Stadia
15. Water Spouts
16. Bays
17. Tombs
18. Conduits
19. Canyons
20. Boilers
21. Pots
22. Ovens
23. Barrels
24. Bulbs
25. Bottles
26. Cabins
27. Wells
28. Bells
29. Capsules
30. Craters
31. Empty Missiles
32. Cacti
33. Beds
34. Webs
35. Pools
36. Boats
37. Cones
38. Funnels
39. Bones
40. Stills
41. Gins
42. Draws
43. Tubes
44. Theatres
45. Cars
46. Springs
47. Flumes
48. Trees
49. Others
Find a way to make them sound.
50. Blowing
51. Bowing
52. Rubbing
53. Scraping
54. Tapping
55. Moving
56. Fingering
57. Breaking
58. Burning
59. Melting
60. Chewing
61. Jiggling
62. Wearing
63. Swinging
64. Bumping
65. Dropping
66. Orbiting
67. Creaking
68. Caressing
69. Bouncing
70. Jerking
71. Flipping
72. Levitating
73. Hating
74. Skimming
75. Ignoring
76. Talking
77. Singing
78. Sighing
79. Whistling
80. Walking
81. Snapping
82. Cracking
83. Snoring
84. Boring
85. Praying
86. Loving
87. Spraying
88. Bowling
89. Channeling
90. Freezing
91. Squeezing
92. Frying
93. Exploding
94. Poking
95. Screwing
96. Lowering
97. Shaking
98. Impeding
99. Dancing
100. Others
Sounds of portable resonant environments such as sea shells and cupped hands may be carried out into streets, countrysides, parks, campuses, through buildings and houses, until outer limits are reached where minimum audio contact can be maintained by a player with at least one other player.
Sounds of the outer environment encompassed by the players may be heard with reference to the sounds of the portable resonant environments carried by the players. Sounds of determinate pitch in the outer environment may be heard in simple or complex relationships to the pitches of the portable resonant environments. Sounds of indeterminate pitch in the outer environment may be heard to take on the pitch, timbral, dynamic, and durational characteristics of the sounds of the portable resonant environments.
Sounds of fixed resonant environments such as cisterns and tunnels may be made portable by means of recordings, or radio or telephone transmission, and carried into inner or outer environments. When carried into inner environments, such as theatres into beds, the sounds of the now-portable resonant environments may either mingle with or take over the sounds of the inner environment. When carried to outer environments, such as boilers into parks, the sounds of the now-portable resonant environments may be treated as original portable environments.
Mixtures of these materials and procedures may be used.
Increasing and lessening of any characteristics of any sounds may be brought about.
How did I happen to write the piece? Well, it happened in various stages . . . let me see . . . I remember a film of a Jules Verne book, I think it was a Jules Verne book, something like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or one of those books. There’s a wonderful scene where men have built an underwater boat, and to get from the shore to the boat, which is moored under the water, several of them are walking along the floor of the ocean with huge conch shells over their heads, as if filled with air. This was nineteenth-century science fiction and the image struck me as something wonderful, walking on the floor of the ocean with those conch shells. I thought of making a piece with instruments, tubas or French horns, in which the players would do something like that, just an idea. And then I thought of actually getting conch shells, huge ones which I could make into bass instruments, conch shells three or four feet high, bass shells, and the openings could be bowed.
About that time Pauline Oliveros invited me to San Diego to perform Whistlers, a piece in which I tried to get ionospheric sounds in real time with a radio receiver and antenna. There’s something about California, being from the East, palm trees and all that, so I asked Pauline, “Can we get any conch shells?” and she answered, “Well, we’ll see.” Every day we drove along the ocean front, and we used to pass a funny little store that had a sign that said “Sea Shells.” One day I asked her to stop the car. The store was filled with hundreds of seas shells of different kinds and sizes, and the man who owned the store said, “You know, people who live in the Islands have blown conch shells for centuries.” Where did I just see in a film, someone blowing a conch shell?
Lord of the Flies?
Tibet! I heard a recording of Tibetan chants on which they played conch shells. Now how do they get conch shells up in Tibet? But that’s one of their instruments anyway. So I thought it would be wonderful to make a piece using conch shells as musical instruments, either blown, or bowed, or struck. It struck me as very beautiful that the organisms that produce these gorgeous shells are somewhere down on the bottom of the ocean. What a wonderful origin of a musical insturment, to have it be made for a functional purpose, to protect some animal. When the animal dies, it is a remainder, there it is, it’s left in the world, and it’s such a beautiful thing it should be put to some use.
My first idea was just to have people blow them. I wouldn’t compose it