Concentration(s):
Music | Theatre Arts & Performance Studies
Honors in Music Thesis:
Body Echoes
This project keeps expanding, like a helium balloon. But, when I inhale instead of making my voice get higher (although I wouldn’t mind that) I feel another memory of my body wriggle its way out. For three months now I have met weekly with nine different close friends of mine to talk about how our lives have collided together at this moment in time. How our messiness must be mucked with and how that lets us understand the togetherness of making communal art. My yearning is to help grow a community of creators that can think, music, and document in a way that is built off of a reciprocal idea of care and awareness of our bodies. To understand our physical memories together. How can we listen to collective embodied echoes? What souvenirs do our bodies keep with us that we can explore together? Each collaboration unearths a new way of entangling memories using specific artistic techniques we have developed and improvised over the last year. Body painting, sound collage, free improvisation, live visual manipulation, poems, singing, are just a few! I picture this project as a slippery blob of meness that oozes in and out of different bodies of knowledge.
Personal Statement:
Ben West ‘22.5 is an undergraduate studying music and performance studies. They are interested in free improvisation, soundpainting, bridging classical, noise, and rock sensibilities and unearthing whacky and unruly sounds. Ben likes to think about how their body and their memories are related to communal music making practices. Ben is also invested in thinking about how transness and non-binary bodies can form music in the cracks of society. Ben loves to ski, do weird dances, backpack, and make bizarre sounds.
Department Note: Ben is walking in spring 2022 but will complete their studies in the fall of 2022. They will finalize and present their Honors Thesis in Music later this year, and this page may be updated to include new details/media from their project.
Michael Tu < Previous Senior