At any moment, wherever we are, we are hearing; but we are not always listening. Sounds unavoidably communicate all kinds of information about the world around us, but only when we treat sounds as music do we realise their inherent aesthetic value. This sense of the potential beauty of sound can be heightened, or at least brought to attention, by the act of making objects sound, whether or not they were intended as ‘instruments’. The central idea of this piece is the participation of the entire audience in the quasi-alchemical process of transforming raw sound into music: creating form out of matter. The five ‘audience instruments’ have been chosen for their ability to produce rich and strange global textures from relatively simple playing techniques. Sometimes these textures define the musical foreground, allowing every individual to focus-in on their own contribution to the aliveness of the moment; at other times they become a background for the activity of the ensemble soloists, inviting an experience of the inevitable tension that arises between listening-to and playing different things simultaneously. In one of the preparatory workshops for the piece a participant asked “what are we supposed to listen for?”. A pertinent question, but one to which there is no absolute answer, except maybe that we should all, at all times, be as attentive as possible to the relationship between our individual action and our surrounding environment: in music as in life. In this way, the aesthetic bleeds into the ethical.

(Christian Mason)


Bibliography:

Whittall, Arnold: Questioning the Sound: the Music of Christian Mason, in: The Musical Times 161 (Summer 2017), pp. 85-99.