We would like to begin the event with a collaboration with, you, actually, so when we begin it would be great
if people actually stood up and got as close to each other as possible.
Can everyone turn to the piece of paper that says at the top "Cornelius Cardew - the great
learning".
Does everyone have a copy?
So we are going to create a piece of music together.
According to a few simple rules.
The text that is kind of arranged as an acrostic poem here, if there would be any confusion,
is a translation of Confucius and that is our text that we are all going to sing.
Now, each line is something that we sing repeatedly.
So when it says sing eight, it means sing that line eight times. Each time we sing the line... and if a word is just a word, you repeat the word...
If it's a phrase you repeat the phrase.
Every time we sing a line we sing it for as long as we can hold our breath.
So it's going to be long.
You sing the word 'if' as long as you can, and you do that eight times. So we're all going to be doing this, and
is there any rhyme or reason to this chaos?
Yes, kind of.
When it comes to the pitches, everybody up here knows what pitches are, I hope. The pitches are important.
When we start everyone picks their own pitch.
Which means that it is going to sound like absolute chaos, white noise.
A dense mass of sound.
Every time you change lines, so after repeating the word a bunch of times, you change pitches.
So each line has a new pitch. And when you move to a new pic h, you have to take a pitch from someone else in the room. One, two, three...
(singing)