2011/12 CVS's first Musical outing!

Today John B and myself picked up from John L's intro to Elements and Principles with an intro to Visually Responding to Sound  .
The media used was charcoal and paper and an eraser was also used.
We primed the Learners with a chat about binary opposites, perception, expectation, non-literal, non-figurative etc.- the usual stuff before we eased them in gently with three tracks of Eric Satie's early 20th c. romantic music.
Their response was initially tentative but they soon started to loosen up.
We followed with a fairly jarring stacatto number by the Kronos Quartet that really woke them up.The reaction was robust and energetic and the eraser was used in response to the contrasting moods within the piece. Afterwards, the learners were able to identify the difference in form, structure and tonality between this and the Satie pieces.
Then they listened to but didn't make a visual response to a Field Recording from the countryside. Some of them thought that the sound was composed and/or manipulated but it wasn't- even thought it (nature) sonically echoed the patterns and weave of the previous piece of "music". A discussion on the differences/ similarities of sound, music and noise took place.
This lead us on nicely to a Youtube video of John Cage's "4:33" as recommended by Claire. I was surprised and heartened by the respect and attention that the students/ learners gave to the piece. The fact that it was a video helped as they had something to focus on . On completion we broke for lunch deflected pleas for an explanation and thereby allowing an hour for peer discussion. After we resumed there was quite an animated debate about Cage's piece and not surprisingly the discussion started to broaden.
And so we returned to playing more soundpieces -aka music.
Orff's Carmen Burana- O Fortuna followed by Adam's Shaker Hoops and Part's Fratres set the tone for the afternoon's work. The response was vigorous and when we got them to stand and use the eraser to remove/transform that work whilst responding to Miles Davis,s Sketches of Spain, they engaged with the exercise positively in visually recording their aural experiences through acts of mark making and erasing .
After the break their work was put on the wall and a short seminar followed.
Overall the response was very positive and no obvious resistance was evident- yet!
More tomorrow, Aidan.