Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Andy Stuhl, Jess Speer, and Jos Alejandro Rivera. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.
"Ugnayan, for 20 Radio Stations" (1974) was created by Jos Maceda, a Filipino classical musician who spent time in European avant-garde music circles; he was also an ethnomusicologist trained at UCLA who focused on indigenous Filipino music --music performed for centuries in villages as part of ceremonies and rituals. When Jos Maceda started composing in his mid 40s, he borrowed techniques from western and eastern musical traditions, as you can hear in Ugnayan, for 20 Radio Stations. Artist and performer Aki Onda wrote this about the piece: Jos Macedas Ugnayan was an expansive audience participatory work for radio to be broadcast at 6 PM on New Years Day, 1974. Arguably the most ambitious, provocative, and controversial work in his repertoire, the fifty-one-minute-long piece consisted of twenty separate tracks, each to be played on a different public radio frequency simultaneously, producing a musical atmosphere at the scale of the city. All thirty-seven radio stations in the metropolitan Manila area turned over their channel for Macedas sound diffusion, with some tracks playing from multiple stations. Millions of listeners tuned in. Manilas parks, plazas, and street corners were converted into what the composer called Ugnayan Centers"142 locations in all. In one of the biggest, 15,000 people congregated, their personal radios creating a stunningly knotted mass of sounds.
Jos Macedas Ugnayan is not very well known globally and is rarely performed, something that Aki Onda has been trying to remedy. In January 2020, Aki Onda recreated Ugnayan for 20 Radio Stations at Fridman Gallery in New York City in collaboration with Wave FArm. Onda obtained Macedas 20 original sound files from the Filipino archive that houses Macedas music and set up 20 transmitters, whose signals were received by an array of radio receivers on-site at Fridman Gallery. I got to hear Ugnayan transmitted in this format, and it was thrilling.
One more point of interest: The Filipino word ugnayan translates into English as relationship or connection between people. Ugnayan is the title the First Lady Imelda Marcos wanted for the piece; Jos Macedas original title was Atmosphere. There is a broader political context in terms of the involvement of the Marcos Regime in the production of Ugnayan. See Aki Ondas insightful essay, In Light of the Frenzy: How Jos Maceda Took Over Manila Public Radio. There, youll also see a link to Jos Macedas Sources of Musical Thought in Southeast Asia.
Wave Farm is a non-profit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves. A pioneer of the Transmission Arts genre, Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. Major activities include the Wave Farm Artist Residency Program; Transmission Art Archive; WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears, a creative community radio station based in New Yorks Upper Hudson Valley; a Fiscal Sponsorship program; and the Media Arts Assistance Fund in partnership with NYSCA Electronic Media/Film. EVERGREEN EPISODE 128.
Jose Maceda
A show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio.
00:58:00
1
July 20, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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