Take a look at that waveform for a moment. Note the way it changes as it makes the steady transition from left to right. Understand that the waveform is a visual representation of sound. Hold off before proceeding to read the following explanation, and first just spent a little time looking at the image.
Now, what that image depicts is not just a melody, but a melody as it slowly evaporates. The piece itself is simple, the same melody over and over — well, almost. Each time the melody repeats, you see, a note is removed. This process of repetition and reduction continues until there is no melody left — except, that is, to the extent that melodies involve silence as much as they do notes. Which is to say, even the absence of notes is, in effect, a melody, all the more so since the ear hears the notes that go missing. Which, in turn, means that at the end of a piece such as this, perhaps we still “hear” the melody, just with our inner ear.
I’ve mentioned the ConcertLab online video series, in which much care is given to the filming of short individual performances by a wide array of musicians, leaning heavily classical, in a wide array of arrangements, focused largely on chamber ensembles, small groups, and solo players. The consistently modest scale of these videos provides the ConcertLab directors and producers with the opportunity to situate the video viewer near and even within the performance.
Cultural phenomena and trends online and off often intersect, and so the Cercle Odyssey traveling series of “360-degree immersive nomad concert installation” settings (also mentioned here recently) suggests, to me, not just a portable experience vaguely akin to the Sphere in Las Vegas, but also an in-person rendition of the kind of experience that crafted performance videos provide on platforms like YouTube. A question for live event producers is how the intimacy of home viewing — perhaps best exemplified by NPR’s Tiny Desk series — can manifest itself in-person.
There’s an interesting intersection of unintended consequences at work in the importance of live music to the livelihood of working musicians. Much of this economic shift has to do with streaming having cut revenue significantly, and that change dovetails with the desire for in-person experiences by people whose life and work increasingly involve staring at two-dimensional screens for much of the day. These twin scenarios — the need to put on a show that encourages word of mouth, and the desire to see things that don’t lose the intimacy of home viewing — find their fruition in events like Cercle Odyssey.
The video that stoked these thoughts is a new upload from Cercle, of an extended performance by Max Richter and a small chamber string group (consisting of Eloisa Fleur, Max Baillie, Zara Hudson, Max Ruisi, and Abby Baillie). They perform post-classical, even neo-romantic, music surrounded by their audience who are, themselves, surrounded by massive screens projecting images throughout the set. It’s a new type of performance set-up, and judging by the length of the videos’ credits, not a small undertaking — all the more understandably when part of the plan is to, later, share the live show online.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0728: Note Down The Assignment: Delete a note at a time.
There is just one step to this project: Record a piece of music with a slow melody that repeats. Each time the melody cycles around, remove one note, until during the final repeat none of the notes in the melody remain.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0728” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 728th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Note Down — The Assignment: Delete a note at a time — at https://disquiet.com/0728/.
Whitney Johnson, viola; Lia Kohl, cello; and Macie Stewart, violin, with all three of them intoning vocally, collaborated on this live set, in which their playing merges with lengthy tape loops. The ear is encouraged to make sense of the seeming disparity, between the focused performance and the disembodied tapes, between the motifs and the loops, between the capacious in situ acoustics and the medium’s fragile textures — it’s a difference nudged further still when Kohl takes a seat besides one of the tape machines and engages with it, making the tool as much a performed instrument as the more traditional stringed ones.
This video is the start of something. The track is one of two on a new release, Bound Sound [Stone Piece], which is itself a preview of an album due in 2025.
The Assignment: Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oblique Strategies card deck
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Disquiet Junto Project 0727: Polar Strategies The Assignment: Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oblique Strategies card deck.
Step 1: Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published the first edition of their Oblique Strategies card deck in 1975, which makes 2025 the deck’s 50th anniversary. Note the milestone — and if you’re not familiar with the deck, read up a bit.
Step 2: Select at random two cards from the deck. If you don’t have a deck, there are various free web and mobile apps that reproduce it.
Step 3: Record a piece of music that somehow combines or reconciles the two directions that resulted from Step 2.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0727” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 727th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Polar Strategies — The Assignment: Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oblique Strategies card deck — at https://disquiet.com/0727/.
