Well, it isn’t recorded music, and, well, it is. (Ah, the wacky world of experimental intermedia)….
Michael Parsons has given us permission to upload his demonstration of the Dumb Show of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, Paragraph 5. Paragraph 5 begins with a ‘Dumb Show’, a series of movements describing the text of the paragraph in a gestural sign language developed from Native American sign language. Each performer is meant to ‘teach’ the gestures to another performer who, in turn, ‘teaches’ the gestures to the next, and so on. The video was directed by Christopher Hobbs and filmed by Martin Shiel at De Montfort University, and was only published in Virginia Anderson’s PhD thesis, ‘Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004).