ritual as artwork

Mutable earth: tiny cauldron, communal rituals, the unexpected

Last week, I participated in a week-long workshop with claire rousay. We met, online, for two hours each day to practice Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening.

There were ten of us in different time zones; some of us starting in the morning and some after midnight; we brought each other into different temporal and geographical planes.

claire rousay is one of my favourite musicians, and she is also a gifted teacher. She had an improvisatory approach to class, weaving the material that we each brought together, and responding and reflecting in real time, creating an intimate sense of connection.

Her approach to making music is to bring depth and drama into the everyday. I felt that care and attention in the workshop space too.

In some ways rousay is always busy making music about music, and too, music about everyday life, about the ordinary. A delicate and deeply timbrel quality is helixed into the musical components of rousay’s work. Quotidian sounds and spoken word elements are woven into melodies that have been temporally manipulated; time is compressed and expanded, chords are frozen in place, instances take eternities, and occurrences flash by with immediacy.

One of the exercises that we did was to make a communal piece of music. We were invited to find something near at hand to make sounds with. We had five minutes to prepare, and ten minutes to record, without pausing, incorporating whatever sounds were in the room.

The items that participants used were varied: a child’s toy, a piece of metal to hang pots and pans from, a crisp packet, a police scanner, as well as more recognisable instruments like a synth and a penny whistle.

I used water in three vessels – a tiny cauldron, a glass, and a jug, hit at regular intervals with water poured between them to change the pitch of the notes and traffic as a background carpet of sound.

When we uploaded the tracks, claire edited them together in Ableton, isolating individual sounds, and layering them together. It was an emotional experience to hear the piece come together, and to hear serendipitous sounds: the sudden crack of thunder, construction work, a murmur of voices.

The different room tones contributed to the strangeness of the sound, and acted as an index of where we all were in space and time.

Pauline Oliveros suggests that whatever is close to hand is the right thing to use, and in this case, it felt true.

claire also told us about her experience of having to adapt from being a drummer, because of logistical and practical limitations, and finding new ways to make the sounds she wanted by using the room as an instrument, using background noise as an instrument. This opens up infinite possibilities.

There are so many ways to know people, to be intimate with them, and making this piece was one way.

It was a ritual that was also an artwork.