Maj Hasager, Ask Kaereby, and the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra | Performance and Sound Walk

Maj Hasager, Ask Kaereby, and the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra
Performance and Sound Walk
Sunday, March 3, 2019 | 2-4 PM
Virginia Avenue Park | (meet at the entrance to the Thelma Terry Building)
For free tickets, RSVP here.
Artist Maj Hasager (DK) and composer Ask Kaereby (DK) will be working with the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra (SMYO) during a series of workshops, focusing on the sounds of the local environment and how these can be translated through their acoustic instruments. Field recordings will be made and interpreted by the young musicians, and on March 3rd, presented in the form of a performance and soundwalk around the area. Parallel to these sessions, short video interviews with the participants in SMYO will be collected.
Student-only workshops:
January 13, 2019: Brief introduction to the workshop for both age groups, examples of cross-disciplinary practices and soundscapes. Demonstration of QR codes and the recording app.
February 3, 2019: How can we listen to our surroundings. Part I: technical workshop in recording. Part II: field recording of sounds in the surroundings. Part III: Video interviews.
February 17, 2019: Rehearsal for the performance – translating recorded sounds from the surroundings for individual instruments. Film recording of the rehearsal.
Public Presentation: March 3, 2019: Soundwalk and improvisation by SMYO. For free tickets, RSVP here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Maj Hasager is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work deals with power structures, identity, memory, architecture, and the construction of history, looking at how these interlinked phenomena are interpreted and represented culturally and spatially. Her artistic approach is research based and she works predominantly with text, sound, video, and photography. Hasager uses oral history interview techniques as a method for accumulating and creating narratives that address personal stories in a sociopolitical context. Maj Hasager’s residency is generously funded by the Danish Arts Council.
Ask Kaereby is a Danish composer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His artistic practice is interdisciplinary and research-based, involving experimental composition, soundscapes and electroacoustic music. He’s interested in the presentation of narratives by means of sound – not through traditional musical gestures, but using different approaches such as musique concrète or the futurists’ brutism. By placing himself in an intersection between known formats, Kaereby wishes to challenge our ways of listening – to music (live as well as recorded), to our surroundings and to (sonic) art.
Header image: Rehearsal Santa Monica Youth Orchestra, 2019. Photo: Maj Hasager.