Practice Jam Session

The set up for the performance

Our band Pine Box Derby is preforming September 16th in the fine arts building at 2:07pm. Yesterday we had, what I would like to call a rough draft/practice/jam session. In a two and a half hour period we figured out the arrangement of our noise machines and also all the noises we plan on making for the performance. We laid out the map of what noises we will make on a large sheet of music, almost like a sheet music of sorts. The sheet music will be what we use to know what noise we will be making and after what noise or action we are supposed to do it after.

Working on the sheet music

Since there is no real set way to arrange the order of the sounds. We decided to do our own choreographed way of getting started. To begin, we wanted to hear exactly what noises each of our machines, we wrote down what we thought it sounded like; ex: WAAAAHWAAAAAAHH, or Scraaaaaaaaaa. The more sounds we listened to the harder it was to describe the sound, our way of describing the noise slowly evolved into a description of what we thought the noise sounded like; ex: stacking bricks, or coin slots. After all the noises were recorded onto our sheet music we listed out the noises in a order that we thought flowed. We played through the "sheet music" a couple times making minor tweeks to the original plan.

Merce Cunningham's choreography rough draft

After I stepped back and looked at our work with the sheet music I couldn't help but notice its chaotic-ness. Anyone outside of my our class might look at this and think nothing of it, but to us, we see our detailed plan for our performance. I also can't help but draw parallels to Merce Cunningham's choreography rough drafts for his Ocean performance. To most people outside of Cunningham's school and close friends might not even know what to make of the chicken scratch on the paper. I really feel like I was able to experience, at least some what, of his process of choreographing a dance.