Instruction by João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga

Instruction was made as a limited edition vinyl to accompany an exhibition of prints, video and installation by the same name.

In 2017 I set out to compose scores for an ensemble of traditional and unusual instrumentation. Having never attempted such a thing, I reflected on my process of composing music and how I would approach the project. I didnʼt want to write melodies on paper and hand them to competent musicians. I wanted to rather curate an ensemble of people who would form a complex mass of personalities, tensions, sonic potential and humour. I wanted to write process.

I started to compose images that could be transposed into musical language. The result- ing scores ultimately took the form of videos with a hidden layer of instructions to musicians on how to “read” each score. The video acted as conductor, indicating how and when to start and stop playing. The score would not change with each performance, but the resulting music would change, as an unfolding movement, a collaboration of many parts that make up one mass. Realising that performance is central to both the writing process and the outcome, I began to think of these scores as performance scores.

Looking for ways to decode my process of working with image as performance score, leading to video as conductor, I began to look for ways of charting these sonic movements and translations onto paper. This lead me to begin drawing, after a two-decade pause, and to explore printmaking with David Krut Workshop and master printer Jillian Ross.

The resulting images are then reiterated as new performance scores, ultimately feeding back into the score itself and revealing new potential for further iterations. The music that is performed is then not the entire work, but a moment along a longer trajectory of a composition. The composition as a whole is an ongoing conversation between image, performance, sound, histories, language and bodies.

João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is a Peruvian Italian Brooklyn-born Johannesburg based artist, composer and maker.

Orecchia has released several recordings, has received a South African Film & Television Award for sound design and has published in the Leonardo Music Journal and the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies.

joaoorecchia.com