MUSIC FOR (PREPARED) BICYCLES
A participatory performance by Caecilia Tripp, 2012-2014, celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage in the streets.
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles is a project-in-progress based on translating John Cage’s works for ‘prepared piano’ into three ’sonic bicycle processions,’ creating a ’music of change’ that transcends geographic boundaries to thrive across three global metropolises.
“Since the theory of conventional music is a set of laws exclusively concerned with ‘musical’ sounds, having nothing to say about noises, it had been clear from the beginning that what was needed was a music based on noise, on noise’s lawlessness. Having made such an anarchic music, we were able later to include in its performance even so-called musical sounds. We need first of all a music in which not only are sounds just sounds, but in which people are just people, not subject, that is, to laws established by any one of them, even if he is ‘the composer’ or ‘the conductor.’ Finally we need a music which no longer prompts talk of audience participation, for in it the division between performers and audience no longer exists: a music made by everyone.” —John Cage
SCORE 1 | WITH CLARK HOUSE INITIATIVE | BOMBAY, INDIA
‘A music made by everyone’
Wanting to take John Cage to the streets, artist Caecilia Tripp finds ways to democratize the many individuals involved—conductor, composer, performer, spectator, onlooker, bystander, passerby—engaging them all as equals within her participatory score.
To create her music—and an accompanying film—Tripp first built a sonic bicycle, a kind of moving instrument kitted out with electric guitar strings. This captures the sounds of the street—and the sounds of strings hitting playing cards—as it is pedaled through significant parts of the city.
Tripp’s insertion of playing cards between the bicycle’s spokes remakes John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ (1938), on which he wrote many compositions, as a bicycle. Cage once said that the future of music was electronic sound. Inspired by Cage’s writing, Tripp applies his ideas to a form of vernacular culture devised and practiced by teenagers in obscure suburbs worldwide.
In Bombay, Music for (Prepared) Bicycles also confronts Cage’s involvement with David Thoreau’s anarchistic philosophy of civil disobedience, a radical appeal to people power that also inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. – Zasha Colah
Curators: Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma with Clark House Initiative Bombay is a curatorial practice interested in ideas of freedom. Associate curator: Veerangana Solanki | Curatorial advisor: Claire Tancons. With Rattapallax, New York | French Institute Paris
SCORE 2 | BROOKLYN, EAST HARLEM AND THE BRONX, NEW YORK, USA
‘Music is an ecology’ John Cage
Score Two involved the building of a sonic bicycle with the Schwinn Bike Club, a Puerto Rican bicycle club in New York. A bicycle ride will be performed and filmed in Brooklyn, Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles | Score Two is a sort of ‘freedom ride’ relating to ‘Music of Change’ by John Cage.
A publication accompanying the project will present a research about the history of Caribbean custom bike vernacular techniques and feature interviews with Puerto Rican activists such as former members of the Puerto Rican civil rights group, the ‘Young Lords.’
The project was realized during Caecila Tripp’s artist residency at Brooklyn College. Students participated in the production process of the sonic bicycle, its procession through the city, and the filming of the performance.
A symposium is planned to conclude the project. It is being proposed to institutions in New York with the intention to create connections with the communities in Brooklyn, East Harlem and the Bronx.
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles aims at connecting community, culture, historic memory and research, as well as a the performance act in which the public becomes a participant. It is a way to create new dynamics between these different spaces & people, taking arts to the streets and taking the streets to the museum.
Music for (Prepared) Bicycles | Score Two is produced in collaboration with Shelley Vidia Worrell (caribBeing) and Ram Devineni (Rattapallax). Project producer Quancard Contemporary Art.
CAECILIA TRIPP. Artist, filmmaker & researcher. Using means of filmic Installation, photography as well as performance, Caecilia Tripp’s work is entangled with the “play of the trickster”. With references to cinematic codes using forms of “re-enactment” and “rehearsals” it emerges into the space of collective imagination as a space of transgression of social and cultural boundaries. Beyond geographical borders and with a critical eye it deals with forms of freedom, utopia and civil disobedience at the crossroads of globalization, shining a light on the invention of new languages, sounds, cultural codes and social imaginary as a permanent process of “making history”. Each project is the outcome of a participatory process, A “Poetics Of Relation”. (E. Glissant)
Caecilia Tripp has received several international grants representing a body of film and video installations, performance and photographic works from 1999 up to now, which has been shown internationally in galleries, museums such as PS1/MOMA New York / USA, Palais de Tokyo Paris /France, Jeu de Paume Paris / France, Museum of Modern Art, Paris / France, Zacheta Gallery Warsaw / Poland, De Appel, Amsterdam / Netherlands, Roomade, Bruxelles / Belgium, Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Russia, Center Of Contemporary Arts, New Orleans / USA, Prospect Biennale 1, New Orleans / USA, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn New York / USA, Dakar Biennale, 7th Gwangju Biennale 2008, Gwangju / South Korea, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai/India and in Film Festivals such as MOSTRA 61Film Festival in Venice / Italy, Cannes / France 2005, Zebra Poetry Film Award in Berlin octobre 2006, Real Life Film Festival Ghana, West Africa, Athens Filmfestival, Greece, Atlanta, Urban Film Festival New York/USA, London among others.
THE MAKING OF AMERICANS 2004 won an award for the best experimental film at Cinema Paradise, Hawai / USA. It has screened at several international festivals and museum venues.