Reading is musical in nature. Functional opacity (so many accumulated marks) compels immediacy: so much to read and see, so much happening and nothing to do. The whole dark, pulsing world closes in and the page is a simple window, letting in the unutterable. And you’re part of it, imprinted by it–reading, you wade in. It keeps coming and mostly it passes you by, an unfathomable river. You let go and stare into the distance, wade in again. More comes by this.
Artist Statement
I have worked with multidimensional experiences at the intersection of writing and action (performed, etc.) for a number of years. This is not an uncommon situation for a composer. But where most music directs itself toward some sounding practice, my work has been drawn to other, perhaps more obscure potentials, less concerned with producing sound as with the basic vitality and immediacy of the material effects of life, one might say. This has played out largely over many thousands of pages, a kind of text which grows more and more complicated and textured, even as it collapses in ever greater simplicity: things stay legible, yet the “readerly” experience explodes in a million parts moving darkly, only some of which graze the mind before vanishing into oblivion as one moves on down the line. By the time any of this registers it’s all over. Music, in a nutshell. You can go back but it won’t ever be the same.
For a long time I wrote scores, hundreds of them. Not like notes on a page except that’s partly my training (and some were, and are). But mostly with text, everything in straightforward language. It seemed to open up the field, how you could truck-in other material and still, you would have just a text: a text score. I became preoccupied with incorporating things I’d read into these pieces. Not for “inspiration,” but actually bringing in another experience, a fragment of a poem, say, almost like a sample, and making a score with it—not a piece about something but a deep expression of latent experience picked up, transmitted and transformed somehow in this simple act of reading, producing both a record and script. The idea was to “do” these pieces, delve into what was coming through and apply it, live within its terms. Skip the intervening “interpretation” we associate with playing music and just get right to what’s already going on, directly. It was surprising (or maybe not at all) how rarely you’d go to the piano or pick up a violin, but, say, tape some velum graph over a hole in the wall of a dark room, instead, or make a silent super-8 film in three one-minute takes…
Eventually, in particular at the end of a very long series of pieces dealing with John Ashbery’s poetry, these texts stopped being scores—they stopped directing any action beyond the page in a determined way. Transcription took over: using the mechanics of printed language to simply record a text in its material aspect. Diverse manifestations flourished—giving up performance meant the text became the performance, and it, too, was now free to get right to what was going on in the poem, directly. There could be wild spectra of characters splayed and slipping in multiple transparent layers, or an arcane, intricate labyrinth of typing passes filling a single typed surface. Sometimes, the transcription was aural, and performance returned in a new version—a strangely layered taped reading, or perhaps a typing session: a text reproduced on its own terms.
Finally, even the idiom of the text gave way to a more basic materiality which no longer differentiates but simply contains salient matter in an inclusive, unified field: the page. In the photocopy essay In the City, all manner of refuse from diverse texts and text/score-making processes, and various ephemera from my own recent existence, proliferates and piles up, cryptic yet ultimately quite legible, over a surface that one gazes into as much as reads, a densely layered experience which eludes comprehension.
Mark So (b.1978, Syracuse, NY)
mark-so.com
EDUCATION
MFA, California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA), 2006
BA, Pomona College (Claremont, CA), 2000
AWARDS, RESIDENCIES & MAJOR COMMISSIONS
AxS Festival Commission, The Pasadena Arts Council, 2011
The Millay Colony (Austerlitz, NY), artist in residence, 2010
Meet the Composer/MetLife Creative Connections Grant, 2010
Spiro Arts (Park City, UT), artist in residence, 2009
Ucross Foundation (Ucross, WY), artist in residence, 2008
VCCA (Amherst, VA), artist in residence, 2008
Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos, NM), artist in residence, 2007
Maybeck Studio Commission and Residency (Berkeley, CA), 2007
KHN (Nebraska City, NE), artist in residence, 2006
Montana Artists Refuge (Basin, MT), artist in residence, 2005
TEACHING & OUTREACH
Guest lecturer/presenter: The California Institute of the Arts (2012), The Florida State University (2012), UCLA (2012), Praxis-One-To-One: Mohave (2011), The University of Southern California (2011), the wulf./Meet the Composer (2010), Spiro Arts (2009), KHN Center for the Arts (2006), Machine Project/Everybody Loves Difficult Music (2006), The Montana Artists Refuge (2005)
SELECTED EVENTS
2013:
some keyboard miscellany with tapes & 10 lists
performance/installation
the wulf. (Los Angeles)
Heliogabalus Trilogy
performances
3 operas in 3 locations over 3 days (Los Angeles area)
mark so – Into Silence: reading & tapes
performance/installation
Michael Strogoff (Marfa, TX)
this event will start at astronomical twilight
collaborative performance with Michael Winter
the wulf. (Los Angeles)
Rick Bahto, Julia Holter, and Mark So: we’re (still) living
collaborative performance
MOCA (Los Angeles)
2012:
Heliogabalus: 3 operas by Mark So
performance
Pomona College Museum of Art
Into Silence – reading and tape pieces by Mark So
performance/installation
The John Cage Festival, FSU
collaborative performance/installation with R. Bahto & J. Holter
ATX (Los Angeles)
4 pieces from the Ashbery series by Mark So
performance/installation
How to Continue: John Ashbery Across the Arts, The New School
We’re Living
collaborative performance with R. Bahto & J. Holter
Jancar Jones (Los Angeles)
2011:
mark so: free as breath/wind
installation/performance
Feral Gallery (Joshua Tree, CA)
Reading ‘Illuminations’
performance
AxS Festival 2011, Art Center College of Design
slides & sides
collaborative performance with R. Bahto
the wulf. (Los Angeles)
A Few Rooms Around Town
performance/installation
The Dog Star Orchestra Vol. 7 (Los Angeles area)
END ROAD WORK. NO PARKING. BOB LOVES BETTY.
installation
the wulf. at MOCA Sunday Studio (Los Angeles)
(idle.) / Moving whole heart
collaborative notebook performance with Eileen Myles
Blind Spot Lab, Murray Guy (NYC)
So / Werder Project
performances of numerous works by Mark So & Manfred Werder
Hampton Park, Halsey Institute (Charleston, SC)
2010:
Color of the sound of waves
performance
Sound Series, Presents (Brooklyn)
windrows (with a full reading of John Ashbery’s “Litany”)
performance
Experimental Music Yearbook Vol. 2, the wulf. (Los Angeles)
(untitled study)
collaborative performance with J. Tolentino & S. Fila
Perform!Now! 2010, Francois Ghebaly (Los Angeles)
Mark So’s Landscapes
performance environment
The Dog Star Orchestra Vol. 6 (Vasquez Rocks, CA)
Heliogabalus Trilogy
performance
the wulf. (Los Angeles)
2009:
reading khôra [readings 30]performance
the wulf. (Los Angeles)
this singular tale of the past
performance
Several Silences, 701 Center for Contemp. Art (Columbia, SC)
mark so: ordinary education – new pieces for 4
performance
the lounge at REDCAT (Los Angeles)
some forgotten day (sparse winter) / Nothing is very simple
performance
assoc. 15febbraio (Torino)
2008:
mark so : 2 x 3 – three new pieces for 2
performance
the wulf. (Los Angeles)
3 pieces from the Ashbery series
performance
Maulwerker Performing Music, Villa Elisabeth (Berlin)
two deaths
performance
incidental music, Mark Müller (Zürich)
the mayan empire
performance/installation
MicroFest 2008, Pasadena Armory
2007:
mark so: late early works
performances
UCSB & environs
readings 19 – The System
performance/installation
Maybeck Studio (Berkeley)
a darkness of one’s own
performance
Kunstraum Düsseldorf
the missing wall
performance
incidental music, Mark Müller (Zürich)
RECORDINGS
Mark So: dark interiors/places of the heart
audio cassette
khalija records, 2014
Mark So: Pale plumes of dullness
reading The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery & Joe Brainard
audio cassette pair (handmade ed. of 20)
Motor Image (MI01), 2013
Mark So: Reading Illuminations/A Book of Palms
audio cassette (ed. of 100)
Recondite Industries (RI-5), 2012
Mark So/Patrick Farmer
sitting and listening/let’s grasp it, naked as it is … under a storm of stones
audio cassette (ed. of 100)
winds measure recordings (wm29), 2012
PUBLICATIONS/BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mark So, “text | composition – score and structure after 4’33”,” The Open Space Magazine, Fall 2013/Winter 2014
Mark So, from “text | composition – score and structure after 4’33″” + two scores & performance photos in Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation, John Lely & James Saunders eds., Continuum, 2012
Liz Kotz, “Back to Basics,” Texte zur Kunst No. 86: 249-252, 2012
Casey Anderson, “2011 and Mark So’s River,” appliedmaterials.tumblr.com, 2012
Madison Brookshire, “Uncommon Knowledge: Mark So’s Text Scores,” The Open Space Magazine, Winter 2011
Madison Brookshire, “Mark So Appreciations I-V,” ashoutinthestreet.blogspot.com, 2010-11
Eva-Maria Houben & Istvàn Zelenka, 1 Milieu – ein Buch nicht nur zum Lesen (includes score ‘nothing else to do’ by Mark So and correspondence), Edition Howeg, 2009
Mark So with Manfred Werder, BANGS, self-published chapbook, 2009
Mark So, “nearing/hearing,” in The Open Space Magazine, Fall 2008
James Orsher, Sara Roberts & Mark So editors, Everybody Loves Difficult Music (series companion), Machine Project, 2007
SELECT CURATED PROJECTS
Traveling furiously toward you – John Ashbery and the arts
web feature edited by Thomas Devaney & Marcella Durand
including 3 FARMs by Mark So
Jacket2.org, December 2013
“Mid-Harbor” (poem by Adam Fitzgerald) / Shadow/Shadows/Tomb (video by Chris Girard) / A Book of Palms (music by Mark So)
collaborative web project, ONandOnScreen.net Issue 5, Winter 2012
This Goes Out
Madison Brookshire’s solo exhibition
featuring the 80-image slide show The Casual Drift by Mark So, documenting Brookshire’s performance of ‘the casual drift’ by Mark So
Presents Gallery (Brooklyn), 2011
Drip Event for George Brecht
group show curated by Natilee Harren
including BRITTEN U.S.A. by Mark So
Crisp London (Los Angeles), 2007