[sonicl]

Originally Posted by Moshe

September 13
"Graffiti Composition" - Under the musical direction of Elliott Sharp, this work by Christian Marclay will be performed by Sharp and guitarists Melvin Gibbs, Mary Halvorson, Vernon Reid, and Lee Renaldo at MOMA, Titus Theater, NYC, 6:30PM.

Oh, how I wish I was a New Yorker.

For those who are not aware, "Graffiti Composition" originates from Christian Marclay posting up blank sheets of music around town, going back later to photograph them, and then using whatever is on the sheets as a basis for a musical composition.

 

 

 

 

Article from The Daily Telegraph, on the occasion of a performance in London:

Imagine looking up at the billboards in the street and, instead of adverts for Vodafone or Renault, seeing giant sheets of music paper. Imagine you then stepped up closer and found an invitation to scrawl something - anything - on the paper.

That was what faced the astonished populace of Berlin in 1996. It was the beginning of a process that led to Graffiti Composition, a musical score conceived by performance artist, video-maker and musician Christian Marclay, which is about to have its British première. As always with Marclay, who is Swiss, the piece straddles the divide between visual and musical worlds.

"My aim was to create a collective score made by the people of Berlin," he says. "So I made these very simple posters, with the traditional five-line musical staves on them. I then posted hundreds of them all round the city, and invited anyone to write their own music on them, or their own drawings, or messages - whatever."

Did many people actually write music? "Yes, surprisingly, perhaps because Berliners are so cultured musically. Of the 800 photographs of these posters I made a selection of 150, which make up the 'score'." Since then the score has been interpreted in vastly different ways, which is natural enough, given that the mixture of squiggles, images, notes and words is hardly precise.

Marclay started out as a "pure" art student, but moving from Switzerland to New York to study changed all that. The two sides of his work can be seen in an exhibition at the Barbican, which includes invented instruments and a sound installation.

"It was punk rock that first gave me the idea of making music," he says. "It taught me that you can have musical ideas without being an expert musician."