KUNSTRADIO

1. 4. 1993

"STUCK HERE FOR A WHILE"

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by Bob Ostertag

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"Reality music" is what the American composer and media artist Bob Ostertag calls his radio piece "STUCK HERE FOR A WHILE". Bob Ostertag has taken one single moment in social reality, which greatly disturbed the American nation in April of 1992, as the basis for his composition: he recorded the statements of Rodney King for the piece "STUCK HERE FOR A WHILE". As many already know, Rodney King was a black American who was brutally beaten by four white police officers after an accident. An eyewitness videotaped the scene. This documentary evidence, however, did not stop the justice system from acquitting the four violent policemen. The court decision, damned as racial discrimination by the democratic public, was the spark that set off a mass rebellion by the black population, the likes of which had not been seen in America for decades.

Bob Ostertag used Rodney Kingís own passionate speech, delivered to a group of reporters on the second day of the trial, for his work; in doing so, he follows in the footsteps of his earlier work, in which he also lifted particular moments in time out of their original context, in order to have them penetrate the consciousness of the listener at the level of critical art. He does not play down the dramatic side of the events, the desperation and tragedy. Quite on the contrary: in his most well-known radio piece, ìSooner or Laterî for which he recorded the crying and mourning of a young man from El Salvador who had to bury his dead father, he was able to achieve more effect with listeners, by choosing an artistic, radiophone form of presentation, which does not allow the effect of numbing and becoming routine, which is required by the documentation of everyday terror distributed in the mass media.

As in his other works, Ostertag does not use any electronic distortion of the acoustics in "STUCK HERE FOR A WHILE". The original recordings are played in their natural temporal sequence. For his music, Ostertag dissects the original acoustics into ìeventsî, brief acoustic moments of an event, which he structures in the form of a musical composition: "You can imagine the source of the sound as a physical object, which can be viewed from various perspectives. The music allows the listener to circle around the object and view it from different angles, as if he were looking through windows with different sizes. Sometimes I change the optical impression by using various formed lenses." (Quote from Bob Ostertag)

1993 CALENDAR 1