Seb Tomczak
Seb. our very own honours student provided us a charmingly droll and understated narrative of his musical happenings.
Seb. Initiator and facilitator of milkcrate: where ensembles of young adventures undertake a 24 hour lock down non stop music making using anything (except musical instruments) that fit into a milkcrate. Mostly. Sometimes the parameters change. 1
Seven times. Seb. Seven milkcrate sessions, to increasing notoriety and accolades.
Seb. The latest forum guest whose art is the process of making the art. The first milkcrate outpourings included a sixty page text to accompany the other (audio and visual) documentation of the process.
Seb Reflection One. Composition and Brevity
Handel wrote Messiah, arguably the greatest Oratorio of all time, between 22 August 1741 and 14 September 1741. 2 Hallelujah.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Last year I joined NaNoWriMo and, along with tens of thousands of other masochists, wrote a novel of 50000 words in one month. Seb's endeavors reminded me of the good folk at NaNoWriMo.
Seb Reflection Two. the Milkcrate of the mind
My head hurts from having spent many hours in the room of audio mirrors, selecting sounds from field recordings. I had much less than one hour of recordings to deal with, and didn't need to tranform them into musical works. This experience helps me to imagine and admire the nature of Seb's work during his Milkcrate sessions, where the transformation of collected sounds into music occurs along side the creation of the sounds.
Seb Reflection Three. Text Accompaniment.
Seb. Seb. Seb. What would you make of Steven Pinker's criticism of text that explains contemporary art?
"...elite art could no longer be appreciated without a support team...They did not simply evaluate and interpret art, but supplied the art with its rationale...Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself." 3
Seb, what of Wolfe who complains how "Modern art has become completely literary, the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text"? 4
(I doubt Seb's 60 page manifesto is a tribute to po mo critical theory, thankfully, but the point is still valid. Can, indeed should art be able to stand on its own, without swathes of explanation of process and rationale? This is a genuine question, and something to ponder at length over soy lattes at BackStage Cafe.)
Seb Reflection Four. Lumen Moment.
All these men (we will have women soon wont we?) who have come to our forum have presented, with relish and delight, the processes they have undertaken to create their music; the technological processes. Every week I complain about their focus in my blog - forget the process, what about the product, the MUSIC?
As I listened to Seb's awful sounding but interestingly created piece for two desk lamps, I had a - ahem - lightbulb moment. Here we are, studying TECHNOLOGY within a TECHNOLOGY department within a TECHNOLOGY discipline. Maybe it's to be expected that our guests would focus on technology in their talks, which they employ during the process of their creation.
1. Seb Tomczak. Lecture presented at University of Adelaide, 27 April 2006.
2. Luckett, R. 1993 (2nd ed) Handel's Messiah: A Celebration (p 86) New York: Harcourt Brace and Company
3. Pinker, S. 2002 The Blank Slate (p.414) London: Penguin
4.Wolf, 1975 The Painted Word (pp 2-4) New York: Bantam Books
posted by aajodie at 9:41 AM
3 Comments:
Heya,
Can I reply to this?
NaNoWriMo sounds like an interesting thing... I must check it out.
I would like to clear up one thing- the sixty page booklet was not in reference to milkcrate. Instead, it was a description of the processes behind a series of ten sonification works, collectively called The Night is a Beautiful Place. At this point, I would not consider writing sixty pages on the milkcrate project.
The most important "text accompaniment" in terms of milkcrate are the rules, which can be found here: http://www.milkcrate.com.au/iswhat.html This text obviously was created quite before the first milkcrate session.
The question might arise, then, as whether any of the milkcrate music can exist outside of these rules. Is it successful as music in itself, something more than just a curiosity? I don't know. Some of it might be.
I do not think the rules detract from the project's accessability- they are quick to read and to understand.
Hey Seb. So what do you think of the question about text with reference to The Night is a Beautiful Place. Does it need this text to make sense as a piece of art and does that diminish it's worth in any way?
Hi Jodie,
>>> Does it need this text to make sense as a piece of art
Well, I think it certainly helps to read the text in this case- but the sounds will still be audible without the knowledge of how they came to be... (TNIABP sounds pretty random without this knowledge).
>>> and does that diminish it's worth in any way?
I don't think so. I think that if the audience did not have access to some sort of explanation for a work where such would make it more accessable, then the worth is already diminished in the ears and eyes of the listener. The audience will automatically turn its back and not deal with the work. So it is important one gives them a chance to understand what is going on. Or something like that...
Anyways, thankyou for your fine blog entry.
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