9 dps = 1 Steve Schick
Virtuoso Solo Percussion Music Re-written For Nine Amateurs

As part of the New Fordist Organization's attempt to industrialize artistic processes, one of our projects is a re-arrangement of Brian Ferneyhough's "Bone Alphabet" notoriously difficult percussion solo percussion piece so it can be easily played by nine amateur musicians.

The original piece is one of the hardest in the percussion repertoire and the NFO is attempting to re-work not only this piece, but several others, in order to move them out of the realm of the professionals, whose highly specific technical skills mean that their labour comes at a premium price, and into that of the amateur who can facilitate the mass-production of virtuosity.

The original work is for one virtuosic professional percussionist playing musical notation that looks like this:

But the New Fordist version replaces one professional musician with 9 amateurs, who only need minimal skills. All of the instructions for this version of the piece are received via computer-generated headphone tracks, which indicate what to hit, how hard to hit it and when, greatly simplifying the work, while simultaneously making it more accurate. There is no written score.

A video maquette of the first four bars of the work has been created using video multi-tracking and can be watched below. All the audio scores for the 9 percussion parts can be downloaded as a zip file here:

9dps = 1 Steve Schick audio score (.zip file).