Signature OR Signatures

On Monday night Klaus Engel and I started to make a paper prototype of Signature, the piece I devised for Euphonopen and improvisational choir, with "user" created content - in this case, the signatures of the people attending a concert, and their names as said aloud by each of them (user is in quotation marks because I rather loathe the concept, but have not yet thought out a write-around).

The idea of the piece came from my observation that people who do not draw use the Euphonopen to make music with, that is to develop sound in time rather than to draw, developing a series of marks on a surface over a period of time, and incidentally generating sound. People who draw quickly get engrossed in the logic of mark making and let the sound fall where it may, but even they are not totally immune form the feedback lo created by the sound being generated by the marks. People who do not draw only get engrossed in the mark making when they write, but especially when they write their own name, and above all when they sign their name.

So the idea is to manipulate each person's name according to the way each person signs, creating a sort of choir of names (sign and sing!) The performance proper starts with the choir signing and saying each member's name as they assemble on the stage. The conductor will use the various signatures, both from the public and from the choir, as a graphic score, and the choir will spend some time with one or more names.

The question Klaus had is: so Nick Storring (who received a Canada Council commission grant to work on the piece) will take care of what the piece sounds like... but what will it look like?

Klaus and I passed his notebook back and forth, writing, drawing, making boxes, charts, stars, as if we were working on an exquisite corpse. At one point I looked up and said: we have to find out what groups of signatures usually look like - petitions, declaration, confessions - how have people traditionally arranged more than two or three signatures?