Archive for May 2009
A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb: an experimental radio-play with vehicular orchestra and live chorus
MAY 23rd PERFORMANCE, BROOKLYN, NYC
Writer and Director: Mary Walling Blackburn
Composer and Conductor: Christopher Marianetti
This modern tragedy/live radio play is performed outdoors at dusk and is accompanied by a live chorus and an octophonic vehicular orchestra (the cars are the instruments and all non-human sound derives from them). Sounds arise from three concentric rings consisting of 12 singers, eight cars with eight boom boxes and one FM radio transmitter. Together, these sonic elements and their conflicting narrators, re-imagine the car as something other than bomb or vehicle.
“The night is a book.” –Duras
“There is no explosion like a book.”- Mallarme
A novel in the form of a car bomb.
MORE ABOUT THE TEXT:
Mary Walling Blackburn received ‘google news alerts’ via email regarding recent car bombs. She immediately parsed through these missives, lifted details and incorporated them into a psycho-philosophical investigation of how we surveil and approach car bombs because of the distances between the explosion and the witness/reader.
Given that the development of the car bomb is contingent on its rapid exploitation of new technologies Walling Blackburn makes the production of the work and its dissemination contingent upon recently developed applications that transfer data between cell phone and web, web and bomb. This triangulation of technologies (bomb/web/cell phone) is intended to echo the car bomb’s appetite for and integration of modern innovations. Consequently, Twitter, a micro-blogging application that delivers texts to a user’s cellphone or their Twitter web account, hosts “A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb”. Text: http://twitter.com/howmuchumean2me
MORE ABOUT COMPOSITION
Christopher Marianetti has orchestrated the work in the following manner: the chorus is divided geographically into four sections. Each section is connected (via headphones and a splitter) to an iPOD. Hence, all altos are connected to an alto iPOD, all tenors to a tenor iPOD. The iPods are controlled by the conductor and give audible cues which create (without the use of anything written) an auditory-score by which each person in each section performs his/her part of the piece.
The conductor helps direct the elements of the inner and outer rings, by cuing the choral iPODS and thus the chorus members, and by queuing the car-actors and car-bombers for various cues in moments of transition or action. The conductor is, at the same time, and in the moment of performance, engaged in the composition of the piece as well.
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MARY WALLING BLACKBURN and CHRISTOPHER MARIANETTI created their first vehicular orchestra, “The First Disappointment”, for eight cars and sixteen dancers in North Adams, Massachusetts while Christopher was participating in a composer’s residency at the 2006 Bang on a Can Summer Institute at MASS MOCA and Mary was an artist-in-residence at the Contemporary Arts Center.
“The First Disappointment” was illegally performed in a scrap yard in the dark and was twenty minutes long. The North Adams collaboration included artist Danyel Ferrari.
