Marina Rosenfeld

roygbiv&b (2011)

The choral work 'roygbiv&b' was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (New York) as part of a 2011 series, “Instruction Lab,” looking at the legacy of Fluxus. The work took advantage of the architecture and acoustics of the MoMA atrium, with its overhang of balconies and high, cantilevered fourth wall, which became a reflecting surface for sounds directionally projected at it from an array of horn-shaped loudspeakers. Playfully conflating 'spectral composition' and its namesake, the rainbow, the work aimed to produce a temporary impression of a rainbow arching overhead by organizing the work’s frequency spectrum vertically in the atrium and punning on the translation of colors into tones and into language. The work’s vocal score was created in collaboration with a youth choir from the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, and drew upon participants’ spontaneous recall of song fragments and diverse affiliations to genre and musical style. In workshops, singers riffed on each of the seven colors of the rainbow, purposefully misreading the letters r-o-y-g-b-i-v as song lyrics: “r” became 'are ( "Are you that somebody...”);, o became 'oh' (“Oh, oh, oh…”); y became 'why' (“Why should my heart...); g became 'je (sus)', and so on. (The extra 'b' in the work’s title added yet another possible reading: the ‘blue(s)’ of r&b.) A call and response structure allowed students to sing against and into an orchestrated and spatially dispersed soundfield.

A second version of the work, roygbiv&b (Version for South London), was recorded and performed at South London Gallery in 2014.

In 2019, Run/Off Press published an artist book, roygbiv&b, with scores, a User’s Manual, and an essay by musicologist Benjamin Piekut. The book was designed by Marion Bizet & Nickolas Mohanna. More information: https://runoffeditions.com/roygbiv-b