Scores available HERE!
Please be invited to Supermarket Music, an event of covert and overt actions for people in a supermarket, at the Econofoods of Northfield, MN at 7 p.m. on Friday, 1/23. This event is open to anyone who shows up. You are invited to perform any of these pieces (including Aisle Music, Monochromes, and Transcription of guqin tuning for people in a supermarket) – or any of your own. If you would like to post your own supermarket scores for others to perform, please comment below, contact me so I can pass them along, or post to our Facebook event page. We will have an optional planning meeting at the Weitz Center at 6 p.m., or you can just show up.
Below is a video of a previous run of these pieces at Ralphs of La Jolla, CA in 2010 – and a little bit about the origins of the project:
This is a collection of scores for people in a supermarket, that began with a meditation on the idea of the 24-hour supermarket as a contemporary form of nature. I had started learning guqin, the ancient Chinese 7-string zither associated with Taoist mythology, in lore played on a mountaintop at midnight as a form of meditation. As a car- less Southern California transplant, I had less easy access to mountains, but Ralphs-La Jolla, with its perpetual fluorescent glow and gently flowing Muzak seemed the closest possible environment for private reflection.
These pieces are a series of undercover actions coexisting with regular supermarket activity, first performed with over 20 participants at Ralphs-La Jolla in February 2010, without explicit permission. When prodded about the activity, a clerk responded, “I don’t know, but as long as they’re shopping, we’re not going to do anything.”
The collection is open and ongoing – new pieces are very much invited.
Supermarket Music
7p.m., January 23, 2014
Econofoods of Northfield
Carolyn Chen 