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Presenting As You

performed at: Dixon Place

collaborators: Panoply Performance Laboratory, Esther Neff


Presenting As You

This score requires an ensemble of musicians as well as a lead vocalist, a conductor, and a mover. Set a future date for a live performance, of indeterminate length.

Here is an album, released on Gold Bolus Recordings, of the results of the survey (outlined in more detail below) performed by Anais Maviel (voice), Valerie Kuehne (cello), Ellen O’Meara (synthesizer), Cory Bracken (vibraphone), Matthew Gantt (laptop), Brian McCorkle (piano and conducting), and Esther Neff (actions):

A survey is published online which asks questions about personal characteristics, traits, preferences, and beliefs. These questions are the author of the survey’s anticipation of the information that will be needed to translate a user’s responses into a performed representation of that person within a set of dysfunctional interpretive conditions. At least one question on the survey should be “write in,” the rest of the questions may be in multiple-choice or other more correlative form. Original survey below and correlations below.

The survey sorts users first by four categories using the multiple-choice sets of answers, which are seen as having four different “modes of energy” (or “character”), symbols may be used, such as *, 0, \^, and # which gesturally and sonically assemble each mode. These four may be used by the ensemble to improvise “stylistically” together or at specific tempo, in a certain order, source phrases or leitmotifs notated for the category, or any other correlative conditionings of their performed presentation.

Each category of users will be performed together, but the order of the parts (1, 2, 3, 4 or *, 0, \^, and #) will be ordered by dominance: the categories into which the most number of users were sorted will be presented first, with the other three categories in descending order of dominance. Inside each of the four parts presenting one category of users each, individual users will be performed one at a time, with their multiple-choice answers in correlation with:

Fragments of notated music falling within the category Actions using materials symbolically, associatively, and linguistically (puns) correlated with each category Notated text of the question overheading the answer Notated text of the answers selected Vocalist one-to-one text (flexibly notated and/or written)

Correlations may be functionalized until each user is a fairly mimetic “object” of generated music, text, and action, OR correlations can be arrayed and then assembled by individual performers and as an ensemble. Rehearsal of arrays is helpful: it is suggested that the ensemble “rehearse the users and their generated arrays” as users fill out the survey online. Arrays may also be performed as overtures or interludes.