Rainer, hand, dance, minimalism

Yvonne Rainer b. 1934

Rainer’s first film, Hand Movie, was shot by fellow dancer William Davis when Rainer was confined to a hospital bed, recovering from major surgery and unable to dance. The resulting five minutes of footage is a sustained close-up shot of Rainer’s hand against a grey background as it stretches and contracts, bends and points, performing the kinds of everyday, quotidian movements that characterize her pioneering minimalist choreography.

Kilde: https://ubu.com/film/rainer_hand-movie.html

Keith Kenniff

(and Miranda July)

Keith Kenniff writes music for movies (among these Miranda July’s “me and You and Everyone we know“)
He is also a major mix-master making sample laws obviously redundant in all their stiffling idiocracy. Listen to this mix and tell me if it wasn’t worth it. Then go and seek out each individual composer and live their bodies of work.

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Maybe you are Partched?

(Harry Partch in public)

Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for instruments he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.

Interested in the potential musicality of speech, Partch worked out his first extended scales to notate the inflections of the speaking voice. He built his adapted viola to demonstrate the concept. In London on a grant he met the poet W. B. Yeats with the intention of gaining his permission to write an opera based on his translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. He took another instrument he had built, an adapted guitar, to the meeting, and accompanied himself in one of his own songs on it. Yeats was enthusiastic, saying “a play done entirely in this way, with this wonderful instrument, and with this type of music, might really be sensational”, and giving Partch’s idea his blessing.

Partch set about building more instruments with which to realise his opera. However, his grant money ran out, and, back in the United States, he began to live as a hobo, travelling around on trains and taking casual work where he could find it. He continued in this way for ten years, writing about his experiences in journals that were later collected together under the title Bitter Music.

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