In the fall of 2011 six students studied Bela Bartok and created short pieces inspired by Bartok’s work.
We watched Latcho Drom, a 1993 French documentary about the Romani people’s music-laden journey from north-west India to Spain, and talked about Bartok’s journeys collecting recordings of folk music in Hungary.
The class took a field trip to William D’Abate Elementary School to record CMW families’s folk songs, but were challenged by peoples’ reluctance to sing into our recorders! Similarly, we approached strangers in a neighborhood park and were met with some hesitation.
We did end up with a few recordings and, after learning different techniques for remixing and layering sounds in Logic, created a few new versions of folks songs that were shared with us. The original project idea evolved and resulted in experimental pieces that combined our field recordings with discordant modern electronic music samples.