Mark Applebaum’s "Medium" (2008) is a musical work for any four instrumentalists or vocalists (here performed by fifteen singers) who rigorously interpret its mercurial spray of pictographs. "Medium" was originally commissioned by the Quiet Music Festival, in Ireland. The score consists of a number of separate leaves—pages hand-drawn using pens, drafting templates, French curves, and straight edges. Some of the leaves serve as accompaniment figures while others are arranged in any order and function as ingress and egress canons during which players enter and exit the stage. The main section of the piece is its ‘quartet’, a series of sixteen bound pages that suggest a continuous musical discourse. The score does not invite improvisation; players are charged with the task of predetermining a thoughtful means to sonify (with exactitude) an inferred musicality. There are several mediums at play: the work is multi-media (moving between visual art and music); the score is a medium, presenting a conceptual substance through which the expressive energy of musicians must pass; and, as a non-standard notation presented to imaginative, inventive performers, it is as much a musical filter as a musical prescription. And lastly, the work represents a
middle state between spatial right and left, between the ceremony of performance and the routine of not performance. 

Mark Applebaum - Medium

The title of Lauren Redhead’s "concerto" (2011), which connotes ‘traditional’ and historical approaches to music-making, might seem at odds with the open notation of its score. As a concerto, the performance highlights both the individual roles of the performers and the group relationships within the ensemble. This devised performance was created by the Vocal Constructivists in ‘collaboration’ with the score. As a response to notation, the performance invites consideration of all of the social activities and relationships connected with music, including composing and performing but also listening, moving, thinking, and discussing—what Christopher Small calls ‘musicking’. This work makes a concerto of the relationship between notation and individuals.

Lauren Redhead - concerto

Michael Parsons - Nevrazumitelny

The Vocal Constructivists specialize in the performance of text and graphic scores using only the human body. The group was formed by Jane Alden in 2011 to give the first ever fully vocal performance of Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise"(published 1967). Coming from diverse backgrounds, the group draws on a variety of artistic influences—classical, global, avant-garde, eclectic, and performance art. The Vocal Constructivists explore symbols, glyphs, and other idiosyncratic notation as a form of social practice. All performance decisions are made cooperatively; no one person assumes overall artistic control. Experimentalism is a primary motivation for the group, but not a statement of fact. We seek to liberate ‘experimental’ music from the straight-jacket of an expected sound world. The combination of vocalisation, body percussion, and movement yields unique intepretations of pieces by iconic composers such as Mark Applebaum, Anthony Braxton, and Christian Wolff. Composers who have written for the Vocal Constructivists include George Chambers, Jan Duszyński, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Ronald Kuivila, Paula Matthusen, Michael Parsons, and Lauren Redhead. See www.vocalconstructivists.com or follow on twitter @constructivists.