Marina Rosenfeld
beginnermonster

I'll put "beginnermonster" here as a proposal for a composition, or maybe as a teaser, a trailer? for another composition rearing its fluffy head in the middle of this processed, packaged, air-brushed, blow-dried, art directed, spell-checked moment we are all having, and that we aren't supposed to even notice... I'm having a love affair with bowing and the bow (rhymes with "snow"). I can't seem to get enough of the raw sound of hair dragging across string, or wood or metal or flesh. In December, I'll premiere my new orchestra, "the emotional orchestra," a kind of successor to the "sheer frost orchestra" project that's been going on for so many years... the "emotional orchestra" is all about bowing, the bow arm as an emotional vehicle, an emotional wand, the transaction between the intractable machine (the instrument) and that other more flexible machine (the body) via the glorified stick that is like an arm itself, that in tandem with the arm makes possible the repetition that makes possible the bowing sound, which is one of the closest things we have to pure emotion in an embodied form, or so history tells us. And every arm is different (and every owner of an arm is different), every bow-sound is individual, so if the proposal is for anything, it's for us all to adopt the values of the bow, which are volatility, variability, idiosyncrasy and expressionism disguised as banal repetition and the everyday. ("the emotional orchestra" premieres dec. 13, 03, Deitch Projects, 18 wooster, nyc, stay tuned...)

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer, turntablist, and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She'll be at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on September 27, with Glenn Kotche, Alan Licht and Doug McCombs.