Call for works

Music for the imagination, vol.1
book-venue and a commissioning/collecting platform for imagined music and other musical thoughtexperiments (music for speculation, theoretical music, conjectural music, music for reading, etc.)

Why a book? Why music? Why imagination?
Is music composition simply having the skills to forge, force, or imagine, music through the limitations of instrumental designs, human physical constraints and performance spaces? Is music fundamentally a pragmatic practice? Why should we (only) commission musical works for instruments and concert halls? Why should we limit ourselves to those settings/strictures? Or rather, why should those social structures shape our musical imagination? Instead of taking small steps against those conditions we call for a different “concert” format, new venue for experimental music: the book. Here, the aforementioned limitations are abandoned and we can commission (without endowment) pieces that challenge all strictures surrounding our musical thinking. What is and has been possible, or on the verge of possibility, is impossible for this venue, deemed insufficient and simply bromidic. Only the imagination becomes our limit, for then we can explore the unimaginable.
The book replaces physical spaces and music becomes a conceptual space, instigating something to be performed within one’s imagination. The collected works will therefore be “read” as the only trace of their actuality (ie. they are readable instead of performable (or perhaps not)). This is the space shared by literature (but we are coming at it from another angle) and therefore text can be employed in detailing such works but also any kind of graphics, musical or otherwise. Always aiming for music (or non-music), be it barely or indiscernible, but not literature and not visual art.
Music could be said to deal with organised sound, but equally we can say that music deals with movements, speeds, precision, notations, linearity, indeterminacy, simultaneity, scores, constraint thinking, (musical) imagination, paper, fonts, pens, strings, synchronisation, pencils, food, talking, loudness, wood, listening, animals, silence, cables, stones, and basically anything the human culture is up to at any given time (we might add soundwise). There are always limits, we are not eliminating limits, we simply want to create new conditions for musical experiments, conditions that challenge our imagination capable of different stimulus. For this first volume we will limit ourselves to the book format which means: there will be page turning, there will be page number limitations, there will be size limitations (A4, B4), there will be financial limitations, there will be English language limitations, there will be retinal based visual information flow. This, we hope, will be challenged in subsequent volumes.
With this effort we want to stimulate future generations, a future when some of these pieces, or elements thereof, might actually become possible. But also, to stimulate people to imagine different (kind of) music, to diversify our options for musical expression, and to understand better and discover what it means to imagine music without actuality. All this might filter through to the actual music scene and simultaneously, hopefully, push the boundary of the unimaginable further away.

Publication date: t.b.a.

We call upon you! If you would like to participate, submit material, discuss, point at, imagine, or challenge, please get in touch: mufothi@gmail.com

 

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