边走边唱
Singing is what makes work possible”
2018年秋季以来，比尔-迪茨与王虹楷一直致力于对歌曲、劳动和价值之间关系进行反复的、持续的调查研究。项目的第一阶段“嗓音的读写”呈现了和已故艺术家克里斯-曼在纽约市三角艺术协会的合作，在一系列表演性讲座中，艺术家采用三方“集会”的形式来促进关于声音档案的口述传播。“歌唱使工作成为可能”的第二阶段，是2019年在费城的Remote Viewing画廊举办的为期一个月的展览（我们将项目空间延伸到画廊以外的街角、餐厅和社区中心）。展览通过每周客座专家的一系列聚焦特定主题的排演，并产生出相应的声音档案。2020年，迪茨与虹楷在Radio Reino Sofía的项目中进一步发展了该计划，利用Radio Reino Sofía的网络界面，将艺术家的工作通过“课程大纲“的形式呈现，内容包含一个2019年排演产生的声音文件列表、一系列精选文本、供进一步研究的视听和空间参考、两份散文乐谱和一份名为“靡靡之音”（With a sound of no substance）的数字出版物。“边走边唱”系列项目的每一次公开展示都建立在艺术家们正在进行的探索基础上，并不断对曲目进行补充。
Since Fall 2018, Bill Dietz & Hong-Kai Wang have been engaged in an iterative investigation into the relations between song, labor, and value. "Literacy of Throat," the first iteration, presented in cooperation with the late artist Chris Mann at Triangle Arts Association in New York City, took the form of a tripartite "meeting" in which the artists facilitated the oral transmission of audio documents in a series of lecture-performances. "Singing is what makes work possible," the second iteration, was a month-long exhibition in 2019 anchored at Remote Viewing in Philadelphia (extending beyond the gallery onto street corners, a restaurant, and a community center), in which weekly thematic foci and attendant audio documents were rehearsed in cooperation with a series of guest specialists. In 2020, Dietz and Wang created a further iteration of the project for Radio Reino Sofía. Utilizing the presenter’s web-based interface, the artists’ contribution took the form of a “syllabus,” including a playlist of audio excerpts from their 2019 rehearsals, a selection of textual, audio-visual, and spatial references for further study, two prose scores, and a digital publication entitled, "靡靡之音 / With a sound of no substance." Each public presentation in the disjunctive trajectory of the series builds on and expands the repertoire of the artists’ ongoing inquiry.
我想我应该先坦白—我们今天要邀请大家来稍微有点假借名义。我们今晚在这里做的是工作，但是当我说到工作，我希望它指向的是一种“精神劳动”，就像震荡教徒所实践的那样。在谈及我的意思之前，我想基于虹凯的导引和我正在进行的调研概述一些问题。
首先，研究一种我们并没有经历过的美学实践意味着什么？
第二，我们如何在艺术、学术和经济的主流范式之外思考与美学实践有关的价值？如何去理解那些在既定接受的美学范式下所误认的东西？
第三（也是以问题的形式对最后一点的回答），如果感觉或 "学习"（如进入一个实践，一个历史，一个 “传统”）不是一个选择，而是追踪一个实践、一首歌曲、一个声音身体的轮廓？也就是说触摸历史的物质性，文件的物质性。
最后，还有一个我不确定能否完全表述的问题，它将与物质的可复制性和剥夺有关--不是在占有本身的意义上，而是在不可占有的意义上--以与物质性的关系，去想象超越商品的形式。也许这与其说是一个问题，不如说是对价值问题的一个简略的回应？
"精神劳动 "对美国的震荡教徒来说是一种信念，即日常生活实践（做饭、建筑、唱歌、跳舞、工作）本身就是 "祈祷 ”的形式。震荡教徒是一个和平分裂主义宗教团体，始于18世纪末的美国，在19世纪达到顶峰，至今只有3名成员在世。震荡教徒相信绝对的性别和种族平等，反对一切形式的生殖和性行为，并以狂喜的集体舞蹈和歌曲作为其礼拜形式。1844年，弗里德里希·恩格斯在他对于“共产主义殖民地最近依然存在的”的描述中突出地提到了震荡教。在该团体的早期阶段，特别是他们的集体崇拜形式，往往被同代人视为格格不入的局外人，正如在1839年于纽约州新黎巴嫩举行的宗教 “会议”中所简单描述的那样。
没有哪个女巫的安息日和狂欢节队伍能比这更不真实、更令人反感、更令人压抑和令人迷惑。他们那刻板的步法，如此长久地跌宕起伏，没有休息，拘泥着的前倾姿势，如痉挛般的跳跃和扭动的脖子，以及戴着尸体状帽子的妇女的可怕面孔，尖锐的声音此起彼伏伴随他们脸上僵硬的表情，共同构成了一个既让人怜悯又令人恶心的景象，这个景象只会在下层地区的舞厅中产生，或用以制造噩梦。
震荡教早期的激进阶段在19世纪下半叶就已结束，因此，并未留有他们狂热实践的记录。然而，这里有一段里卡多·贝尔登兄弟的录音，他出生于1869年，自1873年起就是一名震荡教徒，在1950年10月他为一位民族志学者唱歌[播放]。这段音频是虹凯和我2018年8月在纽约三角艺术协会开始致力于 “嗓音的读写”项目时，分享的两个原始资料之一。那天晚上，她和我各自分享了一段这样的录音，然后尝试和我们的观众一起用耳朵来内化每一首 “歌曲”。
随后，我们和我们共同的朋友，已故作曲家&作家克里斯·曼进行了一场表演。尽管录音是在震荡教早期的狂热阶段结束很久后才录制的，但我们希望能够在里卡多兄弟的 “我的感觉”的歌声中听到关于早期这种“精神劳动”实践中汗流浃背、晕眩的、无法控制的真实的文字踪迹。他的声音，无论是它的独特性，还是它所学习及内化的轮廓，都是一种记录，一种实践的身体转录，远比任何书面符号所能实现的精确。他对于细微转音的强调如化石般的入迷，他的轻微的犹豫是一种精神错乱的习惯，但直接传递的是关于“上帝”工作的生活实践。让我们回到2018年的8月9日，这是我们参加里卡多兄弟的声音后，一起劳动的结果。
鉴于这一切，我们最重要的问题似乎不仅仅是我们如何能够唱出像里卡多兄弟那样的歌声，他的声音，或如何唱出一些完全逐字地听不见的东西，我们如何运用这些声音，这种歌唱的实践如何成为它 “触摸”历史身体的一种方式。不仅仅是我们可以学习一首歌，而是我们如何学习歌唱它。同样，它不仅仅是歌唱，也是一种歌唱的实践。不仅仅是练习，而是工作。不仅仅是一个临时工，而是一个不是注定会产生价值的工作。这就是说：我们如何能在这里，在现在，一起发现一个别处，一个其他的地方。
现在，让我们所有人一起有点笨拙地练习吧， 我不是一个老师（尽管表面上是这样），我不知道如何歌唱，我没有详细分析和研究过这些音乐，我当然也不知道如何教唱歌......但我想笨拙地一起到进入这个领域。 为了邀请大家现在进入我们的工作，我想使用我们在纽约排练过程的最后阶段作为我们在这里进行排练的基础。
录音节后6个多月后，虹凯正在费城进行这个项目的第二阶段，“边工作边唱”。在那个展览的开幕周和研讨会上，我们回到了震荡教，尽管这次是他们历史中近乎不可听闻的部分——长老丽贝卡·杰克逊的故事—一位有远见的作家和精神实践者，以及费城唯一一个城市震荡教团体的发起人，这个团体完全由女性组成，其中许多是非洲裔美国人。
没有任何关于关于杰克逊和她的同伙的音频踪迹，我们唯一拥有关于她们团体声音的文字记录是1889年的，其中包括一些神秘的描述。“他们的歌声很特别，但却有一种精神力量，让人相信他们是在其力量之下。”为了帮助我们思考这种缺失的声音，曾为杰克逊工作过的艺术家考琳·史密斯（Cauleen Smith）加入了我们。我们做了一次无声的聆听之旅，在费城中部这个对杰克逊很重要的地方。我们的行走结束于杰克逊在一篇文章所提及的一个地点，她称之为 “星辰运动间的奇异图景”，在现在的中国城的Race和10街的拐角处，我们一起大声朗读她的视觉文本[播放]。在把事情移交给虹凯之前，让我们一起读这篇文字。
I guess I should start with a confession - that we’ve invited you here under a bit of a false pretense. What we are here to do tonight is to work. But when I say work, I hope I mean it in a sense at least pointing toward “spiritual labor” as the Shakers practiced it. But before I get into what I mean by that, I want to sketch out some of the questions that have guided Hong-Kai and my ongoing investigation.
- First, what does it mean to study an aesthetic practice that we have not lived?
- Second, how we can think about value in relation to aesthetic practices beyond the dominant paradigms of art, academia, and economy? How to even begin sensing that which can only be misrecognized by existing receptive aesthetic paradigms?
- Third (and also a bit of an answer in the form of a question to the last point), if sensing or "learning" (as in entering into a practice, a history, a "tradition)" is not an option, what about tracing the contour's of a practice’s, a song's, of a voice's, body? That is: touching the materiality of history, of the document
- And finally, one additional question that I'm not sure I can entirely formulate, which would have to do with material reproducibility & dispossession - not in the sense of appropriation per se, but in the sense of unpossessability - of a relation to materiality that can imagine beyond the commodity form. Perhaps this is less of a question than a sketch of a response to the question of value?
“Spiritual labor” for the American Shakers was a belief that the practices of everyday life (cooking, building, singing, dancing, working) were themselves forms of “prayer.” The Shakers were a pacifist separatist religious community that started in the late 18th-century in the US, peaked in the 19th-century, and exists today with only 3 living members. The Shakers believed in absolute gender and racial equality, were against all forms of reproduction and sexuality, and practiced ecstatic forms of communal dance and song as their form of worship. In 1844, Friedrich Engels mentions the Shakers prominently in his “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence.” The early phase of the group, particularly their communal forms of worship, was often seen by contemporary outsiders as abhorrent – as documented in a short description of a spiritual “meeting” in New Lebanon, NY in 1839:
No witch’s Sabbath, no bacchanal procession could be more unearthly, revolting, oppressive, and bewildering. The machinery of their stereotyped steps, plunging on in this way so long without rest, the constrained attitude forward, the spasmodic jumps and twists of the neck, and the ghastly visages of the women in their corpse-like caps, the waving of so many shrill voices, and the rigid expression of their faces combined form a spectacle as piteous as disgusting, fit only for the dancing hall of the lower regions or the creation of a nightmare.
This early, radical phase of the Shakers was over by the 2nd half of the 19th century. There are, as such, no recordings of these practices at their wildest. Here, however, is a recording of Brother Ricardo Belden, born in 1869 and a Shaker since 1873, singing for an ethnographer in October 1950 [play]. This audio was one of the two sources Hong-Kai & I shared when we began our process of attending to the "literacy of the throat" in August of 2018 at Triangle Arts Association in New York. That night, she and I each shared a recording like this, and then joined our audience in trying to internalize each "song" by ear. We were followed by a performance by our mutual friend, the late composer & writer Chris Mann. Though recorded long after the early wild phase of the Shakers came to an end, our hope was to be able to hear in Brother Ricardo’s singing of “My Feelings” a real, literal trace of the earlier phase of the sweaty, dizzy, ungovernable practice of “spiritual labor.” His voice itself, both its singularity, and its learned, internalized contours, is a recording – a bodily transcript of a practice far more precise than any written notation could achieve. His microinflections of emphasis are fossilized ecstasy. His slightest hesitations are habituations of delirious stumble. A diffuse but direct transmission of a lived practice of “god’s work.” Back on August 9th, 2018, this was the result of our laboring together to attend to Brother Ricardo's voice: [play].
In light of all of this, our broad question seems to be not just how we can sing something like Brother Ricardo’s singing, his voice, or how to sing something that is quite literally inaudible, but how we can work our singing of these, how our practice toward such singing might be a way of "touching" the body of history. Not just how we can learn a song, but how we can learn a singing of it. And not just a singing, but a practice of singing. And not just to practice, but to work. And not job work, but work that might not have to be destined to produce value. Which is to say: how might we discover an elsewhere, an otherwise, here, now, together.
I want to awkwardly start practicing all of exactly this together with you right now. I'm not a teacher (despite appearances), I don't know how to sing, I haven't studied this music at much length analytically, and I certainly don't know how to teach singing...but I want to awkwardly get into this together. To invite you all now into our work, I want to use the last stage of our New York rehearsal process there as a basis for our own rehearsal here: [play].
6 or so months after that recording was made, Hong-Kai were in the middle of the second iteration of this project, “Music is what makes working possible” in Philadelphia. For the opening weekend and study session of that exhibition, we returned to the Shakers, though this time to an even more inaudible part of their history - the story of Eldress Rebecca Jackson - a visionary writer & spiritual practitioner, and founder of the only ever urban Shaker community, in Philadelphia - a community made up exclusively of women, many of whom were African American. There are no audio traces whatsoever of Jackson & her cohort. The only textual account of her community's singing we have is from 1889 and includes the mysterious description: "Their singing is peculiar, but it is given with a force of spirit that impresses one they are under its power." To help us think about the sound of that absence, we were joined by the artist Cauleen Smith who has worked on Jackson, and we took a silent listening walk through sites in central Philadelphia that were important in Jackson's life. The walk concluded in a site mentioned in a text by Jackson she called "Vision of Singular Movements Among the Stars" - at the corner of Race & 10th Streets in what is now China town, we read her vision text aloud together [play]. Now, here, before handing things off to Hong-Kai, let’s read this text together:
Since Fall 2018, Bill Dietz & Hong-Kai Wang have been engaged in an iterative investigation into the relations between song, labor, and value. "Literacy of Throat," the first iteration, presented in cooperation with the late artist Chris Mann at Triangle Arts Association in New York City, took the form of a tripartite "meeting" in which the artists facilitated the oral transmission of audio documents in a series of lecture-performances. "Singing is what makes work possible," the second iteration, was a month-long exhibition in 2019 anchored at Remote Viewing in Philadelphia (extending beyond the gallery onto street corners, a restaurant, and a community center), in which weekly thematic foci and attendant audio documents were rehearsed in cooperation with a series of guest specialists. In 2020, Dietz and Wang created a further iteration of the project for Radio Reino Sofía. Utilizing the presenter’s web-based interface, the artists’ contribution took the form of a “syllabus,” including a playlist of audio excerpts from their 2019 rehearsals, a selection of textual, audio-visual, and spatial references for further study, two prose scores, and a digital publication entitled, "靡靡之音 / With a sound of no substance." Each public presentation in the disjunctive trajectory of the series builds on and expands the repertoire of the artists’ ongoing inquiry.
我想我应该先坦白—我们今天要邀请大家来稍微有点假借名义。我们今晚在这里做的是工作，但是当我说到工作，我希望它指向的是一种“精神劳动”，就像震荡教徒所实践的那样。在谈及我的意思之前，我想基于虹凯的导引和我正在进行的调研概述一些问题。
首先，研究一种我们并没有经历过的美学实践意味着什么？
第二，我们如何在艺术、学术和经济的主流范式之外思考与美学实践有关的价值？如何去理解那些在既定接受的美学范式下所误认的东西？
第三（也是以问题的形式对最后一点的回答），如果感觉或 "学习"（如进入一个实践，一个历史，一个 “传统”）不是一个选择，而是追踪一个实践、一首歌曲、一个声音身体的轮廓？也就是说触摸历史的物质性，文件的物质性。
最后，还有一个我不确定能否完全表述的问题，它将与物质的可复制性和剥夺有关--不是在占有本身的意义上，而是在不可占有的意义上--以与物质性的关系，去想象超越商品的形式。也许这与其说是一个问题，不如说是对价值问题的一个简略的回应？
"精神劳动 "对美国的震荡教徒来说是一种信念，即日常生活实践（做饭、建筑、唱歌、跳舞、工作）本身就是 "祈祷 ”的形式。震荡教徒是一个和平分裂主义宗教团体，始于18世纪末的美国，在19世纪达到顶峰，至今只有3名成员在世。震荡教徒相信绝对的性别和种族平等，反对一切形式的生殖和性行为，并以狂喜的集体舞蹈和歌曲作为其礼拜形式。1844年，弗里德里希·恩格斯在他对于“共产主义殖民地最近依然存在的”的描述中突出地提到了震荡教。在该团体的早期阶段，特别是他们的集体崇拜形式，往往被同代人视为格格不入的局外人，正如在1839年于纽约州新黎巴嫩举行的宗教 “会议”中所简单描述的那样。
没有哪个女巫的安息日和狂欢节队伍能比这更不真实、更令人反感、更令人压抑和令人迷惑。他们那刻板的步法，如此长久地跌宕起伏，没有休息，拘泥着的前倾姿势，如痉挛般的跳跃和扭动的脖子，以及戴着尸体状帽子的妇女的可怕面孔，尖锐的声音此起彼伏伴随他们脸上僵硬的表情，共同构成了一个既让人怜悯又令人恶心的景象，这个景象只会在下层地区的舞厅中产生，或用以制造噩梦。
震荡教早期的激进阶段在19世纪下半叶就已结束，因此，并未留有他们狂热实践的记录。然而，这里有一段里卡多·贝尔登兄弟的录音，他出生于1869年，自1873年起就是一名震荡教徒，在1950年10月他为一位民族志学者唱歌[播放]。这段音频是虹凯和我2018年8月在纽约三角艺术协会开始致力于 “嗓音的读写”项目时，分享的两个原始资料之一。那天晚上，她和我各自分享了一段这样的录音，然后尝试和我们的观众一起用耳朵来内化每一首 “歌曲”。
随后，我们和我们共同的朋友，已故作曲家&作家克里斯·曼进行了一场表演。尽管录音是在震荡教早期的狂热阶段结束很久后才录制的，但我们希望能够在里卡多兄弟的 “我的感觉”的歌声中听到关于早期这种“精神劳动”实践中汗流浃背、晕眩的、无法控制的真实的文字踪迹。他的声音，无论是它的独特性，还是它所学习及内化的轮廓，都是一种记录，一种实践的身体转录，远比任何书面符号所能实现的精确。他对于细微转音的强调如化石般的入迷，他的轻微的犹豫是一种精神错乱的习惯，但直接传递的是关于“上帝”工作的生活实践。让我们回到2018年的8月9日，这是我们参加里卡多兄弟的声音后，一起劳动的结果。
鉴于这一切，我们最重要的问题似乎不仅仅是我们如何能够唱出像里卡多兄弟那样的歌声，他的声音，或如何唱出一些完全逐字地听不见的东西，我们如何运用这些声音，这种歌唱的实践如何成为它 “触摸”历史身体的一种方式。不仅仅是我们可以学习一首歌，而是我们如何学习歌唱它。同样，它不仅仅是歌唱，也是一种歌唱的实践。不仅仅是练习，而是工作。不仅仅是一个临时工，而是一个不是注定会产生价值的工作。这就是说：我们如何能在这里，在现在，一起发现一个别处，一个其他的地方。
现在，让我们所有人一起有点笨拙地练习吧， 我不是一个老师（尽管表面上是这样），我不知道如何歌唱，我没有详细分析和研究过这些音乐，我当然也不知道如何教唱歌......但我想笨拙地一起到进入这个领域。 为了邀请大家现在进入我们的工作，我想使用我们在纽约排练过程的最后阶段作为我们在这里进行排练的基础。
录音节后6个多月后，虹凯正在费城进行这个项目的第二阶段，“边工作边唱”。在那个展览的开幕周和研讨会上，我们回到了震荡教，尽管这次是他们历史中近乎不可听闻的部分——长老丽贝卡·杰克逊的故事—一位有远见的作家和精神实践者，以及费城唯一一个城市震荡教团体的发起人，这个团体完全由女性组成，其中许多是非洲裔美国人。
没有任何关于关于杰克逊和她的同伙的音频踪迹，我们唯一拥有关于她们团体声音的文字记录是1889年的，其中包括一些神秘的描述。“他们的歌声很特别，但却有一种精神力量，让人相信他们是在其力量之下。”为了帮助我们思考这种缺失的声音，曾为杰克逊工作过的艺术家考琳·史密斯（Cauleen Smith）加入了我们。我们做了一次无声的聆听之旅，在费城中部这个对杰克逊很重要的地方。我们的行走结束于杰克逊在一篇文章所提及的一个地点，她称之为 “星辰运动间的奇异图景”，在现在的中国城的Race和10街的拐角处，我们一起大声朗读她的视觉文本[播放]。在把事情移交给虹凯之前，让我们一起读这篇文字。
I guess I should start with a confession - that we’ve invited you here under a bit of a false pretense. What we are here to do tonight is to work. But when I say work, I hope I mean it in a sense at least pointing toward “spiritual labor” as the Shakers practiced it. But before I get into what I mean by that, I want to sketch out some of the questions that have guided Hong-Kai and my ongoing investigation.
- First, what does it mean to study an aesthetic practice that we have not lived?
- Second, how we can think about value in relation to aesthetic practices beyond the dominant paradigms of art, academia, and economy? How to even begin sensing that which can only be misrecognized by existing receptive aesthetic paradigms?
- Third (and also a bit of an answer in the form of a question to the last point), if sensing or "learning" (as in entering into a practice, a history, a "tradition)" is not an option, what about tracing the contour's of a practice’s, a song's, of a voice's, body? That is: touching the materiality of history, of the document
- And finally, one additional question that I'm not sure I can entirely formulate, which would have to do with material reproducibility & dispossession - not in the sense of appropriation per se, but in the sense of unpossessability - of a relation to materiality that can imagine beyond the commodity form. Perhaps this is less of a question than a sketch of a response to the question of value?
“Spiritual labor” for the American Shakers was a belief that the practices of everyday life (cooking, building, singing, dancing, working) were themselves forms of “prayer.” The Shakers were a pacifist separatist religious community that started in the late 18th-century in the US, peaked in the 19th-century, and exists today with only 3 living members. The Shakers believed in absolute gender and racial equality, were against all forms of reproduction and sexuality, and practiced ecstatic forms of communal dance and song as their form of worship. In 1844, Friedrich Engels mentions the Shakers prominently in his “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence.” The early phase of the group, particularly their communal forms of worship, was often seen by contemporary outsiders as abhorrent – as documented in a short description of a spiritual “meeting” in New Lebanon, NY in 1839:
No witch’s Sabbath, no bacchanal procession could be more unearthly, revolting, oppressive, and bewildering. The machinery of their stereotyped steps, plunging on in this way so long without rest, the constrained attitude forward, the spasmodic jumps and twists of the neck, and the ghastly visages of the women in their corpse-like caps, the waving of so many shrill voices, and the rigid expression of their faces combined form a spectacle as piteous as disgusting, fit only for the dancing hall of the lower regions or the creation of a nightmare.
This early, radical phase of the Shakers was over by the 2nd half of the 19th century. There are, as such, no recordings of these practices at their wildest. Here, however, is a recording of Brother Ricardo Belden, born in 1869 and a Shaker since 1873, singing for an ethnographer in October 1950 [play]. This audio was one of the two sources Hong-Kai & I shared when we began our process of attending to the "literacy of the throat" in August of 2018 at Triangle Arts Association in New York. That night, she and I each shared a recording like this, and then joined our audience in trying to internalize each "song" by ear. We were followed by a performance by our mutual friend, the late composer & writer Chris Mann. Though recorded long after the early wild phase of the Shakers came to an end, our hope was to be able to hear in Brother Ricardo’s singing of “My Feelings” a real, literal trace of the earlier phase of the sweaty, dizzy, ungovernable practice of “spiritual labor.” His voice itself, both its singularity, and its learned, internalized contours, is a recording – a bodily transcript of a practice far more precise than any written notation could achieve. His microinflections of emphasis are fossilized ecstasy. His slightest hesitations are habituations of delirious stumble. A diffuse but direct transmission of a lived practice of “god’s work.” Back on August 9th, 2018, this was the result of our laboring together to attend to Brother Ricardo's voice: [play].
In light of all of this, our broad question seems to be not just how we can sing something like Brother Ricardo’s singing, his voice, or how to sing something that is quite literally inaudible, but how we can work our singing of these, how our practice toward such singing might be a way of "touching" the body of history. Not just how we can learn a song, but how we can learn a singing of it. And not just a singing, but a practice of singing. And not just to practice, but to work. And not job work, but work that might not have to be destined to produce value. Which is to say: how might we discover an elsewhere, an otherwise, here, now, together.
I want to awkwardly start practicing all of exactly this together with you right now. I'm not a teacher (despite appearances), I don't know how to sing, I haven't studied this music at much length analytically, and I certainly don't know how to teach singing...but I want to awkwardly get into this together. To invite you all now into our work, I want to use the last stage of our New York rehearsal process there as a basis for our own rehearsal here: [play].
6 or so months after that recording was made, Hong-Kai were in the middle of the second iteration of this project, “Music is what makes working possible” in Philadelphia. For the opening weekend and study session of that exhibition, we returned to the Shakers, though this time to an even more inaudible part of their history - the story of Eldress Rebecca Jackson - a visionary writer & spiritual practitioner, and founder of the only ever urban Shaker community, in Philadelphia - a community made up exclusively of women, many of whom were African American. There are no audio traces whatsoever of Jackson & her cohort. The only textual account of her community's singing we have is from 1889 and includes the mysterious description: "Their singing is peculiar, but it is given with a force of spirit that impresses one they are under its power." To help us think about the sound of that absence, we were joined by the artist Cauleen Smith who has worked on Jackson, and we took a silent listening walk through sites in central Philadelphia that were important in Jackson's life. The walk concluded in a site mentioned in a text by Jackson she called "Vision of Singular Movements Among the Stars" - at the corner of Race & 10th Streets in what is now China town, we read her vision text aloud together [play]. Now, here, before handing things off to Hong-Kai, let’s read this text together: