Cryptids
The Glasgow Project Room
Glasgow, Scotland
2014
Curated by Conor Kelly
Liam Allan, Amelia Bywater, Nick Evans, Luke Collins, Conor Kelly, Shireen Taylor.
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Cryptids, The Glasgow Project Room. 2014.
Curated by Conor Kelly.
Liam Allan, Amelia Bywater, Nick Evans, Luke Collins, Conor Kelly, Shireen Taylor.
A Resounding Success:
The musical notation used in this work is an excerpt taken from a community orientated publication produced by the Soichiro Honda Craftsmanship Centre in Hamamatsu, Japan. On the cover of the publication, entitled “Challenging Spirit - Dreams for Tomorrow”, is an illustration of Soichiro Honda alongside the sub header, “I have a dream.”
The transcribed music, a vocal piano score, is punctuated with images of wholehearted, energetic youngsters enthusiastically performing on stage. In one photograph, five performers have their backs turned to the audience and their fists in the air as ‘Honda’ is spelled out through letters emblazened on the backs of their overalls.
Soichiro Honda (1906 - 1991) was a charismatic and dynamic Japanese businessman who created the Honda Motor Company. The narrative surrounding Honda presents a series of accomplished goals played against the almost constant shadow of adversity. His ascension from penniless young boy in Hamamatsu to becoming the leader of one of the most successful corporations in history is well documented in business and managerial literature. Within this story, the focus of the narrative presents his failures and resilience as being the most important key to his prosperity.
'A Resounding Success', moves between diagram and resonant indexical trace. The found musical notation is plotted into a digital tonal scale diagram and played through a delay module. Then, the trace produced by the delay translates these notes into a solely aural object, plotting its own resonating, successive, temporal points. These points are subsequently programmed to be pulled in a constantly ascending tonal diagonal.
This structure ensures that throughout the recording, even when tones descend, they are still ascending; an aurally symbolic representation of how Soichiro Honda’s life is described and repeated by The Honda Corporation. The constantly repeating notation, upon which the piece is based, aims to demonstrate a mundane workplace actuality - the commonplace contrast and frequent resultant of such inspirational corporate characters.
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Thanks to Conor Kelly, Chris Rudge and Robert Banks.