Group items tagged

"This month's series will have readers thinking about the sounds in classrooms in different ways. They will consider race, class, and gender, and how those aspects intersect how we listen to the classrooms of our past and our present. More importantly, the posts will all include assignments that educators at all stages can use in their classrooms."

Vibrations conducted through a person's bones produce the uncanny sensation of low sounds emanating from within the body. The New York-based artist Sergei Tcherepnin draws on this effect in Stereo Classroom Chairs (2015), mounting a transducer to the underside of each wooden seat on which visitors are invited to sit. When not attached, a transducer plays sounds quietly, at a level that is almost inaudible. When its surface touches another object, however, the material characteristics of that object filter the sounds in various ways. Here, Tcherepnin's audio composition travels through the body of each sitter with a physical intensity. The chair amplifies the composition, while the sitter acts as the filter, amplifying low-frequency sounds and muffling higher frequencies.

In the decades following World War II, the musical score emerged as a unique and powerful medium for experimental art. A new movement of visual artists, composers, poets, and performers reimagined the score-traditionally defined as the written representation of a musical composition-as a tool for structuring experimentation in the nascent fields of performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia. They drew inspiration from unconventional musical notations devised in the early to mid-1950s by the composers Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. The new movement's use of experimental scores spread during the 1960s through publications, festivals, concerts, classrooms, networked correspondence, exhibitions, happenings, and a renewed awareness of score-like antecedents in the charts, diagrams, sketches, and written instructions of earlier avant-gardes, from Dada and Surrealism to the Bauhaus. By the later years of the 1960s, diverse communities of artists, musicians, poets, and dancers had transformed the possibilities of the score into an ever-expanding universe of textual, symbolic, and graphic marks. They used experimental scores to stage a multitude of practices that dismantled and recast the traditional boundaries of artistic media.

Having students understand ideas of expansiveness, asymmetry, and non-linearity as central to black cultural expression and critique-even as artists refuse to sacrifice an expressed political commitment to black resistance-begins to suggest ways for students to contemplate the intersection of identity politics with the unexpected, fantastic elements of expression that lie outside of more recent flattened diagnoses of black nationalism."