Abstracts
Abstract
For months after instituting COVID-19 pandemic social distancing measures, musicians were required to pivot their creative practices, too often with the dissatisfaction caused by latency and physical separation from collaborators and audiences. This article examines a pandemic-era, socially-distanced project by the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (the CEE) entitled Pass the Track (PtT), which they began in 2020 and released on Bandcamp in 2023. I first position the CEE’s creative practice within live electronic free improvisation (Andean 2022) and categories of liveness (Sanden 2013). I then analyze the process and outcomes of PtT to argue that, despite the lack of spatial and temporal awareness, the project perpetuates the CEE’s value on collaboration and exhibits liveness.
Keywords:
- Canadian Electronic Ensemble,
- improvisation,
- pandemic,
- collaboration,
- liveness
Résumé
Pendant les mois qui ont suivi l’instauration des mesures de distanciation sociale de la pandémie COVID-19, les musiciens ont dû orienter leurs pratiques créatives, trop souvent avec l’insatisfaction causée par le temps de latence et la séparation physique des collaborateurs et du public. Cet article examine un projet de distanciation sociale de l’ère pandémique mené par le Canadian Electronic Ensemble (CEE), intitulé Pass the Track (PtT), qui a débuté en 2020 et a été publié sur Bandcamp en 2023. Je positionne d’abord la pratique créative de l’EEC dans le cadre de l’improvisation libre électronique en direct (Andean 2022) et des catégories d’existence (Sanden 2013). J’analyse ensuite le processus et les résultats de PtT pour soutenir que, malgré l’absence de conscience spatiale et temporelle, le projet perpétue la valeur du CEE sur la collaboration et montre la vivacité.
Mots-clés :
- Ensemble électronique canadien,
- improvisation,
- pandémie,
- collaboration,
- vivacité
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Appendices
Biographical note
Alexa Woloshyn is an associate professor of musicology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Her first book An Orchestra at My Fingertips: A History of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble was published in 2023 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her current book project “Unsettling Sounds of Indigeneity: Reckoning with the White Possessive in Settler-Indigenous Sonic Encounters” emphasizes place-based ethical musicking and is an accounting for settler colonialism in music education, performance, and ethno/musicology and her own positionality as a settler listener and scholar. Woloshyn’s work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Circuits: musiques contemporains, The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and MUSICultures, as well as chapters in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production and Popular Music and Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions.
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