Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg

The Society for a Subliminal State, the organization I co-founded with Carrie Dashow has published a hardcover tunebook featuring all 53 shape note songs written during our summer tour of the Erie Canal with the Subliminal History of New York State.

Each song is accompanied by texts written by Carrie contextualizing the words and music, as well as occasional illustrations of how the poems were performed as participatory readings during the tour.

Order copies from the Society’s store

This summer I’m on tour with the Subliminal History of New York State, a tour with Carrie Dashow along the Erie Canal excavating subliminal histories and writing them into shape note songs, then presenting these songs with a video installation at final presentations in each location.

I’ll be too busy to post updates here along the way, but will have created a blog for the tour: Route of Progress which Carrie and I will be updating regularly.

Also on the web site for the tour is a complete schedule, podcasts, our press room, and lots of information about the project. Come see us this June and July in Troy, Schenectady, Rome, Palmyra, Lockport, or Lily Dale!

I’m proud to announce the release of a new CD, Under Island, in partnership with Gigantic ArtSpace. The CD, a collaboration with Carrie Dashow, features eleven original shape note songs telling the subliminal history of Roosevelt Island.

The limited edition CD comes packaged in a paperboard case with a screenprinted cover, and includes an editioned, hand-printed tunebook containing scores to the songs so you can sing along.

You can listen to the Under Island CD at Gigantic ArtSpace at 59 Franklin Street in Manhattan, where the disc is for sale through January. On December 9, you can buy the CD at La Superette at Eyebeam in Chelsea.

I’m five days into my weeklong AIRtime Residency at free103point9’s Wave Farm in Acra, NY. I’ve been making a lot of progress toward realizing an interactive installation of the Azariah songs in a forest setting.

I’ve also been captivated by the abundance of mushrooms along the paths through Wave Farm’s forest. There must be tens of thousands of mushrooms here, and dozens of varieties. I’ve been photographing the mushrooms as I work in the forest, and I’ve been posting the pictures to Flickr along with text mostly about the mushrooms, but intermittently detailing the work I’ve been doing.

See the Mushrooms:

• Day 1
• Day 4
• Day 5

Knock-Knock, an interactive installation I created in collaboration with Bettina Bloc, Olivia Robinson, and Amy Scarfone, will open this Friday in the Boston Cyberarts Festival at Kendall Square. Knock-Knock evokes contemporary communications networks using cardboard and copper wire. This collaborative project is a network of suspended cardboard boxes, linked by contact microphones and drivers, transmitting sound across the box network through the cardboard filters. The contact microphones are precisely tuned so that tapped messages can travel short distances along the network or cycle around the ring, depending on the strength of the tap.

There will be a reception this Friday, April 22 6-9 p.m. Knock-Knock is in the Vertex Building at Kendall Square, just off of Third St. near the Kendall T stop.

More information about Knock-Knock is on the Knock-Knock web site.

I will be participating in the Boston Cyberarts Festival this Spring, collaborating with Bettina Bloc, Olivia Robinson, and Amy Scarfone, creating an installation reconstructing a communication network out of low-tech materials.

Our work will be installed, along with work by Bill Seaman, and some Brown University graduate students, at 675 West Kendall Street. The Cyberarts Festival (and our show) runs from April 22 through May 8, 2005.

My new piece Victory/Concession will be featured in this weekend’s Graduate Exhibition, SNOWNO SHOW, at Rensselaer. Work by all of the graduate students enrolled in my program will be included.

Victory/Concession depicts the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns at the moments of their closure. Victory/Concession retraces the myths of evangelical Christianity, moral values, urban and rural, and red and blue, and exposes devious campaign strategies and a complicated country.

The show will run from 5-9 PM on Sunday, December 12 with a reception at 4 PM and a screening and performances at 6 PM. The show is all around West Hall on the Rensselaer campus in Troy, NY. Feel free to email me for directions.

This Saturday and Sunday (while celebrating my 23^rd birthday which occurred on Friday, I attended the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention in Northampton. The WMSHC is one of the biggest and best conventions in the Northeast and this year’s convention was spectacular, with well over 300 singers in attendance and 128 leading about 200 songs.

Attending last year’s convention lead me to begin writing shape note music, and in the wake of this year’s convention, I’m hoping to finish work on my first set of compositions and begin arranging some performances. I’m now working on a couple of new pieces as well as porting all of my old compositions from Finale NotePad to Sibelius. As I make these changes, I will also update the shape note section of this site to include full-size scores as PDF and GIF files as well as MIDI files for each piece represented. I will also add a selection of new shape note pieces I composed since posting the current selection.

I’m planning on working with Pamela Slea and Laura Neuman to provide my shape note pieces with words, but I have plenty of pieces and I am eager to work with any interested writers. Please email me or fill out the form on the Contact page if you are interested.

Over the last few days I’ve been talking to a few friends about moving forward with some new sound and video projects. I’ll be working with Laura Neuman, a New York City-based writer on a new concert work featuring a live performer running a SuperCollider program, and two vocalists, one live, one pre-recorded, reading from a text written by Laura.

Beau Martin, another friend of mine and a teacher at the Kildonan School in Amenia, New York, will be working with me on a curriculum for an experimental music composition course. Beau will teach the new course during the Fall of 2004 at the Kildonan School.

I recoded parts the site today in PHP, a change which will hopefully make updating some parts of the more efficient.

I went to Middletown, Connecticut today where a group of 25-30 shape note singers brought together by Neely Bruce sang a selection of shape note songs, largely from the Sacred Harp songbook. A reporter and photographer from the Hartford Courant attended and reported on the event. The selection of songs was meant to illustrate the history of the tradition, from “Old Hundred,” the oldest song in the book, to recent works.

The group sang four pieces from the shape note sketches found on this site, including “Hampshire” and “Monday,” as examples of recent compositions in the tradition. Thanks to Neely Bruce for the opportunity, and to Anne Rhodes and Mark and Linda Pearlman Karlsberg for advice and support preparing for the sing.

I initiated a new project today to conduct surveys of audiences at new music events in an attempt to gather information on their reasons for attending new music events, their reception of new music, and the relation of those receptions to the aims of composers and performers. If you know of or are affiliated with new music events and are interested in distributing surveys, please let me know.