In college, S Lockhart wrote a 20 page paper on imperiled female telegraph operators in silent films of the early 20th Century, including "The Lonedale Operator" (pictured above). There was quite a rash of them, though perhaps it was a case of one imperiled female telegraph operator film being quite popular and the others were merely rushed into production by studios hoping to capitalize on the ur-imperiled female telegraph operator film. Regardless of the production context, the imperiled female telegraph operator films of the early 20th Century reflected American society's anxiety about the threats to the family posed by women working outside the home and the beginnings of suburbanization (aided by the rise of the automobile) coupled with immigration which saw the loosening of the bonds of the traditional extended family living in one household or in the same neighborhood. This has nothing to do with the music of SL Morse.
Sounds Like
one listener commented that it sounds like free jazz, others are generally rendered speechless or leave the room.
SL Morse began as a conceptual art project for the radio, translating context-specific texts into morse code and the morse code into music, performed on drum set. Upon further consideration, we determined that this idea was worth exploring as music, with the morse code falling somewhere between chance composition and a simple graphic score guiding improvisation.
Our current "repertoire" includes texts by Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and past performances have featured "Sentences About Conceptual Art" (Lewitt), "Dante's Inferno Canto 6" (Dante), as well as texts by Hermann Nitsch, Samuel Beckett, Frank Norris and Kimberly Chun.
in the winter of 1993 -1994 margie asked me for a sunflower in the spring of 2007 i planted to hundred pounds of sunflower seeds on a small island in loring park minneapolis minnesota usa 44.969907 latitude -93.285706 longitude
