¡¡ NEWS !!
flashes, secrets, and snags have been reported throughout the week of performances at UCSD’s Springfest, across multiple venues in San Diego, CA.
* * *
If at first the idea is not absurd,
then there is no hope for it.
Your brain, an unfathomably capable organ, can be in more than one place at once. A nimble attention span is a symptom not of distraction, but of a curious and creative mind: observant, receptive, attuned to the unexpected.
What if live concert performance – instead of formally plodding along with one-thing-at-a-time, beaming an unmoving spotlight on the thing you are “supposed” to be paying attention to – was trip – wired with flashes and snags of alternate attention spans, momentary somersaults there-and-safely-back-again through a looking glass you didn’t even realize was there?
FLASH
An event lasting sixty-three seconds or less is prepared by [a] performer[s], and presented during the performance experience.
The event is unannounced to the audience but pre-arranged with performers.
SECRET
A thought experiment or perceptual exercise for an individual audience member,
whose undertaking will be unknown to anyone besides the person doing it.
[Secret scores are distributed to audience members through
pamphlets, signs, business cards, programme notes, online, etc.]
SNAG
Not an event-in-time; but rather an alteration to the physical, material environment of the performance space.
The snag is in place throughout the duration of the performance experience.
We are creating a workbook of scores for flashes, secrets, and snags for both open online distribution and live execution at the Hochschule für Musik Basel, Switzerland (Carlota Cáceres) & the University of California San Diego (Celeste Oram). We invite any and all imaginative humans to contribute scores—that fulfil the flash | secret | snag criteria outlined above—to this workbook. Scores can be in any or no language, and exist in any form/medium able to be embedded into a webpage (e.g. text, image, audio, video, gif, vine, tweet, javascript, html, &c).
All submitted scores will be included in the online workbook, with full credit of authorship. The workbook will also collect existing scores that satisfy the flash | secret | snag criteria. This collection is already underway – browse this website for example scores. A selection of scores from the workbook will be presented in Basel and/or San Diego throughout 2015-2016. A log of the scores presented will be recorded online. Our dual presentation of the scores in Basel & San Diego will serve as an alpha-test of the concept. We’ll be logging and blogging about our successes and failures as we go: in essence, developing a performance practice for picking apart the formal, linear frame of the concert experience.
The deadline for scores to be included in the workbook’s initial launch is September 15th, 2015. We will happily take rolling submissions later throughout the year; the workbook will be regularly updated. Send us your flashes, secrets & snags (okay, not those kinds of flashes and secrets, please) to flash.secret.snag@gmail.com. Please include your name and the date of composition.
The International Sign for flash | secret | snag is a banana. The presence of a banana (real or represented) in a performance environment indicates that one or more flash | secret | snag scores will be presented in that performance.
Click the + below to browse and search scores…
