from the archive of Waterloo Festival 2020.
Back in late April 2020, together with Jerico Orchestra, we published a call out around a radical choral reinterpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7. This piece is built on a continuous drone using just two notes (F# and B).
Originally planned around a live event in St John’s Waterloo in collaboration with the London Stroke Choir and other local community choirs, the version below has been made from multiple voice recordings submitted by members of the general public over the course of May 2020 as London lived through its first Covid-19 lockdown.
“Collective singing is one of the oldest ways human animals have of being together. It is believed by many archaeologists that Neanderthals sang and made music. Like our ancestors we sing when we are happy, we sing when we are sad, we sing when we are drunk, we sing when we pray, we sing as we go into battle and we sing to our children before they go to sleep. I sing when I’m nervous: it works for me. Try it.
So: humans sing, it’s part of who we are and how we function socially, that’s why I’m not at all surprised that this new interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7 came out so well: after all it’s perfectly natural.”
Rita Says, Jerico Orchestra.
