You may or you may not be
Ricardo Arias, Samuel Holloway, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Matthew Shlomowitz, Rogelio Sosa, Jonathan Zorn
8 March 2015, 5.00pm. Ex-Galerie Barbazanges, 26 Avenue du Président Roosevelt, Paris. Listening online: www.modelab.info
Musique d’Ameublement (Furniture Music) is perhaps one of Erik Satie’s most bold compositions, a seminal work for a wide range of modern and contemporary music styles and theories, sound art and design.
To mark the 95th anniversary of Musique d’Ameublement, Modelab invited international sound artists and composers to reflect on the evolution of functions of music within a specific space. This dialogue, translated into sound compositions, will be available through portable devices on March 8, 2015, at the ex-Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, where the work was premiered in 1920.
Among the six artists involved, Samuel Holloway, Auckland-based composer, prepared for this project a realization of a previous work, Things (2014), which evokes the notion of silence in a piece “that struggles to become nothing”.
While time is the canvas for the composer, a specific device containing music also becomes a living sculpture revealed only by the audience. In this manner, the space for which the music is thought for becomes also an instrument, as Satie playfully envisioned in Musique d’Ameublement.
By celebrating Satie's life and work, "You may or you may not be" will also look into the evolving essence of music and its relations with public space, understood in the same manner as a recording: “a limited set of sounds that can nonetheless have a variable relationship in the environment in which they are played” (Pisaro: 2009).