ANDREW BURKE

Description: 
Music for Cell Phones is a concert of works written for cell phones. Each piece utilizes the cell phone in a different manner, frequently making use of audience participation, engaging spectators in questions regarding technology and how it mediates our relationship with ourselves and each other. Among other issues, this project seeks to interrogate notions of noise: how does technology both create and delimit noise in all its various senses? What are we tuning out and what are we tuning into? It also explores questions of memory: in an era of hyper-documentation, how do we not only remember but also forget? As George Lipsitz writes, "remembering and forgetting are not just things that people do, but also things that are done to people. Memory is institutional as well as individual. It may be perceived personally, but it is created collectively." What role will phones increasingly play in supporting or disorienting memory for both the individual and the collective? 

In this project, I also utilized a non-traditional approach to program notes. Rather than creating a traditional program, I printed business cards for each piece and distributed them in small envelopes.