Sound Artist Part 3: Brenda Hutchinson
April 5, 2009
Probably my favorite sound artist to research. OK Maybe a tie with Francisco Lopez. Here’s a sample
“Collaborating with strangers”
“Brenda Hutchinson has been singing the National Anthem into a 9 1/2 foot tube ever since the first so-called election of George Bush. Singing into a long tube makes this kind of vocal feedback.
Brenda Hutchinson was born in Trenton, New Jersey. Hutchinson encourages her participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music. She often bases her electroacoustic compositions on recordings of these individual collaborative experiences, creating “sonic portraits” or “aural pictures” of people and situations
“My artform is sound and performance.
Much of my work is centered on creating large-scale experiments in socially based improvisations. I work with sound, stories and performance in order to engage people directly and to ask them to focus on themselves and their own experiences as ways to begin to connect with others. I am deeply committed to understanding people and to bridging gaps among strangers. Through my work I try to find common ground among groups of people or to create situations and occasions for people to find their own.
Sound is my medium. Performance and collaboration are the means I use to engage with others. It is through sound that I explore, navigate and understand my relationships with people and to the physical and social world. I believe in the transformative power of paying attention to sound. Listening without judgment to sound itself is something I learned from music, and I try to transfer that quality of attention to all aspects of my work.”
She is a very engaging artist and she tries to get the whole world (if she can) involved in her project and experiments. She focuses on basic instruments and from her resume she is the most “safe” of the sound artists because she is not venturing into undetermined territory and she just uses what is around her, like her Tuba. Compared to the other artists, she is more of an old timers artists and not yet using the technology in the advanced way most other artists have been using. She is still though my second favorite only behind Francisco Lopez, of the artist l investigated.
Brenda Hutchinson Bell Project
