publicity stunts (my growth as an obscuro)

publicity stunts (my growth as an obscuro)

In 1978, my friend, a flute player, 'commissioned' me (no money involved) to compose something for him. I wrote these pieces. They're so over-the-top that I still find them amusing & stimulating to this day 40 years later. In keeping with the tendency of contemporary classical music to provide the performer with olympic challenges, I made some of these pieces 'impossible' to perform but interesting to imagine. Others are so easy that almost anyone can pull them off. These are the ones that've actually been performed.

The whole style of the booklet is typical of some of the lengths that I go to make things extraordinary. The fron cover has the large block letters "E" & "G" cut out. These are the latin abbreviation for "Exempli Grati", "For Example" in English. Starting in the 1970s I used this to begin texts to indicate that I meant the following writing as an example of possibilities. After the "publicity stunts" scores the letters "ETC" are cut out of the paper, the abbreviation for et cetera, meaning "& so on" to indicate that the preceding text is not the end all & be all of the possibilities. On the back cover, a "?" is cut out to call anything that's preceded into question.

Turning aside the front cover, the 'title page' is now fully visible. As it's seen through the cut-out letters of the cover it's partially obscured. Given that the booklet was over 40 years old by the time I scanned it, one can see the differences between the yellowing of the covered page & the exposed page. Apparently, contact with the black construction paper caused a greater degree of yellowing.

The back of this page, as with all the pages that have the main body of the text on them, has 2 lines of names parallel to the side of the page in faint pencil. Closer to the interior of the page is my signature, "Michael Frederick Tolson et al", meaning my given name + all others that I might use. Closer to the dge of the paper, agains written in pencil, but this time in printed capitals, is a list of names that I was using at the time that I was associating with this project: MICHAEL TOLSON; POR K ESSKAY; TENTATIVELY, A CONVENIENCE; ID ENTITY; MT; GYM DANDY; AT LEAST. The "LEAST" being parallel to the bottom & meant to function similarly to EG, ETC, & et al.

The 1st score is 3 pages that're stapled separately & inserted into the booklet. The intention is for them to be removeable. The piece could be called "testing t he power of blief". The idea is to, as a 'performance', believe in something in an attempt to get other people to believe it as well. The 1st page explains this. The 2nd page is to be filled in by having the 'performer' explain what they're trying to get people to believe on the top. Underneeath them, the people who the 'performer' is trying to convince are to sign & date to indicate that they don't believe. The 3rd page is to have the same text from the top of page 2 on the top again but the bottom area is now to be signed & dated by people who've come to believe what the 'performer' purports to believe.

The "Cue Cards" idea that follows is, obviously, one of the simple ones & has been realized. An example is part of "Limpolysemia", which is both on my onesownthoughst YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/DikIpJ_RX3E & on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/Iimpolysemia .

"use (a) thing(s)" is also fairly obvious but to the best of my knowledge has never been performed. A possible realization might be to write with a pencil until the pencil is worn down to unusability & to then never write with a pencil again.

"sound 1 ntity" is a bit of a challenge & an interesting experiment. The idea is to do something in the vicinity of something that's growing & then to record what you've done for playback in the same thing's vicinity to see whather you can change the speed of its growth by changing the speed of the playback. In a later version of this, the word "whatever" is substituted for "t he flute" & "flute" & the word "whateverist" is substituted for "flutist".

"restructure t he universe" is probably my favorite of these & certainly one of the funniest. The 'god-like' behavior is specified rather casually.

"shoot (a) blank(s) in t he dark" is another easy one & was performed by Monty Cantsin at the Neoist Network's First European Training Camp in Würzburg, West Germany, on June 24, 1982.

"use (a) c shell(s) as (a) hearing aid(s)" was another easy one that I realized multiple times. I can be seen doing it across the river from Three Mile Island on April 9, 1979 here: https://youtu.be/WFnEj9c35fE?t=37s .

My preoccupation with experimenting with names & what I called "entity boundaries" is delved into next. This was early 1978 years before I got involved with Neoism & became one of the Monty Cantsins.