On December 12th, Margaret Leng Tan and Ranjit Batnagar team up to premiere the Speak And Play, a hacked-invented keyboard instrument made by Ranjit during his “An Instrument-A-Day” project last February. Read about what we can expect to see at Pianos!
Ranjit and I are planning for this UNCAGED launch premiere of SPEAK AND PLAY is to use selections from John Cage’s INDETERMINACY as the basis for our performance. Indeterminacy consists of 99 anecdotes each of which have to be performed within the span of one minute. Some have a lot of words, some are very sparse so this determines the speed of execution.
We have selected 14 stories that we like and I have asked Ranjit to reduce that to 8, based on his preference. Ideally we will prepare 8 and on the evening perform 5 selected randomly (by someone in the audience?). If we don’t have enuf time we will just prepare 5.
After Ranjit has programmed the words into SPEAK AND PLAY, I will proceed to translate the stories into a playable musical experience. For variety’s sake I think I will share the speaking role with the computer’s robot voice. Cage’s Indeterminacy also calls for auxiliary sounds/noises so Ranjit will provide these live, using various toys from his and my arsenal! He’ll have a field day!
This will be a unique rendition of Indeterminacy for sure!
There is a nice video of us realizing SPEAK AND PLAY at:
http://www.flickr.com/
