Ben Finley performer-composer specializing in bass; often inspired by collaborative & sustainable place-making, voice/words, and improvising
People and Place Based Notations: Liner Notes for 2+1=3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v13i1.6157
Published June 30, 2020
Considering the stakes of chronic environmental degradation, what are the roles of musicians and artistic institutions in the climate crisis? Weaving through a suite of pieces I composed for duets and landscape (2+1=3) at the Summer Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation in Québec's spectacular Gaspésie, I look into how humans/composers/improvisers, might practice music in ways that recognize and activate its ecological and environmental significance. Drawing from autoethnographic and ecomusicological frameworks, I explore how writing for (and with) people and places might afford vital ways of cohabitating and relating to the biosphere—creating an emergent/spontaneous ethics of care, listening and participation.
Some of the scores that
emerged <---
excerpts from Boxed Pictures
1. Turtle Feet (inspired by the music of Patrick Behnke and the poetry of Sung Po-jen)
2. Vowels (inspired by this asknature.com)
words sung in "You, Beloved, Neutral, Challenges, All"
Ben Finley
Erin Felepchuk and I examine the use of improvisation within the language of crisis response. We argue that historic cultural anxieties have generated negative connotations for improvisation within such conceptual metaphors as “illness as war” (where improvisation is positioned as a defensive strategy) and, more broadly, “improvisation as disorder,” and draw on improvisation studies theory and discourse to propose alternate metaphors for disease and disease mitigation.