Art to Think With

Jen’s body is an air pump and a sound filter she can alter in many ways. The trombone is a filter, the mute is a filter. Our listening, thinking, speaking bodies filter what we perceive, think, and project into the world. Alter filter to hear what we’ve been missing. Every filter we are has consequences; this piece is a cannon.

Resonance is how we hear space and what is in space. It implies an interior space - the space of a room, the space inside the piano, the space inside yourself. It is also the sound of response - when the piano’s pedal is down, the other strings are allowed to respond, aloud, to the strings of the note played.

I think the piano’s timbre has a special capacity to evoke the kind of indirect, mid-afternoon, daylight that enters rooms in the city, and to convey a feeling of bleakness. For me this particular bleakness includes a feeling of self-possession in the face of difficulty, but almost requires that interior, that daylight. I’ve been thinking about how the stability of space enables us to face adversity, but in our city now we are allowing space and stability to be taken away from more and more people, through foreclosures, evictions, and gentrification.

I think the piano’s timbre has a special capacity to evoke the sweetness that is an antidote to the bleakness. I am not proposing the sweetness as a solution, only as a help to us in organizing a systemic solution. The sweetness of love and being loved. The sweetness of touching each other.

The piano has a special capacity to transmit touch - you can hear how Ishmael touches the piano.

The piece includes a musical quotation, a hymn, written in 1615, published in the Bay Psalm Book, in Boston in 1698, which is around the time we started displacing people, and gentrifying. The words of the hymn are, I said I will look to my ways, for fear I should go wrong: I will take heed all times that I offend not with my tongue.

In 1972, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program at CUNY closed for lack of interest, a lack produced by anti-war organizing. In a 2011 report, "Underserved: A Case Study of ROTC in New York City," the American Enterprise Institute asserted that, “The absence of ROTC units on urban campuses, especially in the Northeast, prevents the military from taking full advantage of their large, ethnically diverse populations. This is particularly true in the case of the City University of New York”. In 2012, "Military Science" was introduced as a major at York College, and ROTC opened there. In 2013, ROTC opened at City College and at Medgar Evers College, and was proposed at the College of Staten Island. The decisions to reintroduce ROTC at Medgar Evers and CSI campuses were made without consulting the faculty, circumventing college governance structures. In Fall 2013, while former general David Petraeus taught a course at the Macaulay Honors College, College of Staten Island faculty and students organized a town hall meeting to debate the desirability of the ROTC program. The program's reintroduction there has since stalled because no department will sponsor it. In February, taking this strategy as a model, faculty and students at Medgar Evers College, where ROTC had already been reintroduced, held a town hall meeting featuring a panel made up of ROTC participants and brass and three Veterans Against the War: two Iraq vets, one a CUNY student, and one Vietnam vet, Glenn Petersen, chair of the department of sociology and anthropology at Baruch. At the meeting, which was organized to precede a College Council vote, audience members spoke eloquently, both for and against the program. On February 24th 2014, reasserting its governing power, the College Council voted to end the program at Medgar Evers, and President Crew has affirmed that the vote "is binding." Efforts to expel ROTC from York and City College are in early stages and need your support.

For much of Feeling ROTC Is Back On Campus there is no single tempo; rather, the players, in front of you, take their individual pulses and play at pulse = eighth-note. To stay "together" requires the interruption of a lot of cues, always given by the percussionist, Sean. I chose the most standard percussion instruments, which already have military associations, and they play all the time, coloring everything. We have moved stands to the side, away from the space between your body and the players' bodies. The players are arranged on stage less as an ensemble than as a line of individuals. For me, this piece is an exploration of sensitization, anxiety, and coordination.

Sometimes a shy sound gets the cover it needs.
I am interested in
    when we can read between the lines and
    what arises out of our doing, over what gets done,
        how, I'm not quite sure.