Composing Utopia with words

Articipatory Music and other weird things by Jessica Corey-Butler

Last weekend Articipatory Music happened at the Olympia Community Free School during “A giant party for a better world,” the Love, Imagine, Network, Kindness (LINK) Symposium, an extension of “A World Beyond Capitalism,” The Third Annual International Multiracial Alliance Building Peace Conference. An activist folk music collective called Riotfolk performed and a Secret Café fund raiser was held, benefiting a residential permaculture project. And eight people created compositions, but not made out of notes and played on flutes and guitars.

Huh?

Articipatory Music was an idea originally born when it’s facilitator (and creator) Michael Gaiuranos attended a summer session with the School for Designing a Society, held on Patch Adam’s Gesundheit! Institute in West Virginia.

Initially, Gaiuranos thought he was going there to compose music with the experimental musicians associated with cybernetics.

The second time he attended the school, he recalls, “I knew I was aiming for something else.” He credits the school for “encouraging me to do weird things.”

As such, he feels his extrapolation of one exercise he had learned where participants composed responses, one inane and one an elaborate ideal, and then negotiated within larger groups.

“That was the really really really interesting part,” Gaiuranos remembers, adding, “How do you negotiate your Utopia?”

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Did-Geri-doo? What's that?

While reading an article about Maya MIA Arulpragasam, the underground music star, I came across this beautiful wind instrument. Very unique, at least, this is new to me. Enjoy!

The didgeridoo (or didjeridu) is a wind instrument of the Indigenous Australians of northern Australia. It is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or "drone pipe". Musicologists classify it as an aerophone.

A didgeridoo is usually cylindrical or conical in shape and can measure anywhere from 1 to 2 meters in length with most instruments measuring around 1.2 meters. Generally, the longer the instrument, the lower the pitch or key of the instrument. Keys from D to F♯ are the preferred pitch of traditional Aboriginal players.

There are no reliable sources stating the didgeridoo's exact age, though it is commonly claimed to be the world's oldest wind instrument. Archaeological studies of rock art in Northern Australia suggests that the Aboriginal people of the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory have been using the didgeridoo for about 1500 years, based on the dating of paintings on cave walls and shelters from this period. A clear rock painting in Ginga Wardelirrhmeng from the freshwater period (1500 years ago until the present) shows a didjeridu player and two songmen (source: Journey in Time, George Chaloupka, p. 189).