In March of 2017, artist, field recordist, soundwalk leader and artistic researcher Jacek Smolicki invited me to the Detroit Gallery to join him and artist/illustrator Jenny Soep in a project employing different modes of transposition. Smolicki and Soep wanted to explore how materials transformed when transposed through different mediums. First, Jacek Smolicki collected 31 short field recordings. He gave these recordings to Soep. Soep then listened to each recording three times, making a drawing in real time for each round. These are the drawings shown to the right (you may look at them in larger format by clicking on each). This is not dissimilar to the way I practice with real world sounds, transforming sounds in real time, through impossible acts of attempted transposition on the violin, as an improvisational act of listening, dérive and technical work with my instrument. When they invited me to participate, Smolicki and Soep hung the drawings up in sequence on the walls of the gallery, and then I played them as a further step in the transposition of the original field recordings. At the time of this writing, Smolicki and Soep have taken contact with another violinist, Sören Thurell, and are also planning to work with with glass blowing artists, to further transform the materials through on-going transposition.
I have included my portion of Smolicki and Soep's on-going work as part of this project because this single afternoon both informed and helped me to articulate so much about the transposition practices I employed throughout the music and sound works here. Having this additional visual element, where transposition was performed not as an act of making a score, but as an act of making a work of visual art, illustrates the act of transposition from another angle than the sonic work that comprises the rest of the music and sound works in this reliquary. My participation in Smolicki’s and Soep’s project also represents a miniaturized example of a wider practice of transposition I have employed throughout my life. Walking through the cityscape, I carry out improvisation and transposition as part of an act of listening, in a combined dérive and soundwalk, through playing the violin. [CITE I have written extensively about this conception of transposition in my article Aural Transposition, Psychogeography and the Ephemeral World, which can be found in the VIS journal (add bibliography reference).] At the Detroit Gallery, I traversed Soep’s drawings on foot around the perimeter of the room, listening through looking, playing in return; a microcosm of that wider practice.
Although the majority of the music and sound works in my PhD project take their final form as compositions or highly structured improvisations, most of my practice with the violin is as an improviser, and this has been a constant when creating the works in thai repository. Even when making fixed-media, large scale or multichannel works, I have had the violin sitting next to me at all times, ready to take up and think about materials with. My work with Smolicki’s and Soep’s project thus gives a clearer example of how my long-running improvisatory practice with the violin is almost always present when I approach materials. To the right are Soep’s 31 drawings, which I played with. Below each drawing is the short improvisation I did for each, starting with a reading of the catalog number for each original field recording, which I never heard, but only touched through Soep's visual transpositions.
Below are the 31 drawings made by Jenny Soep, together with the 31 short improvisations I played for each. Press "play" on the sound file to listen, and double-click the corresponding drawing to look at it in a larger pop-up window.
