1987

The idea for my singing on this cassette tape came while I was living and working in Jerusalem for an extended period of time in 1986. I became very interested in the simplicity and beauty of the Muslim chants, which could be heard daily – broadcast through loudspeakers in different areas of the city. What interested me the most was the a cappella voice, with no accompanying instrumentation, and more important, the lack of the traditional western drum beat in the background. Without this incessant “western” drum beat, the silence or spaces between sung phrases often lasted for five to ten seconds. This was totally unique to me, as someone who had always been conditioned to hear musical notes in regular time patterns.

The Radical Songbirds Of Islam (Opus For Voice) grew out of a collaboration between myself and another artist-musician, Ed Tomney, in 1987. At that time, I had been counting continuously from zero to over three million numbers. Ed's custom made computer program translated these numbers into a musical score for my voice. The resulting music, taken from a library of sampled notes sung by myself, is then constructed from a series of tape edits. (Distributed by Reachout International Records, Inc., New York)

Track Listing     (Click On Song Title To Play)
Please Note: When downloading any part of this continuous song for the first time, depending on the speed of your connection, the music may skip until the file is completely downloaded. (Cable/DSL: Under 1 minute, Dial-Up: Approximately 10 minutes.)

The following text is written by James Cuno, director of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.

Borofsky has been singing and writing music almost as long as he has been painting; that is, since he was a child. But this audio tape bears little resemblance to a children's song. Partly influenced by Islamic prayer chants the artist heard over a radio while in Jerusalem, The Radical Songbirds of Islam is a collaboration between Borofsky and composer/performer Ed Tomney. The sounds were taken from a library of tones sung by Borofsky over a three-year period and were edited on tape according to a score generated from a computer program written by Tomney, based on Borofsky's continuous counting toward infinity. There is no rhythmic structure to the music, no beginning and no end. It fills the space and bounces back and forth from speaker to speaker, emphasizing one area then another, sometimes passing from one to the next and back again. In this respect, and not unlike the artist's experimentations with light in I Dreamed I Found a Red Ruby, the audio tape is a kind of dematerialized sculpture, engaging space and shaping our experience of it.

Borofsky lived in New York from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, when composers like Philip Glass and David Tudor were experimenting with computers and writing and performing computerized tape-sound pieces. They had been encouraged by the writings and compositions of John Cage, who had said as early as 1958: "New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds." And in that same year: "The strict division of parts, the structure, was a function of the duration aspect of sound, since, of all the aspects of sound including frequency, amplitude, and timbre, duration, alone, was also a characteristic of silence. The structure, then, was a division of actual time by conventional metrical means, meter taken as simply the measure of quantity" (quotes are from John Cage, Silence, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 10 and 18). Both the emphasis on music as sound activity and the understanding of structure as simple duration are evident in The Radical Songbirds of Islam. The chant-like sequence of tones sung by Borofsky and distributed through the space of the room in which one hears them is a sequence that could begin anywhere and finish nowhere. It is in itself a kind of march toward infinity, of which one hears a part, only a part, any part.

This sense of openness contributes to the chant-like theme of the work, the effect of which is to still the mind, slow the heart, and release the spirit. It is, as in some respects all of Borofsky's art is, a religious work. As he wrote in the tape's liner notes: "In Jerusalem / Fuzzy static radio / Singing Muslim Prayer / No beat, beat / No / No / No guitars / No drums / No orchestra / Empty space, song over? / In New York / Religion becomes numbers / Numbers become music / Sing."