Don’t Touch The Art: Sonorium in B-flat minor, by Andrew Garton, is an on site performance for Arts Birthday, 17 January 2009, in collaboration with KunstRadio and performed at the Magical Soundmachines exhibition, Kulturfabrik, Hainburg, Austria.

Listen MP3 Stream: Arts Birthday Mix

It is said that a child’s first sound is in B-flat. Some say the tone that resonates across and through the planet is in B-flat minor. A black hole 250 million late years away is said to emit a tone 57 octaves below middle C and its known pitch is B-flat!

If at art’s birth, its first sound were B-flat, it is fitting that at this auspicious year, when the earliest of electric sound machines are present, at the turn of a new phase in human industrial history, that a sonnet in B-flat is performed on site at the Kulturfabrik Hainburg.

Garton will perform Don’t Touch The Art: Sonorium in B-flat minor for Ondes Martenot33, solo voice, makam (Turkish melodic formulas similar to Western scales / modes) chord generator and hard curve saturation.

Included in the work will be a “sampling” of open licensed sounds and recordings in the key of B-flat, or B-flat minor. As open licensed content is inherently a gift to all within the public commons, so it will come to pass that a compilation of such works will be, in 2009, a gift to Art.

The Ondes Martenot was the 1928 creation of Maurice Martenot. It was inspired in part by Lew S. Thermen, inventor of the Theremin, whom Martenot had met in 1923.

The Ondes Martenot33 is exhibited at Magical Soundmachines, Kulturfabrik, Hainburg, Austria.