TRK 5 Concert Notes
by Tom Moore
This piece was originally considered an ethnography of the car. I have always been interested in the ways we listen to music casually and the social weight that these ways of listening carry. This piece has now become a reimagining of the friendship between my iPod and I and the story takes place on the center console of my car.
Since around the time I was 12, I had access to a lot of music through the unlabeled CD mixes my music teachers gave me. These twenty-song-CD-mixes would gather mounds of virtual dust on the shelves of my iTunes library until I got a car. At this point I quickly learned to appreciate the randomizing algorithm in my iPod that mixed up my music to provide an ever-refreshed playlist of company for my rides. In states of road-induced amnesia I’d consistently find myself listening to music, be it Radiohead or Ravel. In these quasi-out-of-body experiences I would become captured by a brief part of a song and then I would be ripped away to respond to a light that had turned green or to a car blaring subwoofer bass stopped next to me at the intersection. This is where I discovered almost all of the music that has really mattered to me: in distracted states of half-listening.
This piece’s goal is to mimic that kind of listening. Hopefully you found yourself hearing this piece—hopefully you are also having a hard time remembering where it started. This is how a lot of listening is done today, especially when it comes to recorded music. Because of that it is all the more important to explore what can be accomplished when the composer takes this new breed of audience seriously.
Hopefully this piece is suspended between bubblegum and experiment—between algorithmic DJ and attention-hungry composer—between song and soundscape.
Performed by:
Tom Moore
Dylan Greene
Emily Lyon
Ben Opatut