Don’t touch me, you don’t know where I’ve been

Alwynne Pritchard
Artist

The edition actually consists of two equal parts: a presentation by Alwynne Pritchard of her performance and then remarks and views on this by Roar Sletteland.

Introduction to the first part
Don’t touch me, you don’t know where I’ve been began as a discourse between composer-performer, musicians, technician and technical rig, audience and acoustic and architectural space. From this evolved an installation and now a publication in which additional techniques such as the use of collage, drawings and text are used to explore some of the same questions and encourage similar imaginative leaps as the original.

The question at the centre of the original work was “how to begin?”; through exploring possible means of interaction between all components in the drama – from a piece of technical equipment to a flesh-and-blood musician – new bases from which a work might develop were established. Until, that is, they were overridden, interrupted, arrested or
abandoned.

Commissioning a Piece of Music

Roar Sletteland
Art critic, Sound designer

Introduction to the second part
A commissioned piece is something else. Right at the outset, even before the creative act has begun, heteronomy is introduced into the composition: restrictions forced upon the composer from the outside in terms of instrumentation, duration, and of course the question of money. The piece is assigned a value based on the amount of labour the
composer is believed to invest in it. The composer, once a sovereign figure, is reduced to a simple employee, fulfilling certain obligations, delivering a product whose identity others have specified, receiving her fee after the job is done. Ultimately, the very serious decision of whether the piece is going to exist or not is made by the commissioner,
not the composer. The piece, then, expresses not so much the composer’s ideas or aesthetics as her will to bow, her ability to comply with the pressures of the society around her.