Freedom of Sound
Religion instructor Russell Weatherspoon sits in a teal armchair at the center of the Assembly Hall stage. His droning voice is tinged with an unearthly echo as he reads from a book. A slideshow appears on the screen behind him, running through the Academy’s timeline, one event at a time. Then, the Assembly Hall is thrown into anarchy as Democracy of Sound (DoS) shocks the student body.
Halfway through the timeline, senior Sol Chase walks on stage with a guitar; senior Sabrina Movitz follows and sings a few verses. Suddenly, the band Three Quarter Moon join in, followed by a string trio. Then, The Exeteras, Exeter’s all-male a cappella group, hop onto the stage.
By now, the audience is thoroughly lost, but engaged. Heads turn as upper Webb Harrington walks in with bagpipes. Upper Sean Taylor, with a tom set mounted on his chest, performs a short solo. Two trumpeters flout their bells. Finally, Weatherspoon leans into the microphone and whispers those two magic words, projected in a disconcerting tone: “senior class.”
“I had absolutely no idea what was going on,” upper Pooja Punukollu said. “I was completely and utterly blown away.”
During the first few minutes of the assembly, many students had expected something different. Many were anticipating the biennial “faculty follies” or an introduction of Lisa MacFarlane. “I thought that they were going to be introducing the new principal, but when the lights started flickering and the phone alarms started going off, I knew something completely different was happening,” lower Honor Clements said.
Indeed, the online calendar on the Academy’s website only provided a two word event description: “Mr. Weatherspoon.”
DoS, a club led by seniors Scott Hermenau, Emily Lemmerman and Hannah Sessler, had been playing around with the idea of hijacking an assembly since fall term.
“We wanted to give people a little ‘dose’ of something they don’t get often, especially at Exeter: chaos.”
Sessler said that the idea for this particular project was conceived out of their desire to “reconsider the [assembly] space, what it has been used for, what it continues to be used for, and what it can become.” Many would agree that the sonic cacophony orchestrated by DoS was a successful manifestation of this desire.
“We wanted to give people a little ‘dose’ of something they don’t get often, especially at Exeter: chaos,” Sessler said. “Ask any science teacher: chaos is natural. We wanted give people that blissful moment of confusion, contemplation and reaction. And boy, did we get some reactions.”
In many ways, DoS itself is the brainchild of its coheads. Between the three of them, they bring forward the eccentric energy for which DoS is known around campus.
Students and faculty alike wonder what DoS actually is. Jon Sakata, club faculty advisor–– “but really just another baker in the bakery,” as he calls himself—sheds some light on the confusion.
“From its inception, DoS wanted to find creative, challenging ways to break down the segregation, [of] the binary performers/audience,” Sakata said. It is true; many DoS “interventions,” as they call it, are interactive and strip away the spatial separation between audience and art.
As for the purpose of the assembly, Movitz has a theory of her own. She believes that the point was to challenge the audience to question the line between beautiful music and noise. “Modern art asks the question, ‘What is art?’” Movitz said. “While modern performance art, like what we did, begs the question, ‘What is music?’”
While others still struggle to grasp hold of this concept, those who are familiar with DoS and its participants offer the assurance that DoS is not a group that needs much explanation or even understanding. In essence, DoS purposefully aims to embrace the chaos as it unravels.
“I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the people around me mumbling confused expletives that grew into joyous shouts of ‘I don't know what this is, but it's kinda cool,’” senior Josh Martinez said.