Break out of "authorized responses"

Browsing MIT's Open Courseware, I found this 15-page essay by contemporary Italian author Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose) on modern music.

Key concepts:

1. Contemporary analysis may focus on what drove artists to call on performers and audience to make constructive decisions about aleatoric performance.
2. Following the Enlightenment, fascination with the evocative power of suggestive art led to contemporary use of symbols without objective keys and provoking questioning of existing values and institutions. (pp 5-6)
3. This shift of value from the author's singular reality to a plurality of possible audience experiences rejects "any ideal normative conception of the world" -- likened to Copernicus's challenge to the Aristotelian legacy.

I'm not sure the parallel between openness in art (specifically, music that doesn't follow Classical tonal structure) and contemporary physics is any more than metaphorical. Theoretical science can get pretty outlandish by itself. But! I do get that as scientists have revealed and explored concepts such as Heisenburg uncertainty and artists, the I Ching to their audiences, outlandish concepts such as every conscious being a world unto themself have become household. My work tends increasingly to celebrate the capacity of individuals to create, recreate, and transform realities. 

It's easy to indulge in dramatizing the 20th century's bent "toward the ambiguous and the indeterminate" as a decay in crisis or chaos. I agree with the counterargument that it is, rather, a social development, driven by growing cultural, economic, and political empowerment, to actualize the creative and transformative power individuals inherently possess. The essay instead presents an alternative analogy: a universe (literally turned into one) in which chance and discontinuity perfectly follow an absolute rule -- untestable, undefinable, divine. In it, any work of art opens up to the perceiver's potentials while simultaneously belonging to the artist and obeying her rule.

It breaks down after that, but you don't have to take my word for it. 

Call for artist collaboration on OWS

My call for collaboration on moving the Occupy effort forward was posted to The Leeway Foundation's blog yesterday. With violence and arrest again threatening the Oakland GA and harsh winter, those of northeastern cities, our challenges demand speedy action.

There are those of us who feel the potential to be a greater force in the OWS movement, but also uncertainty about how to apply our skills optimally or to balance advocacy with ongoing projects. Let's meet by video chat or conference call weekends to pick each others' brains and motivate each other.

I know Occupy Boston and other cold-clime sites need group movement leaders to keep bodies warm. We're uniquely good at engaging others' attention and provoking them to problemsolve in unaccustomed ways. How can you apply your skills, confidence, and voice to the movement near you? Who are artists you'd be excited to ask to give a workshop at an Occupy site near them?

We need all hands on deck. If there's no demonstration near you (I'm in Indonesia as I write) let's network other, appropriate actions for economic justice and
transparent governance.

Email qianian@gmail.com with your availability and tech needs to get on call scheduling!

Idul Adha in Bandung

I arrived in Bandung Friday night after a 22-hour, two-leg flight and 4-1/2 hour bus ride through urban Javanese traffic. My fabulous hosts hired a cab to pick me up from the bus station, and when I saw the narrow alleys we had to wind through to get to their door I understood it wouldn't have been easy had I hired a cab myself.

Jakarta and Bandung have so far been strongly reminiscent of but markedly different from my previous trips to the next island over. I'm staying in a house abutting a mosque, which broadcasts prayers regularly, even more so in advance of the holiday celebrating the end of the annual pilgrimage. Waking at 3am to multiple calls to prayer was precious. I'm in Indonesia.

Let's watch.

One Journey

To follow up on my first transition post, I'm sharing the license detail for the completed score, an interactive, multidisciplinary improvisational performance piece.

A year ago I had a long email exchange with pianist, composer, and publisher Dennis Tobenski about new music copyright. As a habitual user of free content, I want to encourage others to be inspired and draw on my work in an attitude of cooperative cultural development. At the same time, we're all striving artists. I've never asked a composer for a copy of a score and been denied or asked for financial compensation. I support the norm of expecting critical feedback -- of course that's why I've been crazy about Feedback Circle. But the controversy of making a living from our calling is silencing: I don't know an emerging artist who doesn't feel even a little conflicted about their uncreative or even creativity-robbing day job, and I attest to frequent guilt trips of underemployment; yet we fear marketing our art would cheapen it. So it does, but in whose eyes?

For now I've stopped posting full scores online, instead giving teaser pages like this for performers to consider and sharing electronic copies for individually.


One Journey by Qian Li is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

9/11 Further reflections

This piece has made it onto Pandora stations. It's no background music for me, sparking examination of how my society's psyche has dramatically changed in ten years.

When I was in high school, an English assignment included listing remarkable events that occurred the day one was born. I had nothing to report. Through adolescence I didn't imagine anything massively traumatic would happen to my peers, family, or me in a lifetime.

September 11th was, however regrettably, part of my cohort's coming of age. Reports from battlefronts and vets in Iraq and Afghanistan made real to me wartime casualties as a physical and collective psychological threat. Living in San Francisco I became accustomed to the inevitability of mass destruction through natural earthquake and measures we must take as a civilization to reduce those risks. I focused more and more on invisible and silent threats of mass deaths from hate violence, suicide, and neglected social services.

Deliberate violence may be taking fewer lives in the current era, and that's worthy of celebration. How can we take that spirit forward to do better to provide one another the resources we need for collective safety, health, and well-being?

Transition 3: Feedback Circle continues

It's been a while since I mentioned it, but the multidisciplinary peer feedback group I started a year ago still meets, though irregularly. We restructured over the summer to have presenters bottom line scheduling for the web conference and reminders. We've had a couple of meetings to do group improvisation as well. We're always open to new members, so check out the Google group to participate.

Here's a screenshot from a meeting earlier this year:

The document you see in the background is my chickenscratch under the formal categories we explore in turn on the call.

I expect to have enough connectivity in Jakarta next month to be available for these conference calls. The vast majority of participants return again and again because the process allows us to voice responses that makes it easy to understand diverse concerns and adaptability of its members. It's worth continuing, so I am.

Transition 2: Philadelphia

My last scheduled performance before moving to Jakarta will be at Andrea Clearfield's salon in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit her site.

Oh, did I mention I'm moving to Indonesia? On both visits in 2003 and 2007 I left resolved to find a way to live there, only to fully engage in cataclysmic changes back in the States. So, at the end of my savings, I'm finally ready to treat living abroad as a reset button. I'm enrolled in a certificate program to teach English as a second language starting Nov 11. I dream of teaching not only the language but the impulse to communicate and to express through improvisation. Last night I literally dreamed about starting off class with Theatre of the Oppressed. The unconscious has the cart before the horse, I think.

The program is only a month long, but there's time for outreach with HIV services organizations and gamelan music as well. And if I am at least as resourceful there as I have been here, I will find more options for living and portals to bring forward my art.