Sweet Summer Salad – performance notes

Sweet Summer Salad consists of a recipe for a salad made of ingredients growing in the Niagara region of Canada at the time of the summer solstice. The sonic ingredients of the recipe are separated from the meanings of the words. Only some of the sounds of the text are heard. Short consonants (b, d, g) and short vowels are not notated and should not be sounded. What remains are resonances of words in tone and noise.

Participants are invited to ‘sound’ the text according to their sonic imaginations, using voices, instruments, or other sound sources. The words are shown in a way that highlights aspects of their phonetic content—as heard in an anglophone Canadian accent. Four types of sounds are notated above the main text, in four colours: percussive consonants (green); sustained noise consonants (red); long vowels (blue); and voiced consonants
(brown). The top two lines are noise-based sounds; the lower two lines can be sung with a pitch: speaking, singing, or a combination of the two. The lower three lines are sustained sounds.

Performers keep track of the sounds made by other players in order to maintain the sequence: everyone should be at the same place in the text. Each sentence is numbered to facilitate co-ordination among the participants, and in case a decision is made in rehearsal to vary the methods of sounding for specific sentences. If there are four participants, each can choose to produce one type of sound. Some past performance options have included vocalizing through harmonicas and other instruments, whispering, and voicing only one or two aspects of the sounds—such as percussive consonants with sustained consonants, or sustained vowels with voiced consonants.

Sweet Summer Salad was composed in June 2013 during the ‘7 Days of Creation’ residency at Brock University; it was revised in October 2014 during a residency at Civitella Ranieri.