User:Niek/selfdirectedtext

Describe recent work / Identify key themes

The Tip Top Orchestra is an amateur avant-garde orchestra dedicated to playing historic avant-garde pieces from the second half of the twentieth century. By doing so, they reissue past media and ideologies in a contemporary oversaturated musical discourse where the original meaning and implications of the pieces have been overthrown by their historic and canonized function thrust forth by a musical elite. By using amateur musicians and defining the very concept of amateurism, the orchestra is able to prevent the canonized workings of the piece and make the playing of it a non-academic, non-discursive practice that works as an act of defiance against the elite and makes the music accessible to a broader audience. This reinstallation of pieces that were composed on the basis of now redundant ideologies is not only a means of defiance, but also an allegory of the decay and helplessness of the human mind and how humans try to overcome themselves by means of ideology. Beauty is after all the result of a battle of beings with their being, juxtaposed with the banality of existence. The orchestra members reflect this battle in the struggle of playing the right notes and reproducing a play that incorporates an ideology that cannot necessarily be reinstalled and believed in any more now that digital media give them a sense of ambiguity. The same goes for the instruments, made of obsolete media and material like PS2 keyboards and old audio-speakers that have lost their original value, be it on the market or as a fetish object. Their tweaking by the members makes them autographic objects and gives them a different value. By playing ‘In C’ not as performers, but as individuals we have done the same with the piece itself.

The debut of the orchestra consisted of a performance of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’, which is in itself already a piece that stands on the border between academic musical practice and a free reign of mind (because of its aleotoric tendencies for instance). An ensemble of twelve musicians and one conductor performed the piece at the Klooster Oude Noorden in Rotterdam, Holland. The performance was recorded by means of VHS cameras and edited into a 30 minute film called ‘The Tip Top Orchestra Plays Riley’s ‘In C’!’. The film is in itself an artistic product that can be looked at and enjoyed without further contextualization, focusing on the instruments and the performers from two different vantage points. The instruments themselves are objects with merit in themselves as well. As such, the orchestra aims on creating a creative environment with a specific set of rules and a goals. Focusing on one piece at the time and producing instruments, recordings and performances from that. The artistic result is not a given thing beforehand.

To truly reinstall past ideology as a means of defiance, there should be an international movement focusing on amateur-avant-garde. This should not not only be done in a musical context, but also in other disciplines. To create a community aware of this notion I aim on producing multiple incarnations of the orchestra throughout the world. By doing so, every country should have at least one amateur avant-garde orchestra which can be the beacon of a striving community. I want to participate in projects across the border to establish these orchestras. Every city has its own population and society, meaning its own concept of obsoleteness and its own obsolete media objects and ideologies. As such, a short term residency would be the ideal way to look at the resources that a city provides and establishing a working orchestra and creative movement from that principle. This means I will take on the role of impresario and work on one project at the time.

Identify how texts you have already produced might be useful (descriptions of work, or annotations for instance)

My writing on reinstallation fits right in with what I wrote about in the above sentences. KIKVORS and its meaning also holds a function similar to this artistic community, but is less focused on a single project, but is more an intermediate in producing existing projects, while KIKVORS builds them from the ground up. I uploaded something about redundancy today as well.

Identify contextualizing texts (art work or literature)

Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen serves imperialism, and other articles: with commentary and notes (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1974)
Michael Parsons (ed) 25 years from scratch: The Scratch Orchestra (London: London Musicians’ Collective, 1994)

Annotate contextualizing texts

Although Cardew's Scratch Orchestra appears to be a lot of things a classical orchestra is not, I believe it is at the same time an outsider exponent of the elitist music structure. By this I mean an incorporated part of the system on the edge of it's accepted boundaries. The first incarnation of Scratch was set up to be anti-hierarchal with all members playing an equally important role in the selection, composition and performing of pieces. These pieces were certainly avant-garde in the classical meaning of the word, usually stemming from a visual concept or framework. However, the way the orchestra was founded by means of a pamflet describing the rules and goals of the orchestra that was published in a notabel music magazine, already bears the seed of the orchestra's ultimate demise. The Scratch Orchestra was set up with decrees telling the members that there should be no hierarchy, but the writer of these rules, Cornelius Cardew, did not believe in anarchy. If he would follow the rules himself after their creation, he would have to put up with a subordinate position in the orchestra after the decrees were put into action, making the original pamflet a sort of axioma and dogma. Any structure trying to replace a structure is doomed to fail, because it is hierarchal in essence. The 'community' created by means of the pamflet only exist on the willpower of Cardew. History has proven this when Cardew chose a new political direction for the orchestra in 1972. When I consider all this in regards to the Tip Top Orchestra the differences between the two orchestras come to light. A structured avant-garde with rules to composing and playing avant-garde is a condicio sine qua non. The notion of amateur avant-garde might be this as well. However, playing canonized pieces in whatever way we like is our first principal goal and here you see the difference. There truly is no other hierarchy than willpower, everybody commits just the amount people want to commit. We are not aiming on being part of a musical elitist structure. We want to be as self-contained as the scratch orchestra, but by ignoring any ideology, also our own. Theory is left for the theorists.