Speaker Synth is a kinetic, sculptural instrument built by Lesley Flanigan to play the sounds of speaker feedback. Her performances with these instruments are a process of sculpting noise to make music as she samples sounds from her voice and feedback to create a pallet of melodies and rhythms. The interplay of feedback and voice takes metaphors of noise as material, instrumentation as form, and amplification as communication to build a performance of new electronic music originating entirely from human voice and speaker feedback.
Speaker Synth can be performed as a musical instrument and arranged in various configurations to create immersive sound works from spatial soundscapes to electronic music compositions. These installations and/or performances reveal a sculptural process shaping noise to make sound. The main components of Speaker Synth are amplifying circuits between a piezoelectric microphone and speaker, on/off control, volume, and the hands of the performer. Additional controls include switches that communicate with a computer to allow for remote sampling of sounds and sequencing of on/off states during an installation or performance, and create the sense that the speakers have a life of their own. With these basic elements, a wide range of speaker feedback tones and rhythms can be “sculpted”. Speaker Synth has been presented and performed at numerous clubs, conferences, and art venues including Exit Art (NYC), Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral (NYC), The Bent Festivals (NYC and LA), and Monkey Town (Brooklyn); and will be featured in the 2nd edition of Nicolas Collins’ “Hardware Hacking: The Art of Handmade Electronic Music.”
“…Connie Beckley is a composer and performance artist of distinct individuality; her work is suffused with a cool methodology that can clarify emotion or confound it … [her] performances occupy that elusive but powerful nether world between theater and music– a form of small scaled but intense lyric drama that may some day soon blossom into full-dress opera.”
– John Rockwell, New York Times
Connie Beckley continues to occupy the above mentioned nether world. And the work has blossomed. Her special talent of composing music that illuminates her original texts by way of abstract visual ideas has become more theatrical in nature, yet no less thoughtful. This was apparent in her work entitled The Aquarium: A Meditation on Life in the City, premiered at Lincoln Center Festival 97. Her current work, “from: a masque in seven inventions,” while existential in its thinking, further emphasizes Ms. Beckley’s strong roots in art and music.
Ms. Beckley’s interdisciplinary sensibility was forged with her appearance as a singer and actor in the 1976 seminal production of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. As a classically trained composer and visual artist who had been told she had to choose between art and music, she rejected the choice and experimented with sound installations in conjunction with sculpture and performance. She coined the term “temporal sculpture” to distinguish her work from the more stage-oriented works of other performance artists.
For instance, in Spiral Cloud 1986, while a pianist played a theme and variations on a baby grand piano in an open field, surrounded by a tethered spiral of black helium balloons, she gradually released the balloons to form an evolving and rising spiral.
In The Funeral of Jan Palach, 1990, based on the dreamy, tragic poem by David Shapiro, singers became living sculptures within a set consisting mainly of light, one of her preferred materials.
Ms. Beckley has presented her work in both commercial and public cultural institutions throughout Europe and North America, including the New Music America Festivals, the Venice Biennale, the Paris Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. Reviews and articles appear in publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Arts, Artforum, Tel Quel, Flash Art, and Art Press. Her musical composition from The Aquarium, initially released by Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria, has been re-released in New York by Composers Recordings, Inc.