I think I’ve solved part of the problem.
In my last post I was concerned about misrepresenting some of my work by putting documentation and original works together in the same publication. I was concerned that if the works were operating on two separate levels, they’d have trouble communicating amongst themselves.
Today I rewrote the opening of my February radio performance as an instruction to a reader rather than a listener. The original radio script began like this:
“Now to keep you all together, I’d like you to bear in mind that not all of you will be hearing my voice at the same time. If you’re listening to this on the internet the sound will reach you with something like a 384 millisecond delay, so you’ll hear what I’m saying just under four tenths of a second after any listeners on analogue radio will be hearing me. If you are listening online you can account for this lag by playing almost four tenths of a second after my beat. My beat will be exactly on the count of the second hand on my watch, so you can either synchronize your watch with mine (or the clock on your mobile phone) or you can just account for any difference between my second hand and yours as you’re listening.”
The new version I’ve written is an attempt to transfer these problems of synchronicity from listening to reading:
“Now to keep you all together, I’d like you to bear in mind that the end of each line is falling exactly on the count of the second hand of my watch. So you can either synchronize your watch with mine, or just account for the difference between mine and yours in your head as you read. If you’re a particularly quick or slow reader you can accommodate the lag by setting your clock just behind or ahead of mine, and then incrementally adjusting the time as you progress down the page.”
The effect of the new piece is quite different, because the impossibility of it is distinct from the impossibility of the original piece.
There is a (slim) hope, with the radio broadcast, that the listeners really could synchronize their watches and clocks, and hence really keep in time with one another. What’s impossible is that the listeners should be able to hear what one another are playing in all their separate homes, and in the light of this knowledge, interact in the particular ways demanded by the instructor.
With the written text, on the other hand, there is no hope of synchronicity. The second hand on the watch of the writer is lost to the reader at the point of writing, and worse: the readers themselves are spread across time. Though they might hope to read the text at the same speed, they won’t be reading chorally.
So the text presents and withdraws the hope of this synchronicity. What I’ve quoted above is the entire text, which means it halts as soon as the instructions are completed. Once you get to the bit that says “as you progress down the page”, there’s no more page to progress down. It reminds me of the “applause” ending of the conductor text I wrote a while ago (and am still editing over and over) –
http://homologue.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/musica-p…
I plan to put today’s text at the opening of the AS CONDUCTOR booklet, immediately following a double page spread with the word APPLAUSE written across it in large letters. It seems to work alright. I’ll have to look at it again once the other texts in the booklet are nearing completion, to make sure they’re all sympathetic.
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This documentation problem is still lingering though, because I still haven’t solved the problem of the performance on the South Bank, which I think I’m going to have to replicate somehow in text alone.
I’ll have a go now.
