FORMER PRODIGIES

The video I created for my practical element acts as a documentary without faces or places and uses several types of art and media to shape and visualize the stories of my interview participants about their experiences at conservatories. Through videography, sculpture, and soundscapes, I emulated the disorienting and overwhelming feeling of attending a conservatory without needing to step foot in one. The video is purposely overstimulating, filled with a lot of overlapping texts and audio, making it difficult for the viewer to read the text, listen to the interviews and cello excerpts, and pay attention to the visuals of the clay people.

Using modeling clay, I created tiny artists. Clay was chosen as my medium due to its malleability, a property also seen in the students who attend conservatories. The clay people are imperfect shapeshifters, acting as physical representations of liminality and adolescence. Clay is easy to mold and impressionable, just like young people. None of the clay people have faces or identifying features, but they do represent the participants whose voices are heard in the video, as well as a little cello player representing myself.

The video begins with a recording of me tuning my cello, an act every musician must do before they start playing, and a signifier that music will follow. The rest of the audio comprises the voices of three of my interview participants who I spoke to on Microsoft Teams. Layered on top of the interview audios are recordings of me playing cello, excerpts from the last solo pieces I studied at the conservatory. The recordings were made while writing this dissertation, and like the clay people, are also imperfect.

I recreated the soundscape of a conservatory by having the cello excerpts start to repeat themselves and layer over one another all playing at the same time to imitate the feeling of being in a practice room. Hearing someone practice the same piece as you in the practice room next to you and hardly being able to hear yourself due to all the noise of others is a feeling that musicians at a conservatory know all too well. Each video clip of the clay people and sheet music is repeated several times. As the video continues, the clips start to be looped, sped up, and reversed. The repetition and modulation of the cello recordings and video clips contribute to the feeling of disorientation and subsequent frustration of being in a liminal space, but also the repetitive nature of the life of a conservatory student: learn, practice, perform, repeat.