(b. 1981) is an artist/composer working often

G. DOUGLAS BARRETT (b. 1981) is an artist/composer working often with performance and various forms of
mediation (text, scores, notation, transcription, recording technology, video). His work has been presented in festivals,
galleries, concert halls, academic conferences and street performance events throughout North America and Europe.
Recent collaborators and performers of his work include Francesco Gagliardi, Adam Overton, Mark So, Bill Dietz,
Object Collection, The S.E.M. Ensemble, Pauline Kim and Philip Thomas. He has appeared at festivals such as the
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Ostrava Days (Czech Republic) and Visiones Sonoras (Mexico City),
and venues such as the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (New York), the Wulf (Los Angeles), Theater Perdu (Amsterdam),
the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK) and Neutral Ground (Canada). Barrett’s writings have appeared in literary
journal Mosaic (U of Manitoba), and new music magazine HIS Voice (Prague), among other publications.
A FEW SILENCE, A PLACE OR TWO, SOME APPLAUSE
A program of experimental performance curated by G. Douglas Barrett.
Incubator Arts Project, New York, August 20, 2010, 10 PM.
Works by G. Douglas Barrett, John Cage, Bill Dietz and Adam Overton.
Performed by G. Douglas Barrett, Kara Feely, Francesco Gagliardi, David Kant, Jonathan Marmor,
Aaron Meicht, Travis Just and Quentin Tolimieri.
JOHN CAGE (1912 – 1992) was an American composer, performer, visual artist, writer, poet and mycologist. His
contributions to the post-war arts have been regarded internationally as some of the most important and influential of his
generation, especially in the areas of contemporary music, visual art and the experimental music tradition which he
helped define and cultivate throughout the latter half of the 20th Century.
BILL DIETZ was born in 1983 near the US/Mexican border in Bisbee, Arizona. Much of his recent work addresses the
performance of listening and the genealogy of the concert. !He studied composition at the New England Conservatory and
Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. Since 2003 he has lived and worked in Berlin, initially as Peter
Ablinger’s student and assistant. Since then, he has worked extensively with Christian von Borries, and Chris Newman
and with Maryanne Amacher until 2009. His music has been presented by the Happy Days Sound Festival (Oslo), the
Maulwerker (Berlin), Birkbeck College (London), the Klangwerkstatt Festival, ARTSaha! (Omaha), the Zepernicker
Randspiele, the West German Radio (WDR), “Tbilisi 6. Never on a Sunday” (Tbilisi), Brückenmusik (Cologne), and
many others. His writings have appeared in publications such as MusikTexte, Positionen, and Shuffle Boil. He is the
recipient of numerous grants (Capital City Cultural Fund, Berlin; German Music Council; Initiative for New Music,
Berlin), and has appeared extensively as a performer (Documenta XII, “Musikprotokoll” of the Steirischer Herbst, Berlin
Volksbühne). Since 2007 he has been the artistic director of Ensemble Zwischentöne.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Some Applause for Doug (2010), Dietz
This work is performed during the interval following each of the works listed below.
A Few Silence (Incubator Arts Project, New York, August 20, 2010, 10 PM) (2007), Barrett
ADAM OVERTON is a composer and performer of experimental music and action, and an artist, teacher, and massage
therapist based in Los Angeles. He is the curator of the currently in progress subtle bodies series, “a series of
investigations featuring subtle, barely-noticed experiments in sound, movement, action, and energy within public spaces,
led by artists, performers, choreographers and sound artists”. In 2008 Overton founded uploaddownloadperform.net, an
online repository designed for the exchange of experimental performance scores.
Place Feed-forward (Spiegelgasse 14, Zürich, Switzerland) (2010), Barrett
A Few Museum-Goer Transcriptions (2010), Barrett
Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Action/Abstraction. Buffalo, June 7, 2009, 3:54 PM
Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Action/Abstraction. Buffalo, June 7 2009, 4:09 PM
Video Free America. Dan Graham: Performer/Audience/Mirror. San Francisco, 1975
Restaurant Gropius, Martin Gropius Bau. Berlin, Dec. 28, 2009, 5:18 PM
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. 21x21. Turin, June 22 2010, 6:15 PM
MoMa. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. New York City, via youtube
MOCA Geffen. index show. Los Angeles, Dec. 6, 2008, 4:40 PM
10’00” (4’33”) (1952), Cage / Touch ensemble petting zoo (no. 1) (2006), Overton
Audience members are invited to approach and touch the performers.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Presented as part of the Incubator Arts Project Music Program,
Organized by Travis Just
Incubator Arts Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Ave.)
http://www.incubatorarts.org/music.html
A FEW SILENCE, A PLACE OR TWO, SOME APPLAUSE
A program of experimental performance curated by G. Douglas Barrett.
Incubator Arts Project, New York, August 20, 2010, 10 PM.
Revolving loosely around the meeting of post-conceptual and discursive practices with those developed by the
experimental music tradition, A Few Silence, A Place or Two, Some Applause is an evening-length program of
performance works which considers the concert situation as technologically mediated site for embodied, social
and institutionalized listening. The program contains works by G. Douglas Barrett, John Cage, Bill Dietz and
Adam Overton, performed by G. Douglas Barrett, Kara Feely, Francesco Gagliardi, David Kant, Jonathan
Marmor, Aaron Meicht, Travis Just and Quentin Tolimieri.
My own work A Few Silence (location, date, time of performance) (2007) is a virtual repetition of
4’33”, albeit one that contains its own internal discursive re-articulation. In the piece performers create written
descriptions, “transcriptions” of the sounds of the concert hall, and then re-perform their respective scores using
various sound-producing objects. The silence of the performance space is acoustically reflected, passing first
through language, then mediated through performers’ music-technological engagement with instruments and
objects.
A PLACE OR TWO
In my other two works on the program, A Few Museum-Goer Transcriptions (2009) and Place
Feed-forward (Spiegelgasse 14, Zürich, Switzerland) (2010), consideration of the aesthetic frame—and its
technological repetition—is expanded to include the museum and its own unique set of laboring bodies
(curatorial staff, guards, gallery interns), and the cultural memorial site. In A Few Museum-Goer
Transcriptions performers create transcriptions of the movements, actions, gesticulations, facial expressions,
attitudes or emotional states of bodies observed during a museum, gallery or concert experience. The piece
works for me as a kind of found choreography, a way of re-inscribing, transposing bodies from one site to
another.
For Place Feed-forward (Spiegelgasse 14, Zürich, Switzerland) (2010) performers each create a
unique transcription—including visual characteristics, objects, qualities of light, bodily movements, social
situations, acoustics, sound events—based on one of three “video field recordings” (roughly, static long-takes
of video) I created at Spiegelgasse 14, Zürich, Switzerland, the site of the 1916 residence of then-exiled
Vladimir Lenin, where the revolutionary lived before returning to Russia in 1917. Incidentally, the site is less
than a block away from notorious early Dada meeting ground, Cabaret Voltaire; some are convinced that Lenin
himself played a role in the formation of Dada.1
SOME APPLAUSE
The following list is taken from a 1919 article on the “claque” in Italy, the then nearly century-old
practice which began in France of hiring professional audience plants to direct the reactions of the public during
a musical performance. It explains the pricing of the various services ordinarily requested of any one of the
claquers by a composer, soloist or opera singer.
A Few Museum-Goer Transcriptions (2009). June 29, 2010, Milan.
A FEW SILENCE
Somewhere John Cage is quoted as having said, “I no longer need the silent piece”. Discussions
of Cage’s 4’33” (1952) often center around silence: silence as emptiness or nothingness, silence as pure
duration, silence as musical resource, silence as noise, silence as indeterminacy, silence and how it’s notated,
silence as reduction or erasure, silence as silencing. What these discussions often fail to underline is the very
conventionality of the frame within which the piece operates: the concert situation itself. It’s not an entirely
novel idea that rather than providing an operation within the frame of the concert, 4’33” displays that very
situation as the work.
Fifty years after the final Henmar Press publication of Cage’s 4'33”, the composer’s famous
catch-all work for “whatever happens” during the course of four minutes, thirty three seconds of the silence of
the concert hall, is met with another receptacle piece, Touch ensemble petting zoo (no. 1) (2006), a work by
artist and composer Adam Overton which requires, for its activation, the work of another composer to be
performed after stripping and inviting the audience to touch the performers as they “play” the work. Cage notes
in the 1960 version of the 4’33” score that the original performance of the piece was given by David Tudor and
it involved the pianist sitting silently at the keyboard, indicating each section of the piece by closing and
opening the keyboard lid. While perhaps not the most obvious choice considering Overton’s score, my
combining of 4’33” with Overton’s Touch ensemble petting zoo is intended to serve as both a faithful
performance of the two works, and as an (iconoclastic) homage by suggesting something of a shadow figure of
4’33”. The pairing is to consider silence not as yet another entity somewhere along the continuum of
“expanded musical material”, but to offer a more radical opening/closing—of the tactile space between
performing and listening bodies, of the very fabric of the social-bodily disciplining constitutive of the musical
and its institutions.
2
The practice of the claque represents a wrench thrown into what might be falsely thought as the happy-go-lucky
cogs of the communal concert machine, wrecking any conception of a stable politics of the public event. The
claque is to suggest the ever-presence of the claque, the thought that since publicness can be tampered with
there was never any pure public to begin with. The social-constructedness of the concert situation—publicness
as only self-deceptively democratic—defines the very nature of the concert. Bill Dietz’s piece Some Applause
for Doug (2010) operates as a perverse digital simulacrum of the claque. The work uses an applause sample
taken from a prior performance I was involved in,3 which is then re-cycled over live applause taken from the
current concert program, which begins a feedback process layering live and pre-recorded applauses, finally
culminating after the last piece of the program. The process Dietz’s piece outlines is one that re-focuses that
material ordinarily thought of as outside of the aesthetic frame, the “intervals” between performances, “where
we’re not supposed to listen, where there’s ‘nothing to hear’”,4 that space where, finally, concert is revealed.
1
See, for example, “dadalenin”, an extensive series of works by artist Rainer Ganahl, <http://www.ganahl.info/dadaleninabout.html>.
Trevor, Claude. “The ‘Claque’ in Italy.” The Musical Times 60.922 (1919): 678-80.
Dietz’s only comment about the piece: “Following a program of works performed by Francesco Gagliardi, Travis Just, Kara Feely, Alessandra
Novaga, Elana Russo Arman, and G. Douglas Barrett, which began at 8PM at the Phoebe Zeitgeist Teatro in Milan on June 29th of this year, the
audience of approximately 20 applauded the artists for 1 minute and 12 seconds.”
4
From a program note for Dietz’s “After the Interval (Concert Piece imJC)” (2004).
2
3