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Ten Tones:
Inside and Outside the Major-Minor
McaM Shanghai

Final presentation of the Proposals to Surrender exhibition curated by Biljana Ciric

Ten Tones: Inside and Outside the Major-Minor is dramatic musical installation to be enacted through two empty houses in a newly developed gated housing community in Shanghai. The work will be a spatially organized sonic drama – each room will constitute a different and distinct “tone” corresponding to particular aspect of the “ghosts” of the history of East/West musical inter-relation and cross-influence. These “Room Tones” will be conjured through a combination of sound, props and mise-en-scene.

The form of the performance will mimic that of an Open House led by the Real Estate Company, held once per day over the course of the two days. While there will be a distinct choreography of how the sound moves between the rooms and houses – and from inside to outside – the format for encountering the drama will be flexible and open ended, loosely guided by the artists.

The houses will act as speakers that the audience can enter into. Each room will consist of a different musical composition or a distinct sonic “tone.” At some moments in the drama the audience will listen from the outside to the totality of these ten tones. The music from all the houses will generate a specific chord (or chordal shift), while inside the house each room will have more intricate sonic character development.

Among the characters who will be invoked through sound and mise-en-scene are: John Cage and his employment of the I-Ching to subvert the existing system of Western Classical music; Lee Hsien Ming, the artists’ grandmother who grew up in Shanghai and was the first woman pianist to graduate from the Shanghai Conservatory; Alexander Tcherepnin, the artists’ grandfather who was a composer, educator and music publisher who created the Edition Tcherepnine publishing house whose purpose was to introduce Chinese and Japanese music in the West; and various Chinese students of Tcherepnin who in the 30s and 40s who were encouraged by their teacher to embrace Chinese Folk music and Folklore in their own music, as a radical break from the then recent past of Western Classical hegemony in Shanghai Conservatory system.

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Initial research for the project was conducted in collaboration with artist Ei Arekawa

The exhibition Proposals to Surrender was presented in Mcam from December 23th 2016 to February 12th 2017

Exhibition is curated by Biljana Ciric and participating artists include:Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan), Isabel Lewis, Eva Kot’átková, Stuart Ringholt, Ana Prvacki, Li Liao, Tino Sehgal, Pratchaya Phinthong, Ei Arakawa, Stefan and Sergei Tcherepnin

Exhibition publication will be launched on November 12th 13:30 at the West Bund Art Fair

  • 20171030002106

    20171030002106