Mendi + Keith Obadike – "Big House/Disclosure" & More
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Mendi + Keith Obadike
On May 12, 2023, Either/Or interprets graphic scores by NYC-based interdisciplinary artists Mendi + Keith Obadike during its program entitled Perspectives and Disclosures. The Obadike’s wide-ranging oeuvre encompasses music, art and literature. In various media and contexts (including early career, innovative projects on internet platforms), their work transforms and recontextualizes historical/cultural information into art experiences. They’ve explored the legacy of chattel slavery and its continuing white supremacist aftermath, as well as important (and often under-recognized) figures in Black American life. Many of their projects are organized into series. Works from Numbers Series (2015 to present) are “performances and sound installations us[ing] numerical databases of violence (police harassment, lynchings statistics, and slave ship manifests) to generate sonic information.” The Americana Suites (2007 to present) are “a series of projects that deal with key issues in American culture through sound installations, texts, and performance.” Mendi & Keith have been commissioned by institutions such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New School, Electronic Arts Intermix, NY African Film Festival, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Mills College, The Whitney Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. They’ve contributed sound to projects by a broad range of artists including loops for neo-soul singer D'Angelo's first album and a score for playwright Anna Deavere Smith at the Lincoln Center Institute. They were invited to develop their first "opera-masquerade" by writer Toni Morrison at her Princeton Atelier. The Obadike’s released two early projects on Bridge Records: The Sour Thunder, an Internet opera, and Crosstalk: American Speech Music. They recently presented Dream Train, a sound and video installation, and multi-disciplinary performance featuring musicians from American Composers Orchestra and 3 actors at The Apollo Theater in Harlem.
At University Settlement in May, Either/Or is performing material from the Obadike’s Big House/Disclosure (2007) project, “an intermedia suite commissioned by Northwestern University for the 200th anniversary (1807-2007) of the abolition of the British Slave Trade.” The works description (included on their website and with a video synopsis of the work) continues:
“Mendi + Keith Obadike worked with the curator Northwestern students in collecting 200 video interviews with citizens in the Chicago area about the city’s slavery era disclosure ordinance. This ordinance requires any corporation seeking a city contract to disclose if they profited or descended from a company that profited from the transatlantic slave trade. The Big House /Disclosure website has three modules: For the Record, Ghost of a Dance and Built on Numbers. For the Record displays excerpts from the video interviews with questions about the disclosure ordinance, architecture and slavery, and house music. Ghost of a Dance features performers interpreting text-based performance scores and graphic musical scores about interpersonal relations in the “big house” in 200 short video segments. Built on Numbers features a downloadable ringtone and a live stream of a 200-hour house song/ sound installation created from vocal samples taken from the audio interviews.”
The graphic scores created for the Ghost of a Dance component of the Big House/Disclosure installation were published in the culminating book component of the “suite.” For the publication (printed by 1913 Press), a quartet of expert improvisers recorded an interpretation of the scores, made available via a compact disc insert. The visual language employed in the scores is “...inspired by Nigerian nsibidi writing, European music notation, and architectural drawings.” Big House/Disclosure was the inaugural work in The Americana Suites series.
Interpreting graphic and textual scores has been a core activity for the musicians of Either/Or Ensemble since its inception. Ranging from classic works by Cornelius Cardew, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff to more recent examples by Raven Chacon, Katie Young, and EO Director Richard Carrick, the group relishes the opportunity to bring its extensive experiences to bear on the visually arresting and contextually profound scores of Big House/Disclosure by Mendi & Keith Obadike.
Score excerpt from Mendi+Keith Odabike’s Big House/Disclosure (2007)