Can you listen like a beginner?

For 43 minutes, professional cellist Melody Giron plays Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G Major. Or rather – she plays parts of its prelude, over and over, searching for her tone. The ending never arrives. The beginning returns again and again, maintaining a state of perpetual preparation. Listen with us to Cally Spooner’s DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up), 2022. Will you unlearn the melody? Can you listen like a beginner?

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Collective Ear v2.8.2 1

Collective Ear is a collaboration between Brand-New-Life Magazine and Zurich University of the Arts.

Episode I is composed of fictional writing and collected fragments of conversations that took place on March 26, 2024, during The Poly Listening Club at Zurich University of the Arts. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased (apart from the artists), may or may not be purely coincidental.

Sound piece: DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up), 2022, by Cally Spooner
Texts: Barbara Preisig
Sound design: Ronja Svaneborg
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Mathieu Dafflon, Kris Decker, Alisha Dutt Islam, Emma Murray, Jarina Müller Frischkopf, Barbara Preisig, Alexander Prince Osei, Maria Rebecca Sautter, Ronja Svaneborg

Special thanks to:
Cally Spooner, the speakers, Felix Friedrich, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, BA Fine Arts Theory II Class Spring 2024, and the participating audience

Barbara Preisig

Barbara Preisig is an art historian and art critic whose research focuses on contemporary artistic practices and their social and political contexts. In exploring translocal, transdisciplinary, and nonacademic ways of writing and thinking, she addresses a range of subjects including artistic research, feminism, institutional studies, and the politics of authorship. Barbara Preisig is co-editor of Brand-New-Life.

Ronja Svaneborg

Ronja Svaneborg is a multi-disciplinary artist. Through her practice, she speculates on the voice as a bridge between self and other, blurring the distinction between individuals and their surroundings. With a focus on loneliness, polyphonic voicing and the response-ability of the collective ear, she researches attunement and resonance in interrelated listening and voicing experiences: modes of merging with the surrounding environment and participating in an orchestrated feeling of belonging.