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:
Sonja (Emergency Exit)
The following is another poem from the exhibit:
Salida De Emergencia
The following segment of music includes the voice of John Cage:
The Telephone Rang (Emergency Exit)

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.