Music is the most familiar quote, yet many do not realize its unconscious power. Do you ever get a song stuck in your head but do not quite remember where it is from? Have you ever found yourself humming to a song or singing in the shower? Maybe, if you are a music performer, do you ever get a musician high - an out-of-body experience?
With my piece entitled "Most Familiar Quote", I intend to recapitulate this surrealistic feeling regarding the unconscious power of music. Beginning with the found object of the book "Barlett's Familiar Quotations", I seek to flip the replace the written quotes with music. To do so, I 3D print an octave of piano keys, placed inside a book - hidden unless open. In such a way, the music is the unconscious force only revealed once the book is open.
Drawing inspiration from Kafka's The Metamorphosis, the only quote still readable is the opening line. Much like the main character (Greg) of The Metamorphosis who underwent a slow transformation from a human to an insect and attempts to make sense of it, music has this effect. A musician's high - much like a runner's high - is unknown to many how one achieves it. Many musician attempts to understand through studying the complexity and contradictions of music. For instance, jazz musicians tend to follow a pre-determined set of chords while simultaneously adding nuance to the melody. Although practicing enables one to achieve such technical skills, musicality comes from the unconscious power of the mind and ear, much like Greg's unconscious mind governing his new sense of insect identity. Thus, with my piece, I symbolize this hidden unconscious power with a keyboard hidden inside the conscious brain of the book- unknown yet so familiar to the musician. In a way, the piece is a contradiction in itself, exploring the tension between the familiarity of the conscious mind and the mystery of the unconscious mind.
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