New Amateurs and Tricksters: A manifesto for music and sound creation

Abstract

This article considers some of the potential advantages that creators without formal training – Barthes’s ‘amateurs’ – have employed in collaborative processes to make sound art and also considers ways in which the approach may open fresh forms of social engagement. Drawing on the author’s collaborative practice in sound creation, Maria Lind’s classification of types of collaboration is extended to develop the notion of a ‘quadruple’ variant. This is based on the relationship between human and non-human collaborators. The role of the ‘Trickster’ is developed as a means of supporting and facilitating amateurs operating in a radical context. I propose, and provide a manifesto for, a category of the ‘New Amateur’ who addresses social engagement in sound practices in at least two ways. First, via structural dependence on a notion of collaboration significantly expanded to include not only other humans but also materials, ideas and both non- and post-human entities. Second, by drawing upon the anarchist ethics and concepts of the Trickster to democratise artistic potential through collaborative and distributed authorship. Thus, the manifesto reflects a political dimension rooted in the everyday and reveals a route to social engagement via personal creative awakening. The New Amateur offers fresh possibilities in music and organised sound and engages via an unleashing of individual capability to mirror the ‘lines of flight’ pursued by John Cage, La Monte Young and Alan Kaprow. The mechanism initiated in this way locates individual creativity in the context of mutual aid. Social engagement is driven by individual creativity and the explosive awareness of the potential this awakens.