Found Objects and Assemblage in The Health

Scranton, Sam R

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-wtys-ep32

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Found Objects and Assemblage in The Health

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In this paper, I analyze a piece of music that I wrote called The Health, a 90-minute musical ceremony that comprises speech, action, video projections, costumes, lights, chant, song, recomposed hold music, diagnostic exams, and renaissance magic. I wrote the piece for Mocrep and myself to perform, the initial run of which took place on May 12th and 13th, 2022 at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, IL. The Health enacts a fictional rite centered on a cosmology of health not as a property of individual bodies, but as a life force, an animating spirit that flows throughout time, space, and matter, responsible for the motion and vitality of the universe. In my analysis, I foreground the process of making The Health as an assemblage of found objects. To open the discussion of found objects and assemblage, I review the work of three visual artists, Robert Rauschenberg, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Molly Roth. I examine their working methods, artistic motivations, and stylistic choices, and use them as a lens to examine my own work. To reframe assemblage and found objects in musical terms, I engage the vocabulary of polystylism as well as a comparison of the differences between physical and musical found objects. I then detail the found object form of The Health at the Macro, Mezzo, and Micro levels. I argue that the found objects of The Health are linked together via three thematic clusters—thesis, autobiography, and debris. I then outline compositional techniques used to elicit musical continuity between each of the musical found objects. These techniques include loops, repetition, modal harmony, tempo, orchestration, etc. I conclude with a discussion of collaboration, influence, and extrinsic frictions that shaped the final outcome of the piece.

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