“The artist has forced me to listen in a place of his choosing.”

The listening station for DJ Responsibility’s FORMALISM is up and running. If you recall from my previous post, local musician David Bernabo created an album whose sole copy is here at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Music Department.

Listeners have left some intriguing comments on the sheets at the listening station and many of them fixate on the idea of “what it means to have a sense of place.” We’re so used to having our music travel with us in the car, on the bus, while jogging, etc. that it’s a fun challenge to take 19 minutes of one’s time, sit in one specified chair in a busy library, and listen to the only copy of a piece of recorded music.

Here are a couple more comments:

It adds to it that I think about the other listeners sitting in the same place to do so. . . . I particularly like the way the music becomes the soundtrack for the ‘movie’ of the people moving around me in the library.

. . . the space itself is what overpowered me. I was sort of “forced” to sit in the one seat facing the stacks of DVDs. Had it been any other location, any other seat, the experience would have been different.

These quotes reinforce that music and its context are inextricably linked. So I invite you to come in and listen to FORMALISM. You’ll arrive with such personal items as your life experience, your mood, your own musical tastes, but there you’ll be, in the same chair that others have sat in, watching a similar but shifting view. The end result, though, is a unique experience of listening. Wow.

— Tim