12.26.09
Emergency Exit (Jose Camejo and Javier Hernandez-Miyares)
Pic By JHM Of Emergency Exit Slide By Jose Camejo
Emergency Exit Installation by Jose Camejo with music by Javier Hernandez-Miyares. This fragment is from an event that took place at the INTAR in New York City in March 2000. The following is an example of how to musicalise a poem.
The following is another poem from the exhibit:
The following segment of music includes the voice of John Cage:
Composing music for an art installation is a challenge, because the expectation is that the audience will be drifting in and out of the proscenium. Therefore, i utilized a theme and revelation compositional style, so that at every moment there is a repetition of a musical figure that later appears in a new context. Jose Camejo described this as Psycho-Symphonic Music.
Postscript:
i did not know at the time that jose camejo had cancer, and he died a few years after this. the first bit that i wrote was an offertorium for sonya’s poem, and i appropriated a segment of audio from a polish mass, which appears throughout the composition. in this segment, i was alluding to mankinds first escape hatch, which is through the birth canal. In the Catholic Mass the offertory is the experience of god inhabiting the inanimate; this is known as transubstantiation. after Jose died i realized that he was contemplating the emergency exit that is beyond the reach of our mortality.
i just happened to record jose laughing, while we were recording a poem, and i used it as a motif, which appears throughout the sonic landscape.
Chachi Camejo said,
June 24, 2010 at 12:34 pm
thank you for posting this. I love having little pieces of memories surface over time.
mbumba said,
June 27, 2010 at 8:11 pm
chachi: it was a blessing for me to have been jose’s collaborator and friend.
if u have the little video clips that jose made of the show, please send them to me. i would like to include them in this page.