The Greater Vancouver Music Appreciation Society
The Greater Vancouver Music Appreciation Society is an ad-hoc organization for the collective enjoyment of MUSIC. Operating in the Greater Vancouver vicinity, the aim of GVMAS is to irregularly congregate for sessions devoted to listening, discussing, playing and exploring all things music or sound in its many forms and permutations.
With no fixed address, GVMAS proposes to host events in and around Vancouver homes, venues, public spaces and etcetera.
GVMAS is seeking to arrange:
• Music listening / sound playback parties
• Music- /sound-related film screenings
• Lectures, discussions, workshops
• Sound walks / excursions
• Collaborative play sessions
• Sound meditation / expression experiments
…while exploring things like:
• Explorations of acoustic space
• The body as instrument
• Movement and sound
• The science of sound
• The inner ear / the attentive ear
• Music and memory
• Biography and music: your listening as history
• The aesthetics of LOUD, contrasted with softness or silence
• Does silence actually exist?
• Hearing loss versus ‘dead’ listening
…and asking questions about:
• Intention, attention, experience: learning to hear
- When and how do we listen?
- How do we awaken our ears?
- The experience of unified / private versus interior / external listening as an individual / group
• Acoustic environments
- What is a music ‘space’?
- How do we set up intentional spaces for listening?
- How do arrangements of light, seating, ambience, etc help cultivate receptive environments for the ear?
• The ‘culture’ of music
- The history, lineage, evolution, cross-fertilisation and propagation of musical forms
- The ‘technology’ of music – from the development of instruments and listening environments to recording, broadcast and portable devices
- Music as ritualized activity across and within cultures
• The ‘community’ of music
- The ‘musicality’ of ‘non-musicians’
- Cults, tribes, undergrounds, institutions, societies and more
- Sharing versus keeping
- Do notions of individuality as expressed by ‘taste’ really matter?
The primary aim of GVMAS is to bring folks together in the unifying LOVE of music. As a listening (and sometimes playing) society, GVMAS is essentially a participation experiment, intently focussed on the enjoyment, pleasure, surprise, and excitement music can release in a shared environment. Hence GVMAS openly invites anyone willing to participate and contribute in a spirit of camaraderie. While there will critical perspectives (and ears) brought to our present and future explorations, GVMAS’s only unwritten ‘rule’ is that nobody be shat on, derided or excluded on differing matters of ‘taste’ (in other words, being ‘expert’ should be not only secondary but perhaps altogether irrelevant to the proceedings at hand). There should be no form too ‘low’ or ‘high’ to explore – the aim of GVMAS is to transcend discursive categories, so we can instead focus our mental, critical, metaphysical, emotional and physical ears and join in articulating our awareness and experience of the form.
