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http://www.jaceclayton.com/gallery/enkutatash/ Ethiopian New Year's and 9/11 event
Enkutatash is a large-scale public choral work by Jace Clayton commissioned by the 5x5 Festival. It will premier in Washington D.C. on September 11, 2014. The score for Enkutatash is based on the Homeland Security Advisory System, the U.S. government's 5 level color-coded terrorism threat alerts which ran from 2002 to 2011. Enkutatash treats the changing threat-level data as a musical score, which will be sung by local choir groups and the audience, using the five-note (pentatonic) musical scale of D.C.'s Ethiopian community. Each note corresponds to a threat level color, and each day is a second – allowing us to sing the nine years of Threat Level Advisories in 45 minutes. Accompanying the sustained choral tones, an Ethiopian vocalist and masinqo (one-string African violin) player will perform a composition by Clayton based on a traditional East African harvest song. During the performance, the score will be indicated by light bulbs and colored flags. This simple visual system lets non-musicians participate, and will remain installed for duration of the festival. The slowly-changing US Threat colors constituted a song of fear, war, and suspicion. Enkutatash seeks to transform that it into its opposite: a song of planting, harvest, sustenance and seasonal time. Ethiopia has a unique calendar system whose New Year occurs on September 11th. This holiday is called ‘Enkutatash’, and is a celebration of family, neighbors, and yearly cycles. Clayton’s Enkutatash takes its name and premier date from this as an alternative to the geopolitically fraught connotations of 9/11 -- transforming a political warning into communal music.
― curmudgeon, Friday, 29 August 2014 01:08 (nine years ago) link
one year passes...
eleven months pass...
He's got a book, and is talking about it in NYC tonight with J Shep. I'm curious about it, but haven't read it.
Jace Clayton With Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Travels in Twenty-First-Century Music and Digital Culture is the debut book by Jace Clayton, also known as DJ /rupture. The book takes readers around the world to investigate how a broad spectrum of cultures have responded to and incorporated new technologies into their musical forms.
7 pm at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York
― curmudgeon, Thursday, 15 September 2016 20:24 (seven years ago) link