Cally Spooner
DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up), 2022
Two channel sound installation, site specific adaption.
Cello tonilisation by cellist Melody Giron scored by Cally Spooner. Recording by Jesse Lewis with mixing
from Tom Sedgwick and Cally Spooner at ZERO… Milano. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
43 minutes 59 seconds
In this two channel sound work, scored for a cello, a building, and anything between them, the recording of a professional cellist plays from a single
audio speaker. The cellist is tonalising Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major—one of the most overused and complex of solos—but she’s staying
in the Prelude, finding her tone.
In the mid-twentieth century, the pedagogue, violinist, and philosopher Shinichi Suzuki knew that a very young child—say, aged three and a half—could learn to
play a string instrument very well, in the same way they learnt to speak; by listening, and particulary listening to tone. Tone — that
quality around what is said, that which arrives before and after a musical note — is environmentally, socially and spatially contingent,
porous, and totally undefended. It needs to be felt via resonance. Tone arrives when stratifications of performance (or industry) — which we
habitually coat ourselves over years the decades — is peeled back by someone who does not yet know how to begin, but loves to try.
In DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm-Up) the cello tonilsiation is accompanied by a digital clock. It beeps every 42 seconds from the second audio speaker in this two channel work,
as an aggressive counterpart that forms a composition on post-industrial time and possible modes of withdrawal.
DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm-Up) was originally commissioned for the industrial concrete ramp leading to the rooftop car test track at the former FIAT factory in Turin.
Produced by the Pinacoteca Agnelli Foundation and mixed on-site by Federico Chiari.
Courtesy of the artist and ZERO…