Rethinking the Instrument

Catalog description

This seminar focuses on redefining the musical instrument. Participants will use musical instruments, everyday objects, materials, and architectural elements in conjunction with loudspeakers, kinetic and mechanical devices, and other systems to create sounding objects. In a workshop environment, the course traces the artistic work of building, composing for, and operating an instrument. Through this process, we will question notions of sound perception and generate new forms of sonic knowledge. In support of this aim, instruments will be taken apart and examined as autonomous resonant bodies. We will observe the form of these components, their materiality, their mechanics, and we will document their behavior in the context of new sonic functions. The instrumental/mechanical components will be combined with and modified by devices, materials, and other instruments. A final project using the work developed through the course can be submitted as a composition, a sound object, an instrumental device, an installation, or any combination thereof. The course is intended for graduate students in music but open to others by permission of the instructor.