Field Studies and Chormethode present: The Social Score
A three-day teaching residency, workshop and performance program from Field Studies led by international artists and composers that takes the form of a collective rehearsal.
The Social Score is a three-day teaching residency and workshop program that takes the form of a collective rehearsal. Led by a group of international artists and composers, it is also the inaugural event of Chormethode, a new experimental ensemble based in Vienna that approaches the chorus as a site of learning and critical, embodied practice.
Each day a chorus assembles to create work that explores how simple actions, carried out by many, become complex music. Most works are rehearsed or created in the space of one day, and performed to a public audience in the evening. Some works evolve and accumulate over the course of the program, sustained through repetition and relays between singers who join the residency on some or all of the days.
All works use methods beyond conventional notation. Texts, protocols and instructions, modular assemblages and material algorithms organise relations between people, objects and sounds. Simple actions combine and accumulate into intricate, unpredictable polyphonies whose unfolding no single participant controls. Being out of control is probably an important part of the process in each. Sometimes the result is quietly poetic and mesmerising, sometimes it is full of irony, humorous and downright hilarious.
Taking part in The Social Score does not require previous musical experience or trained singing voices. The residency is open to anyone curious about what this kind of collective choral practice can do, and what it is like to experience contemporary music in the making, together with the people who make it: everyone in the room.
For more information about the workshop program, participating artists and composers, and how to enrol, visit field-studies.org
Field Studies is a study programme and research network that fundamentally rethinks the domain of education and the institutions that frame it. Based in London and Vienna, it operates as a roaming academy, organising seminars and intensive teaching residencies in different European cities and locations.