SINGING TOURS
I have always enjoyed doing “singing tours” of art exhibits. Just as art historians and curators lead groups through museum spaces, pausing in front of selected works and commenting on them, I guide a tour in which I stop in front of visual art works and perform a prepared vocal improvisation, thus creating a dialogue with the artist and presenting an “interpretation” of the piece through music, rather than analysis. This can also be done as a group, as I have done with students at the art museums in San Marino and Alessandria in Italy. Here is a recent, and particularly inspiring, example:
“Daniel Spoerri in the Natural History Museum in Vienna: an incompetent dialogue?”
Daniel Spoerri invited me to do a singing tour of his summer, 2012 exhibit for the “finissage” on September 17th. Spoerri allowed himself to be inspired by the works in the museum to create a dialogue between some of the objects he found there and his own art. Similarly, I visited the show and allowed some of Spoerri’s works and the objects around them to inspire a singing tour, beginning with the last room and ending at the entrance.
The tour began with a glass case that was part of a series of works entitled Carnival of the Animals. This particular work is called “Birds, Reptiles and Mammals.” In the manner of the walking theme from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, I used the banal first theme of Saint Saëns homonymous work to begin and end the improvisation, as well as provide a link as I walked around the case, observing the stuffed creatures within and giving them a voice. In order of appearance, they were: a mountain goat, a parrot, a crow, a rooster, a cat, a dog (this led to a fight) and a chimpanzee.
I then led the audience to a work in the corner of the same room entitled Vagina Dentata. My partner Désirée Townley, a trained contemporary dancer, stood next to the work: several shark’s jaws with a vagina-shaped shell in the middle on a wooden base with many shark’s teeth. The sculpture has an alarm system to prevent it from being damaged by visitors getting too close. My improvised “grammelot” was punctuated with sung pitches and shark’s names in the languages I speak: tiburón, shark, squalo, hai (this was developed, given the fun sound and the fact that it also means “yes” in Japanese) and to end, “requin.” I find it fascinating that each of the five words is completely different from the others. Meanwhile, I attempted to approach my partner’s vagina. When I got too close, she stretched her arm out and sounded the alarm, forcing a retreat.
I led the visitors into the next room for an interaction with Spoerri’s video Resurrection. The video itself had to be resurrected by Spoerri and his assistant, because it had been switched off. This piece is quite shocking, as it shows cream cheese (part one) and a steak (part two) beginning as excrement and going backwards through the process of being eaten and then produced. The shit to steak resurrection involves some butchering. Spoerri selected baroque music interludes for the video (mostly in D major) and I decided to sing the two parts of Seneca’s death aria from Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea as my contribution to the work (mostly in D minor). The text, with its description of the brief suffering at the end of life, the ascension of the soul to Mount Olympus and the purple trail of blood leading to death, seemed an appropriate comment to the fate of the cream cheese and the cattle.
A passage through the next room of the space followed, during which I briefly gave voice to a cow skeleton eating a turtle, some dead songbirds and insect specimens. A cave exhibit separates the entrance to the exhibit and its first Spoerri piece, The Bear, from the rest. I led the visitors through the dark cave portion, with its films and drawings of stalactites and stalagmites and sounds of dripping water, in the manner of Orpheus leading Eurydice, singing a sustained low note. This led the listeners to The Bear, a representation of various bears on a base of copies of drawings by Charles Le Brun comparing human anatomy to animal anatomy. The spectators occupied the gallery area, as if they were in a theater box, and I performed an improvisation based on musical growling, mostly inspired by Tibetan gügye, in the resonant dome-covered rotunda of the museum below.
The tour began with a glass case that was part of a series of works entitled Carnival of the Animals. This particular work is called “Birds, Reptiles and Mammals.” In the manner of the walking theme from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, I used the banal first theme of Saint Saëns homonymous work to begin and end the improvisation, as well as provide a link as I walked around the case, observing the stuffed creatures within and giving them a voice. In order of appearance, they were: a mountain goat, a parrot, a crow, a rooster, a cat, a dog (this led to a fight) and a chimpanzee.
I then led the audience to a work in the corner of the same room entitled Vagina Dentata. My partner Désirée Townley, a trained contemporary dancer, stood next to the work: several shark’s jaws with a vagina-shaped shell in the middle on a wooden base with many shark’s teeth. The sculpture has an alarm system to prevent it from being damaged by visitors getting too close. My improvised “grammelot” was punctuated with sung pitches and shark’s names in the languages I speak: tiburón, shark, squalo, hai (this was developed, given the fun sound and the fact that it also means “yes” in Japanese) and to end, “requin.” I find it fascinating that each of the five words is completely different from the others. Meanwhile, I attempted to approach my partner’s vagina. When I got too close, she stretched her arm out and sounded the alarm, forcing a retreat.
I led the visitors into the next room for an interaction with Spoerri’s video Resurrection. The video itself had to be resurrected by Spoerri and his assistant, because it had been switched off. This piece is quite shocking, as it shows cream cheese (part one) and a steak (part two) beginning as excrement and going backwards through the process of being eaten and then produced. The shit to steak resurrection involves some butchering. Spoerri selected baroque music interludes for the video (mostly in D major) and I decided to sing the two parts of Seneca’s death aria from Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea as my contribution to the work (mostly in D minor). The text, with its description of the brief suffering at the end of life, the ascension of the soul to Mount Olympus and the purple trail of blood leading to death, seemed an appropriate comment to the fate of the cream cheese and the cattle.
A passage through the next room of the space followed, during which I briefly gave voice to a cow skeleton eating a turtle, some dead songbirds and insect specimens. A cave exhibit separates the entrance to the exhibit and its first Spoerri piece, The Bear, from the rest. I led the visitors through the dark cave portion, with its films and drawings of stalactites and stalagmites and sounds of dripping water, in the manner of Orpheus leading Eurydice, singing a sustained low note. This led the listeners to The Bear, a representation of various bears on a base of copies of drawings by Charles Le Brun comparing human anatomy to animal anatomy. The spectators occupied the gallery area, as if they were in a theater box, and I performed an improvisation based on musical growling, mostly inspired by Tibetan gügye, in the resonant dome-covered rotunda of the museum below.
For more information on Daniel Spoerri click HERE
