but orchestras and opera companies that do get the biggest slice of the pie by far, seem to be the least responsive and least accountable to its constituents. So, you can say that at least they’re accountable so that a third of this budget of these companies comes from ticket sales, so their being responsive to what people apparently want to listen to. But there’s such murkiness around who gets commissioned to do things, that’s the case with museums and galleries as well, there’s almost zero accountability there. I just think that if you’re going to be given the task of representing a culture, pretty much by proxy because you’re just given so much money to do so, then you have a duty to be responsive to what living practitioners are doing right now, and what meaning is right now in Australia and moving into the future. And if the meaning is going to be how we judge ourselves against Mahler or Beethoven, fair enough it’s fine to go and listen to that, so why is that 99% of what we’re supporting? So yes, I definitely think they need to be much more diverse for sure, just much more lithe and accountable to what our culture wants at any one time. And that’s why I think of the orchestra, it’s no enemy to me – I love orchestra, the idea of coming together collectively to make sound together to me is the driving principle so that’s why I’m trying to implement models in my own small way and why I think we need to keep investing in a huge multiplicity in alternative models and that we always need to value people’s meaning making culturally by giving them some money.
VP: I suppose coming out of all this thinking and working with Super Critical Mass, it’s given you a lot to think about in terms of thinking about the world of orchestra and how it was and remains the symbol of our industry?
JD: Yeah, I’ve given this some thought and I actually wrote a book chapter about this quite recently, which was looking back at a Super Critical Mass event back in 2013 in Birmingham, which was a commission to help open this really grand new public space to sort of say we value coming together as a civic hub. So, myself, Janet McKay, Luke Jaaniste part of Super Critical Mass, we were seen as useful to help fill in that conversation by bringing together 100 brass players from Birmingham and the surrounds. So, we did this sort of hour-long immersive composition in this really dramatic building. The musicians would be on circular gantries and tiers, the public of which there were maybe 3000 or 4000 throughout he day would ascend on these travellators to hear these musicians play, Notably, not playing from a score but just listening to each other with call and response, and some basic blocking like “You’re going to start out by treating the instrument like an object, tapping, blowing against it, taking the mouthpiece out of your French horn, going from this general consensus of noise and objects through going to a harmonic consensus through the middle before spooling out again into a sense of individuation, so you kind of get this sense of noise comes to chord comes to everyone doing what they like sort of thing.
3:30 EXCERPT of Discovery Season (2013), Super Critical Mass, City of Birmingham Library
JD: But it’s sort of occurred to me that you could think of libraries and orchestras in similar ways. They’re both kind of spaces of possibility, these utopian spaces of possibility, but they’re also traditionally and culturally these spaces of archiving and repository. And I think they fulfil both functions pretty well and you can go to a library and there are decades if not hundreds, even thousands of years of scholarship that you can access at the turn of a mousepad or reach of a book, and similarly with an orchestra, they’re sort of there to maintain a certain body of repertoire that’s there for you. But, they’re also on the more generative side, they’re placed of assembly for multiplicity. In a library it’s a bit more noticeable in that these days, you don’t have to go to a library to read a book. You can go there to access the wi-fi, you can go there to discreetly drink a drink and have lunch, you can go there as someone who has no home, and again discreetly pull a hat over your eyes and kind of nod off. They’re kind of safe collective spaces that allow for a lot of different things to happen so long as it’s quiet. And you could argue that the orchestra could be doing that, but it kind of doesn’t. It only does the memory-building part of it; the collectivising and the archiving part of it. I think it’s really important with orchestras to think of them not just as spaces of possibility, but to also acknowledge that they come out of a very specific time and place. They come out a time in history where for some centuries where Europe was trying to dominate the planet and did so pretty well, I mean it colonised most of the planet if you combine the efforts of France and England, Portugal and Spain et cetera. I personally see the orchestra as working in lockstep with that, kind of colonisation with the planet. I see it at a very militaristic kind of way of operating. If you think about the power that the States has had in recent decades. I see that in a kind of triune fashion. You’ve got the militaristic force, you’ve got the economic force and you’ve got the cultural force. And I think the orchestra from a European perspective sort of fits into that model as well.
It’s an economic force. You can only have an orchestra if you have enough wealth to support it, so it’s kind of like a PR strategy for your country’s wealth. You can only do it as a kind of soft diplomacy, a marker of a certain degree of sophistication, of learning of education, of having a history worth sharing – in a sort of the dark sense of the term. It’s also kind of a military squadron, I mean it is a very finely tuned instrument of collectively that is driven by a commander. It has a conductor. It has a chief and everyone fulfils their role. So I can’t divorce that from the reality of the fact that in the last century we’ve kind of come out of some centuries of European domination. And I think it’s notable that when Europe started to lose its place in the world, the orchestra stopped evolving, effectively. I mean, it stopped evolving around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, right at the time when Europe itself stopped having the same kind of meaning in the world. And then you start to see orchestras popping up in other parts of the world which want to assume a new form of empire building, like the States for instance. So, I sort of kind of not think of the orchestra as being deeply symbolic of power, and it does this kind of sleight of hand by making you see that appreciating orchestral music is just for its universal true values of beautiful complex thought, but I just don’t want to divorce it from the systems of power that brought it into being in the first place. And particularly in a country like Australia, if we’re going to do these collective models of power and display of wealth and education, why is it with a European model? Why is it not another models that actually show what Australia in all of its useful and interesting flux and diversity actually is? There are some pottered thoughts I’ve thinking about lately with orchestras.
VP: I mean, you’ve touched on so many things I’ve been trying to think about but have probably articulated them in a much better way. So, the first thing you mention is hierarchy, and I always look into an orchestra and think it’s really weird how they’re so highly regimented, as you say. Because what it is a group of highly trained 120 to 140 creative people who are forced to play the same thing in the same structure, and for those who don’t know what it looks like behind the scenes for an orchestra, it’s proper hours. You know, you’re scheduled to do x amount of concerts a week and x amount of rehearsals a week that accomplish being able to play that music for those concerts scheduled for that week at a certain standard, and every week it’s like that. So, you have these creative people who are squished into a very formulaic existence in terms of creating art.
JD: It’s kind of like boot camp and the only difference between an orchestra and the military is that the military has a little bit more inclusive in terms of who can join, probably a lot more inclusive because they need numbers. I think of orchestras these days a little bit like ABC TV, I don’t know if it’s still the case, but once a year at least they would broadcast the Edinburgh Tattoo. And you’d see this kind of display of Scottish people with Scottish hats, and the Scottish kilts with the bagpipes and the brass doing a sort of display of effectively impotent power. What is a pipe and drum band for? It’s just a display of power, especially a part of the world, the UK, is pretty important in terms of its role in the world these days. So I don’t think you need to think too far outside the square to see the occasional broadcast of the orchestra in the same way. It’s kind of show of strength, in a very beautiful way, again I’m not questioning the quality of the music or the value of the musicians, just the literal experience of hearing one of these things, it’s unmissable – you’ve got to hear an orchestra at least once in your life! But in terms of the kind of formation, the squadron like nation of it, the militaristic precision and the fact that, you know, only the fittest survive, it really is the fittest survive in the orchestral world. And it’s not even the fittest, you can’t really be the fittest, you’ve also had to have come from the right background, you’ve got to have the right amount of wealth and they’re really ruthless machines, and I think that we ought to be realistic about what the orchestra is. Enjoy it, appreciate it, continue it, support it but also like not be rosy-eyed about what this thing is culturally, especially in a country like Australia.
VP: And I’ve never thought of the orchestra being live archiving, in terms of performing archives. It’s really interesting because what you mention about Europe’s declining in power coinciding with it, around I’d say early 20th century in terms of imperialism, but in France it didn’t really happen until the 70s and 80s, but it coinciding with orchestras playing the same rotation of repertoire. To the point where you go to countries that are not Europe, so Australia, America, South American even huge parts of Asia, we’re still playing the same repertoire, so this exact model of this European pure and absolute truth experience of what music is, is kind of being repeated and replicated all around the world. It’s not just Europe anymore.
JD: It’s kind of like the common era stops when Europe stopped becoming the common place. We stop really taking the music seriously after about 1915-ish. There are obviously pieces in the repertoire since then but the majority of it is from the time of European Empire. It is the voice and the mouthpiece of that.
VP: Well, as we move away from the early 1900s and although there’s seemingly a system of replicating this archive of orchestral repertoire, the world of sound art and experimenting and ensembles have begun to move in various ways out of this. And in a way, you mentioned Pauline Oliveros and I feel like I should touch on her. I remember reading a lot of her work when I was doing a lot of my own research towards the tail end of studying at the Conservatorium. And all of her… I forgot the name of the publication now… Oh! Sonic Meditations! They’re all about listening deeply and listening as activism, and what I liked about the way she writes about this idea of listening deeply not just for musicians, although she is a highly skilled musician herself, but it was also for the public. So, this text is accessible and some of the written exercises can be accessed by anybody, in the ways that you’ve gone about the participation?
JD: yeah, there’s very little barrier of entry to the Sonic Meditations. Firstly, you can just download them off the web for free if you do the right Google search. They’re very inclusive, I mean they’re just basically short paragraphs of information that are really designed about how to think through being a little society and that society’s whoever wants to turn up and do a sonic meditation. They’re really beautiful and poetic, and I think it’s been so vindicating and rewarding to see the level of attention that’s been given to Pauline Oliveros in recent years. Sadly, she’s not with us to partake in this long overdue attention to her work, but she’s really one of the more powerful figures in recent memory in experimental and contemporary music in so many ways. A powerful individual, artist, performer and pioneer in so many different ways and also a very, very generous person. I remember she emailed me once or twice saying and she never really met me, I got to interview her for radio, but it was only really via the anonymity of two studios in two parts of the world, a bit like what we’re doing right now. So, she wouldn’t know me from anyone else, but she sent me some emails and said “you should come up and say hi, and come to meet me in upstate New York sometime. She scheduled a piece of mine to open one of her long-form festivals once. And I’m just one of thousands of people she crossed paths with in any given year, so she’s certainly one of my heroes. And I’ve taken a lot from some of my studies of her work to somewhat transmogrify into some of my own practices.
VP: You know what would be really cool and I was thinking about this when I first came across her work, is if her Sonic Meditations became part of studying in a very traditional institution like a Conservatorium, because it really does open your mind in terms of what you can do as a performer or a creator and how you can connect between each other in ensemble but making the ensemble about your audience as well.
JD: Yeah, it’s kind of introducing a theatre sports/get to know you exercise/philosophical conundrum into the act of playing music together. I mean, I would be very surprised and disheartened if the sonic meditations aren’t really central to a lot of music pedagogy today but it probably isn’t. Recently, it was about a month or so into the COVID-Lockdown worldwide, there was a re-versioning of a Pauline Oliveros work ‘Pink Moon,’ where some hundred people across the world got to participate in just by plugging into ZOOM, and that was a really rich way to come together in a moment of terror and strife, globally. So, and it was no real major instruction, they’re very inclusive as pieces along those lines, so I think she’s an excellent starting point for anyone thinking critically and empathetically about music-making.
VP: We could probably keep going for ages talking through the nuance of the orchestra and Super Critical Mass has been doing. But I have to ask, is there anything we should be keeping our ears peeled for over the next year or so?
JD: Yes, so I’m really continuing to spread my wings in terms of being an artist and composer. I have work that I’m preparing right now for the Brisbane Festival in September 2020 with the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. I’m looking forward to 2021 in terms of returning to Australia and making Super Critical Mass works but also hopefully and ideally continuing my video practice, my scoring practice, my sculptural installation practice. There’s been a big shift for me coming to terms with the fact that for 20 years of my life I’ve been a radio presenter and yet I’ve been making these fairly kind of open-ended structures in my artwork without any reference to the fact that I have a speaking voice. So, I’ve actually been doing a lot of soul-searching and writing about things from a more positioned perspective, and so I think that’s going to come through more in the work. And I’ve also got a couple of commissions from the Australian Music Centre and from Tura in Perth and there will be new video and sound works in the not too distant future. So, don’t forget to log onto julianday.com and you’ll find our more
VP: Oh my god. You are so busy. It’s really amazing that you’ve somehow managed to balance all these components of your career together. I just want to say thank you so much for talking with me and sharing all your ideas, particularly about the process of your work and how you think about it, and also the nuances of the orchestra that we maybe should be thinking about.
JD: It’s been an absolute delight to speak with you, and have the opportunity to speak and share ideas and I think this series is amazing. I’m looking forward to listening to every episode in your podcast series, It’s a great initiative.
VP: Thanks Julian! And thanks again for being on the show. I know that I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears peeled for everything you have coming up, and I’m sure our audience is as well. For anyone interested in following up on Julian’s work, all the links and details relating to his upcoming projects, published papers and the powerhouse that is the Super Critical Mass project is available in the description and transcript. You know what I’ll also do, as we talked about Pauline Oliveros I’ll put a link so all of you might download Pauline’s ‘Sonic Meditations’ and get to know her work more closely if you haven’t had the chance to yet. Wow, we’ve covered a lot this episode. Once again, thank you to Julian and thank you for listening. Catch you next time!
DECLASSIFY is a podcast available for listening and subscription on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It is hosted and produced by Victoria Pham.
RESOURCES
Julian Day
Day, Julian. 2019. ’24 Hour Choir: Towards a Civic Ethics in Improvisation,’ Contemporary Music Review 38: Improvisation and Social Inclusion: 529 – 532.
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Super Critical Mass
https://www.supercriticalmass.com
Key performances and excerpts listed below:
Critial Mass (2008) for 100 flutes at Carriageworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7k0DQtYyI
‘24-hour-choir’ (2017): https://maas.museum/event/24-hour-choir/
Performance Documentation at the UTS Chau Chak Wing Building (2018), led by Julian Day
‘Moving Collected Ambience’ Asia Pacific Triennial (2015-16), Interview and Excerpts with co-directors Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL9P_vcJfXE
‘Moving Collected Ambience,’ Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), Interview with Julian Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV67beWR8r0
‘Discovery Season,’ Library of Birmingham (2013), Excerpts of the performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrDsx313rjA
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Gerard Brophy (Composition teacher to both Julian Day and Victoria Pham): http://www.gerardbrophy.com.au/
Oliveros, Pauline. 1974. Sonic Meditations. Smither Publications: American Music. Downloadable at this link: https://monoskop.org/images/0/09/Oliveros_Pauline_Sonic_Meditations_1974.pdf
O’Brien, Kerry. 2016. ‘Listening as Activism: The “Sonic Meditations” of Pauline Oliveros’ accessed at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/listening-as-activism-the-sonic-meditations-of-pauline-oliveros