Samson Young

"John Cage's project has failed Asia. The institutions of music continue to neglect and negate Asian composers. Composers outside the West are invisible in their own concert halls... We must begin by confronting the very language with which we describe the auditory and the act of composition. What does it mean to "orchestrate" and to "compose"? Could one orchestrate and compose without reproducing the power structures that are implicit in these terminologies? What is the new silence, the new decay, the new reverb, the new resonance?"
Samson Young, Artforum (Summer, 2016)

Muted Situations are proposals for sonic situations to be heard anew, achieved through a re-prioritisation of different sound layers. Certain layers – in most cases the sonic “foreground” of such situations – are consciously muted or suppressed, and as a result the less-commonly-noticed layers are revealed. Instructions on how to stage these situations range from specific directives, to more open approaches that require negotiation with the participants. Mute is not silence. Muting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, the act of muting is an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory. It involves the conscious suppression of dominant voices, as a way to uncover the unheard and the marginalised, or to make apparent certain assumptions about hearing and sounding.

Included in Eavesdropping is Muted Situation #5: Muted Chorus

"Stage a performance of the entirety of a choral composition without projecting the musical notes. This must be done without a diminution of the energy that is normally exerted in the performance of the composition in question. Ensemble-ship, phrasing, engagement of the bodies and all other factors pertaining to the performative intent of the work must be preserved as far as possible, but the sung musical notes are not to be heard. Suppress the consciously sound-producing constituent of the performance. As a result other sounds will be revealed, including but not limited to inhale of the singers, the sound that their bodies produce, and the rattling of the music scores."

Documentation