In 1977 the American composer John Cage created 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs of New York. The work’s score is a map of New York City and features 49 superimposed triangles. Each triangle symbolizes a waltz. Cage obtained each point of the triangles via chance operations to pin down a specific location. Performers of 49 Waltzes visit each identified location to capture its sounds and sights to experience, treasure and document the acoustic ecology of a place.
Cage encouraged transcriptions of this work for other places. Thus students of ASU’s School of Music and Arts, Media and Engineering teamed up to transcribe this work for their Tempe campus. The ASU Art Museum is presenting the Arizona premiere of their realization of 49 Waltzes as an audio-visual installation.
This is an exciting opportunity for the public to work with students to make their own Tempe campus waltz which will be added to the exhibition.
Tamara Underiner is Associate Dean for Research for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and theatre, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance of the Americas. As Associate Dean, she convenes the Herberger Research Council, serves as the liaison between Herberger faculty and ASU\s Office for Knowledge Enterprise Development, assists in the identification of funding opportunities and development of grant proposals, and helps link Herberger faculty to other faculty across ASU who share similar research interests. Her own research is in the area of the arts and cultural wellbeing.
She will offer welcoming remarks and open the Symposium.
Keynote
“The Ordering of Sounds. The Homogenization of Listening in the Age Of Globalized Soundscapes”
Sabine Breitsameter (Professor for Sound and Mediaculture, Hochschule Darmstadt/Soundscape- and Environmental Media Lab)
During the last two to three decades, it has become more and more difficult to distinguish the big cities on our planet from one another by their acoustic appearance. The majority of them have experienced a significant change of soundscapes, which has resulted in an ongoing assimilation of their sonic environments, and a loss of their acoustic identities.
The keynote will explore how this loss of auditory diversity can be perceived. It will identify parameters of assimilation and investigate reasons for this development. What sounds have arisen instead and why? What is responsible for the disappearance and/or transition to sounds and sonic experiences?
In addition, the talk will examine the ways in which listening occurs, as shaped by habits and media, and as they are closely related to the basic laws, priorities, deficiencies, and power relationships within society. What are the driving influences that shape an ordering of sounds within the perceptual system, claiming at the same time that this is a pre-stabilized, “naturally” given sonic system, to which we have to adapt our listening abilities?
The argument assumes that auditory phenomena, their methods of listening, as well as the auditory sense itself are appropriated by prevalent societal and political conditions. What do these methods of listening suggest and what does the aural appropriation stand for? What do they reveal about our societal systems, can such an "ordering of sounds" be changed, and why should it be changed at all?
