Chris Swithinbank

Over the last few years I have been work­ing with Irv­ing Goh on a spe­cial issue of CR: The New Cen­ten­nial Re­view and it is fi­nally on­line. It brings to­gether state­ments by com­posers Joanna Bailie, Ta­tiana Catan­zaro, Car­olyn Chen, Ash­ley Fure, and Fa­bien Lévy along­side es­says on music by Claire Cole­brook, Jef­frey Di Leo, Je­remy Brad­dock and Tim­o­thy Mor­ton, Jean-Luc Nancy, Naomi Waltham-Smith, and Holly Watkins. It also in­cludes my own text, ‘Who Vi­brates?,’ which tries to think about Car­olyn Chen’s music and how New Ma­te­ri­al­ist the­o­ries of vi­bra­tion, vi­brancy, and an­i­ma­tion in­ter­sect with colo­nial his­to­ries of race and sub­ject­hood.

I am very grate­ful to all our con­trib­u­tors who took the time to make this col­lec­tion pos­si­ble and to Irv­ing for in­clud­ing me in the pro­ject.

You can find the issue on Pro­ject Muse, JSTOR, or di­rectly from Michi­gan State Uni­ver­sity Press. Some of the pa­pers (or their drafts) are also avail­able from open ac­cess sources and I’ll try to keep this list up­dated as oth­ers come on­line:

• Irv­ing Goh, “Ed­i­tor’s Note: The Cry of Music”
• Claire Cole­brook, “Es­cap­ing Mean­ing, Es­cap­ing Music”
• Car­olyn Chen, “Parts to Sing Empty”
• Holly Watkins, “On Not Let­ting Sounds Be Them­selves”
• Chris Swith­in­bank, “Who vi­brates?”
• Ta­tiana Catan­zaro, “The Breath of Sound”
• Naomi Waltham-Smith, “A Music Wor­thy of the Name: Or, Agam­ben’s Mu­se­i­col­ogy”
• Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Goh, “Vari­a­tions on the Reprise”

Here is a video from the first per­for­mance of al­ways extra folds of birds of paper and you could move your fin­ger along the length of them and have wit­nesses by Yarn/Wire.

This would not have been pos­si­ble with­out the hard work of Yarn/Wire’s Ian An­to­nio, Laura Barger and Rus­sell Green­berg, guest per­former Eric Wubbels, and am­pli­fi­ca­tion per­former James Bean. Thank you also to Jerry Mac­Don­ald (audio record­ing en­gi­neer), Manuela Meier (cam­eras), and Clara Ian­notta (light­ing). I am al­ways grate­ful to Renee Glad­man for her Calami­ties from which I bor­row the title for this piece.

If you would pre­fer to just lis­ten to the piece, there’s an al­ter­nate take with­out the video on Sound­Cloud:

A record­ing of union|haze from en­sem­ble recherche’s res­i­dency at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity back in May, is fi­nally here:

Huge thanks to Mar­tin Fahlen­bock, Shizuyo Oka, Bar­bara Mau­rer, Åsa Åker­berg, Melise Mellinger, Jaime González, Klaus Steffes-Holländer, and Chris­t­ian Dier­stein of en­sem­ble recherche, to Clara Ian­notta and John Pax who per­formed as guests, to An­thony DiBar­tolo & James Bean for re­spec­tively record­ing and am­pli­fy­ing the per­for­mance, to James and Seth Tor­res for their help with this tricky mix­ing job, and to every­one else at Har­vard who helped bring this into the world.

To com­ple­ment the ‘Gen­der Re­la­tions in Darm­stadt’ panel put to­gether by Ash­ley Fure at this year’s In­ter­na­tional Sum­mer Course for New Music Darm­stadt, I put to­gether a vi­sual overview of gen­der bal­ances at con­certs at this year’s fes­ti­val.

Even more in­ter­est­ingly, Fure col­lected the data from Darm­stadt’s archives on gen­der rep­re­sen­ta­tion across the years, and the of­fi­cial GRID Blog in­cludes var­i­ous other ar­ti­cles and re­sources.