Secret Piece
Performance October 8 2009
Yoko Ono's Secret Piece is an early work that unfolded from a childhood homework assignment in which she was asked to translate daily sounds into notes. Later, while a student at Sarah Lawrence College, she attempted to notate the songs of birds. Finding it impossible, she composed Secret Piece instead. The score to Secret Piece is a page of music paper with a single note—f above middle-c—drawn on it with instructions for a performer to play the note in a secluded place between 5 and 8am.
The performance took place at Judson Church in New York City on Thursday, October 8, 2009, opening the Ear to the Earth Festival 2009. The musicians who played the single note in the performance were Madeleine Shapiro, cello, Esther Lamneck, clarinet, and Gayle Young, amaranth.
The concert at Judson Church, October 8, 2009
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Our realization of the score began on Friday, June 12, 2009, when ringleader William Blakeney, otherwise an attorney based in Toronto, organized a sortie of willing recruits, equipped with battery-powered audio and video gear as well as a reasonable supply of adult refreshments, to head north to the secluded Nekabong Hunting & Fishing Club in the Pontiac area of Quebec Province. The willing recruits were Joel Chadabe, Warren Cooper, Thomas Galligan, Terrence O'Brien, Lorne Reitzenstein, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Gayle Young. Bill set the course:
Bill Blakeney speaking
The Nekabong Hunting & Fishing Club was made available to the group by Tom Galligan, a member of the Club. It included a lodge and various outlying buildings. It did not include electricity, telephone, internet, or cell phone possibilities.
The lodge
Tom Galligan speaking
The lodge, surrounded by forest, faced a most beautiful lake.
Late afternoon
In fact, the area contained several lakes. Exploration, organization, and getting to know the terrain preceded our planning session for the next morning.
L>R: Thomas Galligan, Lorne Reitzenstein, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Terrence O'Brien, Joel Chadabe, Gayle Young, Bill Blakeney, Warren Cooper
Bill saw beyond the simplicity of the score to think of it as an interaction with nature. More, he understood that Yoko Ono was providing the performer with a specific experience. To the collective historical knowledge of all of us that were involved in this performance, Secret Piece was the first musical composition to be based on a concept of engagement with the environment. And the concept of art as experience was a deeply appreciated idea.
The group's goal was not only to perform the piece, but to record in audio and image the performance in such a way that it could be presented in a non-secluded concert hall in New York and that the audience could be made to feel a part of it. At the appointed time, Warren Cooper began to set up a video and audio recording station by the shore of the lake. The video was high definition and the audio included shotgun mics. Lorne Reitzenstein, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Gayle Young took a rowboat across the lake to record from another vantage point. Bill Blakeney, Terrence O'Brien, and I set up different equipment at a location near the lodge.
Setting up
We started the recording at 5 on Saturday morning. And what followed was a spellbinding experience. Not being early, but being attentive. I was not the only one among us never before to have simply watched the sun come up and listened to the forest come alive. It was three hours but time flew by. The lake, the shadows, the reflections were beautiful in the transforming light. The sounds were fascinating, the overall texture hypnotic.
Dawn
Bill Blakeney and Gayle Young speaking
But, we concluded, we were an hour late. After our first morning on the job, we realized that the forest actually wakes up at 4am. We discussed it. We decided to record again on Sunday morning from 4 to 7am. Listen to a minute or two of the sample below. The sound is from one recorder only. But you hear, from different directions and varying distance, the multiple layers of activity.
The forest at 4am
Reactions? As Gayle put it, we had learned how to do it for the hypothetical next performance. And we learned that the forest orchestra, as Bill referred to it, starts playing before 4am.
Gayle Young and Bill Blakeney
We turned to Warren for a final comment. We asked him if he had advice for others to do similar things. His answer was universal: Listen!
Warren Cooper
— Joel Chadabe, October 2009
SITES
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