Concept Music

This is a description of a piece of "music" (conceptual music) that I "wrote" for a class:

The piece that I composed for Music and Language today, titled “Graphite”, is a conceptual piece. The actual performance of the piece is aleatoric in nature, but also has elements of ambient noise. The performer is to use a normal spiral notebook and a pencil as instruments. The performer will begin by looking at a clock, and remember the time when the piece is begun. He or she will then look at the first person they see in the audience, and write down a description about that person. He or she will continue to do this to as many people as the hour the hour it was when the piece started (i.e. if it was 7:59 the performer will write down descriptions about seven people). After they are finished with that, he or she will run their pencil across the rings of the binder back and forth one time for each minute past the hour (in our example above, 59 times). Finally, the performer will erase everything off of the page, and the performance is over.

This piece is meant to challenge the conception of music by focusing the audience on ambient noise that, as college students, they aren’t used to hearing the rhythm of. Moreover, it is meant to inspire curiosity in the listener about what the performer is writing, and why he or she is only writing about certain people in the class.

pretty weird, eh?