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She plays angel music (where people might die) is a 60-minute concert-installation for 5-25 female harpists. It was triggered by highly questionable and incomplete information on the history of harp composition found on Wikipedia. While it is generally accepted that Wikipedia is not a reliable source in academia, it still a powerful source of knowledge amongst the general public. Thus, the incomplete display on the site promotes
a) the historic and continuing discrimination of women from music composition in the classical music world and
b) the continuing rejection of contemporary music in favour of music by dead composer in the classical music world.
This presentation takes the reader through the compositional steps that were performed in order to create a post-internet work that attempts to highlight political situations by gathering publically available information into a controversial context.
The title of the work is taken from an article in the Orange County Register that we came across when looking for harp composers online.
Clicking on the first hit the Wikipedia page gives us 25 names of dead male composers.
Researching their lives and works, it becomes obvious that some of them wrote a lot of pieces for the harp, some just one (for example, Händel)
The aim is to create a piece of "Post-Internet-Music" (see Adam Harper's article on the subject), where the trigger, all musical and non-musical content and the title are all taken from internet pages. All this information is then combined with the following conventions in order to create an interactive experience:
- the unique way of transporting the harp on specially designed harp trolleys
- the uncomfortable but still widely accepted fact that it’s ok to exclude female composers from music history
- the way that wikipedia has replaced encyclopaedic knowledge and shapes our view of the world
- the fact that there are many more female harpists now than male ones
- musicological interest in historic composers’ travels
- By clicking on the pages of the 25 Wikipedia-Harp-Composers (WHC) we researched their lives and travel according to Wikipedia. We specifically made notes of when each composer was where.
- 75 towns, cities and specific regions in total were visited by WHC altogether. We marked those locations with red crosses on a map of Europe:
The time-frame of the performance is set by a projected “history clock”, which starts in year 1660 and counts to the present day and beyond with a year lasting 10 seconds. The clock also announces the birth of all WHC composer with the sound of a gong.
In the performance each harpist decides which composer(s) she wants to represent. As soon as the birth and birthplace of the chosen composer is announced by the clock, the harpist travels to the corresponding music stand (the one representing the composer’s birthplace). From there she follows the instructions given on the music stands, sending them travelling in the footsteps of the composer until his death:
A copy of the Dubez score can be accessed here.
A copy of the Händel score can be accessed here.
While the harpists are travelling they play constantly repeated cells of music written by their chosen WHC. The selection of the cells was made by us based on original sources found on the online International Music Score Library Project.
The chosen material had to be
- short enough for the harpists to memorise quickly and
- playable with only hand (as the other was steering the trolley)
When the :history clock" reaches a year in which a WHC is born, a sound file is triggered, presenting the audience with the biography of the respective WHC as found on Wikipedia, "read out” aloud by a computer generated female voice. The file includes the exact Wikipedia text, i.e. elements that are usually omitted when reading out aloud (such as footnote numbers) and wrong pronunciations of people’s names.
Performance space and audience participation: There are 75 locations and music stands in the venue, some of them are famous cities (Rome or Vienna), some more obscure places (Howth or Plock). Sometimes harpists have less than ten seconds to travel to a particular place and on a few occasions a journey is impossible to achieve in the given time. In addition, music stands are facing in different directions, so a location name might not be visible.
Audience and the performers are sharing the same space. This means that harpists can ask the audience for help when looking for a location:
Political music:
This work is dealing with political issues not by making political statements but by presenting facts as they can be found in the public domain. It emphasis the discrimination against female harp composers and living composers, by
making the separation of male and female more obvious
- by using exclusively female performers performing music composed by men who are now dead
- by using exclusively female voices talking about the lives of dead male composers
Also, the “soft and gentle” image of the harp is replaced by the physical reality of shifting a heavy object with the help of a trolley.
The only overt addition by us is the sentence “There are no more living harp composers” when the history clock counts beyond the death of the last of the WHC on the list (from 2003 onwards). The clock continues to count into the future until the last person has left the performance space:
This statement is clearly a lie as music is still written for the harp today, but it is true according to Wikipedia. This is the moment where the discrimination is at its most obvious. The audience is forced to put what they have experienced into perspective and decide if they follow the conventions of the classical music world as presented by Wikipedia and accept the discrimination of women and contemporary composers .