January this LP appeared in my mailbox.
Late 2015 I was engaged in a collaborative project initiated by Kommissar Hjuler und Frau based in Flensburg, Germany. We were to respond to a CD track with german spoken words, parts reading, parts discussing George Mead's sociological theory of The Generalized Other, a concept used in the field of symbolic interactionism.
My response is a short piece for a music box, based upon the words Die Verallgemeinerte Anderen (The Generalized Other).
This was done by isolating the letters C, D, E, F, G, A, B in the text and using them in a notational system to indicate pitch. The melody was then played with a PRIRI-technique.
P-R-I-RI indicates the many ways a musical piece can be played. P stands for Prime (the original version of the melody), R is Retrograde (backwards), I is inversion (melody is flipped around the first note in the melody) and RI is Retrograde Inversion (being the flipped version played backwards).
All of which is easy and possible to do on a music box.
In this case the first 13 notes (D-E-E-A-G-E-E-E-E-A-D-E-E) are Prime, then starts retrograde, and so on.
The LP has an exclusive edition of 100.
The project explained by the initiators:
Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer run a project called (SHMF-019+…) for which any artists are allowed to create versions of the reading DIE ANTIZIPATION DES GENERALIZED OTHER. A tape, several CD-Rs and some LPs still have become released in this series on Der Schoene-Hjuler-Memorial-Fond.
The Generalized Other refers to George Herbert Mead's psychological explanation for the origin of social self-consciousness. Within Mead's theory, is the act of 'role-taking' in which individuals react to social gestures, and adjust to common attitudes. Through 'role-taking', people adapt to social exchanges based on gesture-response action sequences. Self-consciousness is then developed through these social actions and completed upon personal reflection. (..) It is a stumbling dialogue with reading parts and conversation parts and in the result we do by far not justice to the grandilocant or intellectual theme.
Mainly artists and musicians from experimental music scene have contributed, but not at least, this project is to create a mix of most different music styles, one of the stranges contributions was by the Afro-French Urban-Rap- and Dub-musician LO daam, who normally creates music far from any experimental scene, and the crazy version by the dark metal band HELLMOUTH from Rotterdam.