Voice Box
Alternative content
Track 1: Adam de la Cour | osteostrangle
Track 2: Adam de la Cour | tickle
Track 3: Mikhail Karikis | Score for Voice and Neighbours
Track 4: Mikhail Karikis | Unvoiced Voiced Inhalation
Track 5: Amy Cunningham | Voice Box 1
Track 6: Amy Cunningham | Voice Box 2
The Voice Box’s growing collection of scores and sounds explores the process of notating and performing.
The ‘voice box’ explores the ‘music score’ as a site in which the conventions of notation, the qualification of sonic phenomenon and the historical hierarchies of sound are interrogated.
This growing collection of scores marginalises the historical rules and logic of compositional practice through the intervention of ‘interruptions’ which fragment and disrupt the sensibility and control of the composer.
In these works, a short musical idea is continually rewritten under conditions of stress which introduce ‘errors’ to its transcription. Uncontrolled markings enter the score, setting the unintentional alongside the intentional.
The (de)formed score testifies to a failed authorship and flawed rationalism of an initial compositional intention. The work resonates against the historicity of the score as the primary site for musical meaning.
The process of interruption is continued in sound. The initial musical idea (‘master score’) of the voice box is performed again and again by voice artists who chose their particular way of interrupting their interpretation of the score.