Pressure Project 3
Posted: October 30, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Recently an area of my art-making has been rooted in archival research. I’m curious about our human instincts to keep records and return to memory, and I wonder about the role remembering plays in the human experience. For this project I used sheet music that I found while exploring a community digital archive called “Watsonville is in the Heart.” This community project is maintained by the descendants and relatives of the “manong generation,” which is the term used to talk about the Filipino men who immigrated to California and worked as migrant farmers in the early 20th century. I have a personal connection to this, as my great-great uncle Dionisio Duque was among that first wave of immigrants. I don’t have a lot of information about him or his life during this time, so doing this kind of archival investigation feeds some of this curiosity.
Here is the original sheet music. This music was hand-written by a man named Arsenio Lopez; he and a few other gentlemen would play music at cultural events and parties together. This song, “Dahil Say-yo,” is a famous Filipino love song (called a “Kundiman”).
Arsenio was a saxophonist, and so is my brother! So the next step of my sound piece involved asking my brother if he could send me a recording of him playing this song. After he sent it to me, I added some record snaps and pops from freesound.org and played with some distortions to try and make his recording sound a little tinny. Because the music notation had words included, it made me think that this song needed a vocal element as well. I did a few recordings of me singing and humming in different octaves, and then added those into the track. I made the humming quite faint and only come in at the beginning and end, and added some reverb and other slight alterations to the highest octave vocal track. I wanted the highest octave to sound sort of haunting and distant, and this is the track that continues for most of the piece. The lower octave voice joins in halfway and sings with her.
As the source material felt important to me, I wanted to include it in some way. I decided to make a diptych with the sheet music and did my own “annotations,” taking some inspiration from illuminated manuscripts. The piece to me is about reaching for something, and the moments where something reaches back to you. I included tracings, transfers, drawings, and collaged elements of his and his wife’s hands.
At our presentation, I was so pleased that a lot of my thoughts and concepts came through for the group. I was especially interested in the conversations that came out about lullabies, and how the songs we sing to our children are especially important carriers of memory and culture.