Rachel Miller
Urban Songlines – Score for a City

Exhibition 3 - 13 May 2006

Urban Songlines is made up of two works, a drawing - Score for a City and The Book of Random Numbers.

The work is an exploration of the relationships between moving image and sound, which have a fundamental connection - both are essentially structured on the element of time. Rachel Miller has employed compositional techniques for music, such as the writing of a score, in the making of an imagined piece of moving image.

Miller emphasises the process of applying musical conventions to ‘write’ moving image. A moving image is not her proposed result. The processes for writing the moving image score are fabricated and the result, a drawing titled ‘Urban Songlines’ functions as a visual artefact.

The structure of the score is based on measures of time that are defined using random selection processes. The Book of Random Numbers is a record of the random numbers produced to write Miller’s score and defines factors including the duration for each instrument, beats per minute. The Book of Random Numbers references John Cage’s use of ‘chance techniques’ as a method for composing music. The sense of distanced authorship of the work and the potential for the unexpected to happen interests Miller, selection is partially left to chance.

In Score for a City, the artist uses music to map an environment; the music is inspired by or determined by features of the land - the score is located within a map of Auckland City. Her score identifies particular locations where the elements (visual and sound) of the imagined moving image work would be collected.

An important reference for Urban Songlines is a book by Bruce Chatwin called The Songlines in which the author discusses the links between music and land of the Aboriginal people. He explains the way the traditional music of the songlines is like a map of the land in that, “the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes”. Score for a City illustrates 12 randomly selected sites in Auckland city where ‘instruments’ were found and the contour of the land was crudely mapped for conventions such as tone, pitch, tempo and duration.

//Chatwin, Bruce. (1987). The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.