when composers refuse to die young: or how to avoid making aging a liablity amongst the artistically inclined

More comedy from the arts sector (or is that the creative industries (I forget which)):

I’d heard that the Young Composers’ Collective (founded 2003) had changed their name to the Irish Composers' Collective (allegedly) because its members, who grew not-young, did not want to relinquish the organization. It turns out, however, there’s a little tradition of doing this: the Association of Young Irish Composers (founded 1972) dropped the ‘Young’ and became the AIC some ten years later.

Anyone tempted to do a Bourdieuian analysis of this phenomenon?

update 11-08-14:

I came across a piece from March 2004 re the Young Composers’ Collective. Full of moments of irony given the evolution of the AIC:

“I contacted a number of people to pitch the idea of starting a new organisation for young Irish composers…. Most of them agreed that more needed to be done for young composers in Ireland. I also contacted former members of the Association of Young Irish Composers which ceased activity in the 1970s. They all spoke positively of this organisation and lamented its demise….
“There is currently no support network for young Irish composers. The Association of Irish Composers (AIC) describes itself as Ireland’s representative body for composers…. It does little for young composers.”

Kind of Weird

Before people get too worked up over this, they need to realize that our album is a copy, not a clone—an object designed to reaffirm what people already love about ‘Kind of Blue’ and to highlight what we could and couldn’t pull off…. That’s where the art is—getting people to think about the original by listening harder to the differences. [more…]

Been following the MOPDTK/Blue threads here and there on fb with some interest. Some random questions:

1. When does musical criticism cross into personal attacks? Is the personal and the musical ever separable, in particular, in the context of improvisative practices?
2. At what point does musical proficiency sanction an entry into the hallowed domain of reinvention? (or is that question just wrong? what is at stake?)
3. If the piece is a conceptual prank (of sorts), then is not the kerfuffle a demonstration of its success?
4. If the piece is a conceptual prank, who or what was the target?
5. When are we comfortable discussing the intersections of class, economics (and race) and music? (and if we can’t do this in the context of a kind of appropriation, when can we do it?)

I’ll admit straight off the bat that I’ve never been particularly drawn to MOPDTK’s work (no fault of theirs, just never got around to it), but this did at least get me to listen. fwiw, some thoughts (my ¢2):

2. There’s a self-consistent argument from those critical of this project that goes like this: by all means do your own music—be creative!—but if you were to copy an existing work, your chops should be up to the task. I’m not 100% convinced by this argument, though it’s hard not to agree that there are people with more aptitude for meticulous recreations. I think notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘respect’ (to/for yourself, the tradition, cultural ancestors, etc.) play in both pro/con arguments, but that are largely left unexamined.
3. Given the continuing struggle with notions of history, continuity and tradition that is so much a part of this music’s DNA, it occurs to me that it would be naïve of anyone to think that the album would not generate, at the very least, heated discussions.
4. It seems to me that that the target could not have realistically been the Lincoln Center neoclassicists and their audience since, given the nature of the band and the label, this piece of cultural noise would just not be audible there. So, it seems to be reasonable that the target of the prank was those of us already on the left-field (those of us already defending or critiquing this work), but that raises a whole bunch of additional questions about purpose, and questions about how to assess the success of the prank.

Final thought: I find it near impossible to hear Kind of Blue with something other than naïve teenage ears (which is how I first encountered that record). So I feel unqualified to do a critical, microscopic assessment of MOPDTK’s work-as-copy. From hearing a short excerpt from MOPDTK’s album, however, all I can add was that I was surprised how well Jon Irabagon could reembody Adderley, and fascinated how Peter Evans apparently could not mimic Davis to the same degree.

Eine kleine Nekromusik

When the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us, as the final ragtag few that is what is left of humanity gather to hear the last musician on the planet at the last piano with the last copy of Mozart’s piano sonatas, we will wait for the text to speak to us. As the undead hammer down the doors, the futility (always already) of fidelity to a long lost (fictional) past will become crushingly obvious.

clouds of garbage cans

I’ve heard that another teacher of improvisation finds that new students in their class play ‘chaotically,’ and that their lessons initially proceed by pulling back from that cacophony. It may be that this teacher (who, I think it’s fair to say, comes from a more composerly background) has different tastes / sensibilities / politics than I, but I have the opposite problem with new students: I seem to be spending a great deal of time pushing towards noise, encouraging the class to produce (to use that Braxtonian term again) “clouds of garbage cans”.
Maybe a better way to put it would be that I try and stop them from stopping themselves; I try to get them to exercise less a priori ‘tastefulness’. Many students come with a tendency to preempt the musical play (if that makes any sense). If a musician comes from a certain tradition (jazz, rock, country & western, circus music, whatever), I want to be able to hear that—I don’t want, nor feel the need for, their histories to be suppressed. And if the result is apparently cacophony, chaos or turbulence, well, I figure that’s at least an interesting place to be, and an interesting condition to interact with.
Citing Robert L. Douglas, George E. Lewis writes that

…Eurocentric music training… does not equip its students to hear music with multidominant rhythmic and melodic elements as anything but “noise,” “frenzy” or perhaps “chaos”.

George E. Lewis (2000), ‘Too Many Notes: Computers,
Complexity and Culture in Voyager’, Leonardo Music Journal (vol. 10), p. 34.

Recently, MLM commented on the similarity of approach—a heterogeneous sound world—in both the free jazz of The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), and the Art Ensemble’s rendering (or appropriation) of Monteverdi’s ‘The Lament of Arianna’ on Les Stances A Sophie (1970). Listening to these, I can imagine a critic, intoxicated on the ideals of unity, coherence and integration, complain that the tuning of the voices are not aligned, the rhythms are not locked together; both Coleman’s group and the AEC are just not together.
Well, maybe, but beyond those losses—loss of unity, coherence and integration—what do we gain that may be of value? Both those (pre- and after-) harmolodics sound worlds are deliberately heterogeneous ones, or, maybe more accurately, practices in which difference, dissent and contradiction are not silenced (deliberately). Perhaps the (West European Concert Music) composerly approach leads to a kind of composition-as-censorship. In contrast, the AACM’s composer-performer approach, say, is one of of composition-as-facilitator, or the N.Y. Downtown’s composition-as-play.

Anyway, as a belated celebration of improvising guitar’s first anniversary, I’ll throw up that first quote:

What happens is what happens; is what you have created; is what you have to work with. What matters is to listen, to watch, to add to what is happening rather that subtract from it—and avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be.

Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan), pp. 2-3

an (unanswered) question

Is this analogous to the old debate in algorighmic composition which, to caricature it, revolves around two approaches to generative processes: start with some arbitrary noise, rich with possibilities, and systematically filter out the undesirable elements, vs. start with processes that ‘intelligently’ generate complexity?
The results, sound or reception wise, may be surprisingly similar, but the discourses embedded in these—the rhetoric that supports them—are maybe analogous to the debate I’m talking about.

And incidentally…

Isn’t The Shape of Jazz to Come a fantastic record title? What formidable ego could stand under that moniker? Is it tongue in cheek? Simultaneously humbling in front of the artform (yes, jazz is something worthy of a future), egomaniac (and this is its future) and pompous (Jazz-as-Art), it borders on the apocalyptic (who knows, maybe Darius Brubeck is right; maybe that was the moment jazz died ;-)

the worst gigs of my life

Having put a downer on that event, maybe it’s only fair if I recount (confess) my least enjoyable and endearing moments. A set of snap-shots into the life of a musician / performer / improviser, I humbly present to you, in chronological order, the worst gigs of my life.

attack of youthful, humorless megalomania

AMC and I have been roped into a segment of a larger event by B.
Let me describe B as ambitious and far-sighted… but B is also overreaching and a perfectionist; a problematic combination that means hardly anything gets finished. In fact, I never heard any of B’s finished projects / pieces / compositions, only the proposals and pitches.
On this occasion, B had proposed a grand, bells’n’wistles composition / piece, but (surprise) it didn’t get finished in time. So B decides to rope in some improvisers so we can, like, jam, man.
AMC and I manage to persuade B out of the B’s original plan—one 30 minute improvisation—and propose several shorter improvisations.
No rehearsal.
Soundcheck takes far too long. I feel we’re pissing-off the sound engineers; not good, I think, not good at all.
The performance is a disaster. Humorless, shapeless, disaster.
AMC—even AMC—cannot inject any humor or lightness into the proceedings.

I fear that even our friends in the audience are ready to pretend they don’t know us.

I’m ready to pretend I don’t know us.

Recorded for posterity, I play this recording to myself (although I can very rarely sit through all of it) whenever I feel like reminding myself of my own mortality. (Maybe I’ll play this to my students.)

the stink

We’ve been invited by K to this ‘guitar and computer’ showcase (high-concept: let’s, like, get some guitarists paired up with laptopiteers, and, like, they can all jam, man).
I arrive at the venue with MK, the laptopiteer I’d been working with, and two friends. The venue is a dive. I speak as someone who loves dusty venues with an interesting vibe, colorful clientele, and a good PA system, but this place—let’s call it The Stink—has no vibe, no clientele, shit PA (and, I swear, a crack-head sound-engineer). It’s the end of summer, and The Stink has no ventilation—it’s hot and dusty in there—no windows, very little lighting, no bar. I just hope that the wiring in this place is good (I subsequently acquire a habit of carrying a power outlet tester, and wiring my gear with RCDs).
Nightmare. This is not why I became a musician.
There’s a guitarist plus computer-operator pair (I recognize them as K’s friends) who have decided to start their warm-up by doing a whole performance there on the floor. Noodling away. It ain’t pretty: it all looks (and sounds) very amateurish.

I go up to K. “Where do you want us to setup?”
K doesn’t make eye contact. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Are you in charge?”
“I think we should wait for [the Big Stars] to show up….”
“Well, if you know where they’re going to setup, we’ll just stay outta the way—setup elsewhere.”
“Yeah?” K looks distracted, looks away. (Looking back on it now, I wonder if K was stoned.) “But we should check.”
Check with who? I think we’re running late here.
I propose a tiered setup—last act near the back of the stage, first act at the front—that way as the evening proceeds, we can just hop out of the way of the next act. K thinks that’s reasonable, but, in a moment of anxiety, adds, “but we should check with [the Big Stars].”
The big Big Stars are nowhere to be seen!
We’re scheduled to start within an hour. I try to make eye contact: “Are you in charge?”
“We should wait.”
“Okay,” I turn away, “you’re not in charge.”

MK and I setup on what appears to be the stage. If we need to move later, we can move later.
Because K’s prevarications, we start a whole hour late. The Big Stars, being Big Stars, of course do not turn up until their start time and K has delayed the setup and soundcheck until then.
I didn’t sign up for this: this is not why I became a musician.
The two noodlers who were warming-up for an hour, dutifully open the ceremonies by doing exactly what they’d been doing for the last hour for an audience that had been (unbelievably) patiently waiting, having heard it the first time around (thankfully, they only play for twenty minutes).

I cannot believe how patient and forgiving the audience was on that night.

At the end, as we exit The Stink, we get paid cash—pocket money—pennies. Deduct transport, deduct the meal before hand….
On the journey back home, I loose it, and scream that we’d been fucked, and that the audience had been screwed and taken for a ride. This is not why I became a musician.

Thankfully, there is no record of this event. (Although, prior to the actual event, it got listed as, if I remember correctly, the Jazz Event of the Week in the local free tabloid. Hahaha.)

free labor

New place, new people. Not getting paid, but the new place might offer future possibilities. (I’m being the optimist; you’d think I’d learned by now.)
Exciting.
I turn up. Nice venue (an art gallery), and the curator’s very friendly (although the initial phone call had rubbed me the wrong way: “Yes, I must have your music”).
Set-up is smooth—I get carte blanche on how and where. Meet the artists (I’m playing for an opening). Interesting people; we banter without doing too much of the odious networking stuff.

Then the moment It Turns.

The curator calls to me. “You know about computers, don’t you?”
“Er…um, well….”
“Well, let me show you….” The curator invites me to the office. “I need to lay this out in a nice way.” There’s some page layout that needs to fixed for the evening's festivities. “You know how to do this…?”
“Well, uh… maybe… um,” I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. “Are you going to pay me for this?” I remind the curator that I’m not being paid for the performance, that the performance is already a Big Favor.
The curator is pissed.
“I’ll show you,” I add, “talk you through what to do, but… but I’m not going to do this; I won’t do this unless you pay me.” I still can’t quite believe what’s happening.
Bad feelings all ’round for the rest of the evening, but I still don’t understand why the curator was pissed.

On the other hand, I think my anger was justified.

No more freebies (I wish I could say that with a little more conviction).

recovering from keithy-poo jarrett

Apologies: this is a scatterbrained post that I managed to fit in my break from the paperwork.

Hopefully the above youtubified clip will help all of us (perhaps including DJA who feels he “inadvertently opened a can of worms”) relax after The Keith Jarrett Incident. (…But, no, I don’t know why Williams’ hands are never shown.)
Talking about pianists, thanks to the ‘HurdAudio Rotations’, I got introduced to the music of Paul Plimley who has a track entitled ‘We Got Noh Rhythm’.
This reminded me of when I was a (young and stupid college student) Composer (capital ‘C’), and I had this silly idea that, if I could fuse the ventilated rhythms of Feldman with the dramatic tone-deafness (and I mean that in the nicest way) of Xenakis, I’d have found my niche. ’Course I failed (anyone who’s ever tried even a cursory analysis of the above score-makers’ works will know why). I did eventually manage something a little like this, but in improvisation, not in composition. The sound world I arrived at was on parallel docks with Noh (what Zappa called Science Fiction Music)….

Apropos of nothing, Jeff Albert offers some fine audio recordings for download.
(Incidentally, in light of Paul Rutherford’s passing, a question: what is it about trombonists improvisers? why do they seem (grossly generalizing for a moment) more extravagant and extrovert? and why are half my—a guitar player’s—favorite improvisers trombonists?)
Finally, Andrew Durkin (under the perhaps unfair label ‘navel-gazing’) has a personal/political/idiosyncratic take on bodies and music (something that interests me also, but under a much more straightforward label—‘body’).

That’s my break from my administrative duties over: back to work….

thoughts from a jazz recital

Still crazy here at TIG & MLM central, so the blog posts will be erratic at best for the time being…. Anyway, I was listening in on a student recital in the jazz division (not my class you understand—I was just an audience member), and a few things caught my ear.

complex heads, simple heads

I admired the group’s courage in tacking some pretty tricky material (a Joshua Redman piece which I wasn’t familiar with). A bit of a gamble by the performers since the head was pretty intricate, and, as I suspected, their solos didn’t quite live up to that level of complexity. It did get me wondering about some of the harmonically elaborate compositions of Coltrane and (earlier) Shorter, say, and how the melodies of those were often quite simple.
Take ‘Giant Steps’ or ‘Countdown’: were the simple ‘melodies’ (which, given their simplicity, almost seems like the wrong word for it) engineered to subdue expectations about the solo? Given the difficulty and, as Evan Parker calls it, ‘problem solving’ nature of the changes, did Coltrane create low-key melodies so that the solo would be a shock of energy? Did he fear that writing complex melodies would make the soloist’s job, given the experimental nature of the changes, untenable?

(Later, most notably in jazz-rock and fusion, you’d start getting intricate ‘melodies’ (and considering their complexity, that also seems like the wrong word for it) over similar changes, but with the promise of solos that were of an even greater bravado of virtuosity, but that’s another story….)

(Another solution might be, admittedly from a rock sensibility, Zappa’s in which the solo only tangentially had anything to do with the ‘head’. The rhythmic and harmonic riot of ‘Approximate’ followed by a riotous guitar solo over a relatively straightforward r’n’b groove, for example. That’s, however, definitely another story….)

jazz: year zero

Listening to the bass player walking in a pre-Carter, pre-Holland manner, the question that came to my mind was why does so much of jazz pedagogy take its year zero as 1945 (±10 years)?
Okay, we all learned jazz guitar from, say, Freddie Green onwards, but does that make sense in terms of careers—in terms of developing an individual sound—in this latter-day jazz context? We could take the model of Tal Farlow as the starting point, or Wes Montgomery. But there’s also a certain logic to taking, perhaps, John Abercrombie as a starting point. As far as I can hear (and I know I’m on very slippery ground saying this), we are living in an after-Abercrombie jazz guitar environment.

(Hey, I might be tempted to start with Nix or Sharrock, but that probably disqualifies me as a jazz guitarist ;-)

There’s an argument that goes, well, the earlier traditions—their methodologies, their practices—shaped what followed, and to understand the latter entails first learning the former (e.g. Abercrombie’s sound was informed by his models). Well, fine, however, although we could arbitrarily turn the pedagogical clock as far back as the historical record enables, we don’t do that in practice for pragmatic reasons: life, at school and after, is too short. Neither Charlie Christian nor Django Reinhardt feature much in orthodox teaching literature, for example, for, I imagine, this reason. (Tangentially, I’m not sure that learning to ape Palestrina, as interesting in itself as it may be, is going to help a budding West European composer find their place in an after-Lachenmann sensibility.) We all learn by choosing some arbitrary (historical) starting point, and shift and skip (forwards/backwards) as the learning experience takes us.
Additionally, we (mainstream jazz audiences) don’t generally expect young(er) jazz musicians to sound like old-timers. We expect them to come from an after-Shorter, after-Jarrett, after-Carter, after-DeJohnette common practice. Very few young(er) jazz musicians are asked to perform in the ‘older-style’ unless as some kind of post-modern pantomime act, or as a house band for visiting elder luminaries (and, as that generation departs to that great club in the sky, I’ve heard less and less of these over the years). Certainly very, very, very few of the jazz musicians I know play ’bop anymore (but maybe I just have weird friends).

Even the neo-classicists take (and now I’m on extremely slippery ground) The Jazz Messengers (c. 1960) as their year zero.

Furthermore, a vibrant local scene gains international recognition, not through its ability to pastiche, but through its display of some distinct take on this common practice (e.g. the recent rise in visibility of many Scandinavian jazz musicians).
So why is so much of formal jazz education still stuck in the Aebersold time-line?

(BTW, I’m talking about ‘mainstream’ jazz here, sidestepping the question of how, as Bailey asks, Ayler’s music could be distilled into a ‘method’. Also, I’ve only witnessed formal jazz education at three institutions (admittedly in three different countries), so this might not be representative.)

it’s electric, dummy!

The notion that an electric guitar is just an amplified version of an acoustic has done no good whatsoever to the teaching of that instrument. Come on, man, turn up the amp, and pick lighter!

locating the music: past|present|future tense

Still being distracted from that ‘real’ writing I should be doing, but….

This started at surviving the crunch. Well, the entry ‘the past sure is tense’ had this interesting phrase:

At some point in antiquity music only existed in the present tense.

Which is what I queried about. Ted Reichman posted an entry as a reply, and here’s my own response (and some clarification of my short and vague original query).

I understand that TR was “making up these terms as [he] went along,” but sometimes hiding away in little slips like these are the stuff of our culture—how we think about, categorize, and order. It is the kind of thing that, on one occasion, I might say, and, on another occasion, I might question. I queried the statement not because I have any answers, but because it intersects with issues that I’m interested in. Furthermore, since we’ve been handed down a set of beliefs, frameworks and vocabularies to talk about music that might not be one hundred per cent applicable to a given musical practice (in improvised musics, for example), these may be issues that radically affect how we practice and discuss music.
Much musicological discourses, for instance, depend the ‘work’ concept, and values teleological structures. It strikes me, however, that performance, and improvisation in particular, can mess with our ‘normal’ notions of causality and temporality, and question (at the very least) the discrete, autonomous nature of the ‘work.’

I hope this is okay with TR, but I’m not going to reply directly to his entry, but instead use small sections of it as a bounce off point for examining some of these issues, and maybe clarifying (to myself) why I might have asked the question in the first place.

…Until people invented any forms of musical notation, recording etc. and thus became able to fix music, or at least an abstracted representation of music, into a durable physical form, if a specific piece of music, or even a way of making music, faded from the memory of every individual who ever knew it or heard it, poof, it was gone.

As a practicing improviser, I’m pretty sure TR doesn’t mean it in this way, but if we accept this at face value, we’re only a stone’s throw from saying what the very old edition of the Grove Dictionary said:

It [extemporization or improvisation] is… the primitive act of music-making…. Among all primitive peoples… musical composition consists of extemporization subsequently memorized, and the process can proceed no farther until some method of notation is devised to record the composer’s musical thoughts independently of his musical performance. [my emphasis]

entry on ‘extemporization or improvisation’ in Eric Blom ed. (1954), The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 5th ed. vol. II, 1975 reprint, (London: MacMillan Press), p. 89.

I wonder if we’ve all been brainwashed here. As performers (and improvisers) do we want to accept these terms? Is improvisation a “primitive act”? Is the recording process the route towards progress/evolution?
Having said all this, I think TR articulates the core issue in the following statement:

We wouldn't be able to do this historical examination without the recorded evidence.

True, true, true, but the most basic recording device/technology in this case has nothing to do directly with those that we have been citing (audio recording and notation). The “applying [of] a set of contemporary ideas, canonizing, critiquing in hindsight” can be done with just two things: Memory and language (floating in a soup of society and culture).

…but I still remember the musical material of this concert (and so do John and Matt because we still talk about it)…

All of which is activated by memory and language (feeding-off of, and feeding-back on, society and culture). You are, in more than one sense, ‘re-experiencing it’ and ‘re-creating it.’ TR is in this case, perhaps, “applying a set of contemporary ideas, canonizing, critiquing in hindsight.”

some unanswered questions:

Am I asking if recording is constitutive or constructed?
Does ‘recorded’ music have “meta-existence”?

I am saying that it existed at that historical moment, and not at others, as molecules vibrating either in the air (active expression), or in peoples' brain cells (memory).

How about if I paraphrase this thus: All music (including ‘recorded’ music) exists at a historical moment as molecules vibrating either in the air, or in peoples’ brain cells.

…a piece of music has been fixed in a physical form that will outlive the people who performed and heard that piece of music, it exists in the past tense. Not that it _existed_, which assumes that at some point it ceased to exist, but that it's simultaneously existing NOW, in physical form, and THEN, in the act of composition (in the case of notation) or performance (in the case of recording).

Okay we need to extricate a couple of (interdependent) issues here.
1. What is “a piece of music”? Does this construction depend on the ‘work’—non-real-time, finite length, single author, autonomous—concept? Or can we define a ‘piece’ to encompass, say, improvised musics as well? In which case, is that redefinition of boundaries unproblematic? If it is problematic, what are the consequences of accepting this redefinition of boundaries?
2. What do we mean by the past and present tense? What are we assuming about causality?

engineering ritual: a curious case of the body in concert

I came across this interesting entry at Mixed Meters. The performance in question is by Debora Petrina—a self-identified ‘polymorphic artist.’ (Incidentally there’s an un-YouTubified version of the video in question on her site. YouTubified video.)
I’ve got no special insight into the specific whys or whats of Petrina’s performance, but what I find fascinating about this is the idea of self-consciously engineering the body and movement into the (concert) performance ritual.

Much of performance ritual gets handed down, and, perhaps in European Concert Music more than in any other tradition, without thought or critique. “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it”—never mind that, as anthropologists will tell you, such statements are (powerful) fiction. A stark example of this might be in acousmatiques in which the concert hall context and metaphor was accepted and (super-)imposed without, apparently, discussion or dissent.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that these rituals and context can (should?) be (re)examined, and the process of opening up these black boxes might reveal the unfamiliar, the unorthodox, and the complex (all good creative stuff).
I also find the self-conscious visibility of the body in this performance compelling—the body in motion as a site of creation, maybe. As discussed by Suzanne Cusick, European Concert Music has come to value the mind over the body, attempting to exorcise the body out of the Concert Hall:

The ideology of listening… strongly discourages physical engagement when listening. Even more, it discourages identification with the bodily work of performers. [my emphasis]

Cusick, 1999, p. 495.

Again, think of the ‘all ears,’ discorporate, mind-to-mind model embedded in much acousmatiques.

As each discouragement draws the listener’s identification away from the physical, it directs it towards the imaginative mastery of all possible combinations embodied by ‘the music itself’. Socially mobile, freed from physical work, seeming to encompass all possibilities in a unified whole… a sonic experience of the middle-class self.

Ibid., p. 495.

By making the body invisible, we’re positing a vanilla, mayonnaise, ‘universal’ human, but the result is, ironically, very much gender, race, class and culture specific.
I’ve briefly touched on the body in performance, and also on the hegemonic, European musical orthodoxy, so I won’t go into much more detail here other than to add that the West European Concert Music Tradition “is suspicious of the body, of real-time movement, and of the possibility of creation taking place during performance or reception.”

Okay let’s get a few things out of the way before I end up playing critic…. I have no idea if any of this is necessarily what Petrina is attempting to do, and there’s plenty of cool things about the performance. Additionally, I don’t know these Feldman scores at all. But this performance (at least this isolated sample) is interesting: It brings up issues that are significant to those of us who do want to (re)examine and (re)engineer performance rituals, and it also flags up potential pitfalls in trying to (re)introduce and (re)activate the body into these contexts.
Here’s what I find problematic about Petrina’s performance: The dance is basically auxiliary to the movement (sanctioned to be) necessary for the ‘music itself’—that which is “free of any verbal or dramatic association or explicit social function” (ibid., p. 493). I don’t mean that the whole should be unified or anything as silly as that. Nor do I have problems with juxtapositions and contrasts (hey, I’d use the word ‘dialectical’ if I knew what it meant). However the relationship between the ‘music itself’ and the performer remains largely uni-directional. In other words, the ‘music itself’ is allowed to dictate the parameters of movement (when and how much bodily movement is possible/practical) while the body remains servant and passive to the dictates of the ‘music itself’.
Ultimately it leaves intact the orthodoxy of European Concert Music; leaves unexamined the single-author, non-real-time, autonomous work. Rather than blowing open the Concert Hall ritual, rather than problematizing the score or the ‘music itself,’ it reinforces these elements (in a similar way to Cage’s 4'33") by allowing the corporeal infection to be carefully quarantined to those areas that do not affect performance practice or the ‘music itself.’

I wonder, in a sense, if it is no more or less transformative than the (gentle) irreverence of Victor Borge (I don’t mean that as an insult at all).

…Hey, but I could be wrong. (Boy, do I hate playing critic.)

references:

Cusick, Suzanne (1999), ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

updates:

03–28–07: Add link to YouTube video.

an application of the principles of canon formation

Things I’ve learned from The Cambridge History of 20th Century Music:

• In post-World War II modernism, Boulez, Cage and Stockhausen ruled the world. The effect of Berio, Brown, Nono (oh, what a problematic Marxist composer), etc were less significant.
• There were two divisions of neo-classicism. One was a one-man movement that included Stravinsky. Everyone else was in the other movement.
• Free improvisation was invented by European Concert Music composers.
• Live electronic music was invented by John Cage.
• Which, by the way, like almost all music in the 20th century, was a guy thing.
• Free jazz was invented by Coltrane (or was it Coleman).
• Cecil Taylor got his music from the conservatory.
• Almost all developments in modern jazz were initiated by Miles Davis.
• Anti-semitism was devastating, but the plantations were only a minor inconvenience for the slaves. (Although the really disastrous thing, apparently, about anti-semitism was having to leave your home.)
• Musicologists can decide to discuss a limited set of historical actors on the following grounds: “…the pre-eminence of those discussed here was not, and has not (so far) been, seriously challenged….”
• Apparently the phrase “hierarchic organicism” means something.
• After Darmstadt, and a few false starts, there was only pre-minimalism, minimalism and post-minimalism. (A bit like pre-classicism, classicism and post-classicism?)
• Vinko Globokar is a composer and performer, but not an improviser.
• White people do not have race.
• Misha Mengelberg is a composer, and Ornette Coleman is a jazz musician/improviser.
• Women composers teach (e.g. Boulinger), are taught (e.g. Saunders), or just follow trends (e.g. Oliveros). This is in contrast to Boulez/Cage/Stockhausen, etc who come to the world as fully formed autonomous individuals. (Somehow Gubaidulina is an exception to this.)

the score, the authority of

By the way, some weeks ago I saw the damnedest thing. One of the best things I'd witnessed in a while, and one of the worst… on the same bill. The second act was so baaaaaaad that MLM and I just packed up and left after barely three minutes. I mean, it was lame, lame, lame… lame.
Well, okay, we've all been spectators to lousy performances, so why am I writing about this one? It brought out something interesting in the audience’s reactions, illustrating something about our desires and expectations of music and performance in a way significant to those of us who practice improvisation and not-one-hundred-per-cent-idiomatic performance practice, and, in particular, those of us who sometimes perform for skeptical, unversed, and/or hostile audiences.
During the first act (the one that MLM and I thought rocked), the audience in general was unruly, loud, boisterous. Actually, I didn’t mind too much (I’ve played clubs with worse), but for MLM (who is more familiar with concert audiences) it was a major distraction. But, like I said, I really did not mind the audience’s general unruliness. However, here’s the deal, come the second act…

silence

Well, actually the silence followed several “shhhh” noises (from, as far as we could tell, some of the the same loudmouthed individuals from the first half), which in turn followed on from comments such as “this bodes well: They have a bass player.”
So what triggered this self-imposed, self-policed reverent silence? What cued these individuals—who were more than happy to mumble, talk, laugh and shuffle ’round during the previous act?

I think they were responding to the music stands.

Both acts, IMHO, displayed a certain lack of presentation skills and theatrical know-how. The second act was certainly not more ‘professional’ or ‘serious’ (for starters the guitar player spent the whole of the setup time noodling away with the amp turned up)…

…but, hey, they at least were (apparently) ready to read from parts.

I’m not about to do a ranting piece of ‘the state of culture in our society.’ I don’t believe that this audience was stupid. I might be persuaded that they’re not fully conscious of what they were doing and why, probably unaware of the implication of their actions and behavior, but I don’t believe they were acting out of ignorance per se. Our little cultural economies put enormous value on texts, scores, parts and notation, and put enormous value on traditions and practices that employ these texts, scores, parts and notation (however much that may be a pantomime act). The audience that night were responding to this. They knew the second act had greater worth.
They weren’t dumb, they just weren’t thinking.

structur(e|ing): towards a music(ology) of verbs

I’ve briefly touched on the subject of ‘structure’ (October 11th and October 3rd). In regard to structure imposed from outside, as I said in limits and boundaries: wikiality that

I don’t believe that this particular understanding of ‘structure’ is helpful to the practice of improvisation. Nor do I have much affinity with the desire for this ‘structure.’

We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects.

Head to your library and look up musical structure or form and you are likely to come away with ideas of a framework around which the musical ‘surface detail’ somehow sits (although why it should generally be that way around, I’ve never understood). ‘Surface detail’ is noise to be filtered out by the analyst out to excavate the essential; never mind that the details might contain, in the terms of the vernacular, an iconic lick, the hook, swing or shuffle. It’s appropriate that traditional analysis, stemming from West European orthodoxy, should gravitate towards glorifying the inanimate musical skeleton, rather than tendons and muscle, seeing everything else as extraneous fat. This is, after all, a reductive tradition of scholarship and pedagogy with a hegemonic commitment. A tradition that is suspicious of the body, of real-time movement, and of the possibility of creation taking place during performance or reception. Structure and form, in this context, can only be teleological, it cannot exist either retroactively or in real-time. Traditional analysis sees objects; it has difficulty seeing processes.
John Law describes this difficulty. Here’s my paraphrase:

Perhaps it is obvious that the musical is a process? Perhaps it is something that we knew already? It sounds obvious, but I’m not certain about this, for large parts of musicology have found it difficult to handle processes. Perhaps this is a symptom of the desire to cleave to the purity of order and avoid the uncertainties of ordering. For one way of putting the point is to note that musicologists, like many others, tend to prefer to deal in nouns rather than verbs. They slip into assuming that musical structure is an object, like the scaffolding round a building, that will stay in place once it has been erected.

my paraphrase of Law, 1994, p. 14.

John Law was in fact talking about the social. Substitute ‘social’ for ‘musical,’ ‘sociology’ for ‘musicology,’ and ‘sociologists’ for ‘musicologists,’ and you’ve reconstructed the original text. (He is also defining sociologist broadly to encompass all of us who have a stake in how society functions (or not) and, here, I use musicologist in a similarly broad manner. We are, in a sense, all musicologists.)
Let me return to this idea of group improvisation as society in miniature. Traditional macro-sociology tends to see a top-down, ideology or system driven society. But is this the best way of accounting for social forces? Can we, for example, hold on to this top-down, monolithic ideological drive as being responsible for the recent anti-war demonstrations in which disparate groups including white bourgeois liberals, radical socialists, disenfranchised black activists, left-wing jewish pacifists, secular feminists and conservative muslim groups temporarily and uneasily made an alliance?
Similarly, traditional musicology tends to see a top-down, composition-centered structure. But is this the best description of the musical? Do the assumptions underlying this view point hold up to scrutiny? Are interpreters neutral? Is performance transparent? Are audiences passive? Is the composer the creator? Is structure pre-ordained? Can we hold on to this top-down, monolithic composerly process as being responsible for collective music making practices such as group improvisation (or the relationship between instrumentalist and instrument)?
Leaving aside, for the moment, whether this form of analysis—looking for the essential structure (object) in a piece of music (another object)—produces valid results, what are the political implications of it? If structure is unified, monolithic, has a single source—the composer or the score—and is located in the discorporate, non-real-time ‘music itself’ (Cusick, 1999, pp. 480–482, 491–496)—then difference and dissent can only express itself as noise (that should be filtered out by the analyst). Or, more likely, the other way around: West European orthodoxy assumes that dynamic, heterogeneous, interactive social networks cannot be structured, and thus concludes, I believe erroneously, that the only kind of structure must be unified, fixed, consistent and uni-directional.

We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects. But there’s another way to understand these words. Instead of seeing them as nouns, we can think of these as verbs; we can think of structuring and forming.

Thinking about structure as something we do has implications for the idea of group improvisation as society in miniature. Society (and structure) is, as Bruno Latour argues, “not what holds us together, but what is held together” (Latour, 1986, p. 276). There are some interesting possibilities in thinking about difference, dissent and resistance in this model (as well as some worrying libertarian implications).
Thinking about this bottom-up impulse in improvisation, this performative structure, it’s interesting to revisit the quote I started this blog with: “…Avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be” (Frost and Yarrow, 1990, p. 3).

There are racial, colonial, and gender dimensions to the orthodox West European approach to analysis, but that will have to wait for another post….

I may be shot down in flames for this, but… I sometimes wonder if the difference between composerly and performerly notions of structure are analogous to, say, how Creationists and Darwinists view biological organisms and ecosystems. The former observes the commonality and diversity, simplicity and complexity, and sees design, and concludes, well, yes, of course there is a Creator. The latter observes the same commonality and diversity, simplicity and complexity, and finds the results of natural selection. The former posits a top-down, engineered world crammed full of authorial intent, while the latter assumes a bottom-up, performative world teeming with emergence.

references:

Cusick, Suzanne (1999), ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Frost, Anthony, and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan).
Law, John (1994), Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell).
Latour, Bruno (1986), ‘The Power of associations’ in John Law (ed) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge).

updates:

11–13–06: Patch in Cusick (1999) reference.
11–30–06: Correct editing errors from the last update.
02–05–07: Correct a reference.

group improvisation: a question of leader(ship)

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Something interesting happened in class this week. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to handle this. I don’t mean to sound negative; I’m fascinated that this turned up, and, anyway, we’d probably have to deal with this issue at some point… I just hoped that that some point would have been some point in the future (like, quite a few months into the future).

The word that encapsulates this issue is leader(ship).

Don’t see the problem?
Well…
That is one loaded word.
Did I say loaded? I meant there’s full-scale, über-density, hyper-congestion embedded in that little word.
Do we mean commander? The executive? Administrator or manager? The MC? Or the referee? The prompter? Possibly we mean trailblazer or the pathfinder. That who-is-followed, perhaps? (Tautological, I know.) Or might we mean coach, midwife, guide, sage?
I suppose because of my own views about group improvisation, and the particular practices and traditions I operate in and around of, I think, naively, that I was expecting this issue to be inconsequential to the students as well.
There you have it. The teacher was spectacularly wrong, flummoxed, fill-in-blank.
Okay. Now the bright side of all of this is the idea, unspoken as such by the students themselves but articulated nonetheless, that group improvisation is in some way society-in-miniature. A big topic that I need to return to in the future, but let me say this much here: Somewhere hiding behind the question of the leader(s) and of leadership was that notion that we can parse, discuss, and maybe understand collective improvisation sociologically. That maybe there is no difference between creative, musical interaction and social interaction in general.
When asked to think of the social or the political, we maybe instinctively think of the macro-social, the party-political, of contests, votes, elections, and ‘tough decisions.’ Of leaders and leadership. (And I think this was what the students were doing.) But the social and the political may also be the small, the intimate, the informal, the ad-hoc. Perhaps all we have to do, for the time being, is to imagine social contexts in which the concept of leadership is peripheral, or even irrelevant.

limits and boundaries: wikiality

An interesting and problematic article from Wikipedia on musical improvisation (archived version in case of changes).

Improvisation can be structured, with certain rules constraining the improvisation (for example, "make up a song about bicycles", "use these chord changes", and so on), or can have no such constraints.

As I wrote in a previous post there’s an assumption that structure comes from outside, and that ‘limits’ carry out that structuring. Additionally, the Wikipedia entry implies that improvisation without constraint results in a performance with no structure.
I don’t believe that this particular understanding of ‘structure’ is helpful to the practice of improvisation. Nor do I have much affinity with the desire for this ‘structure.’ As for alternative definitions of ‘structure,’ I’ll save that for a more extensive post….

A couple of other things about the article. How is it that the writers can state that improvisation has been “an integral part of music since the beginning of music,” yet suggest that improvisation is distinct or separate from the “conventional approach” to musical performance? I also wonder if improvisers would agree that what they do is play in an “offhand manner.”

why improvise? redux

We addressed the question in class last week.
One person responded that improvisation was exciting, that you don’t (or can’t) get this kind of excitement elsewhere.
This reminds me of a discussion I had a few years ago with AMC—a friend and musician. We were discussing the purpose of improvisation, and, for AMC, spontaneity—the ‘real-time’ element—was an important part of the answer. The social dimension only really works because of the immediacy in interaction.
I’m now wondering if the notions of the social, the spontaneous, and the ‘edge’ are more closely tied together than I may have implied….

When the class moved on to ask in what ways improvisation was different from other forms of music making, a couple of interesting words turned up: ‘Perfection’ and ‘control.’ Composition, say, had the potential to move towards ‘perfection’ in a way that was, apparently, unavailable in improvisation. Additionally, as an improviser, you have less ‘control’ in comparison to someone who creates/manipulates texts/scores.
I apologize to the class for potentially misrepresenting them here (the word ‘perfection’ was, for example, quickly withdrawn), but I think these words are interesting. The words we use were, in many cases, developed to talk about different musical practices (e.g. a composition-interpretation model), and we sometimes stumble and fall over when talking about improvisation. I want to tackle these issues in more depth in a future post, but for now, all I want to say is that whatever ‘perfection’ is, and whatever ‘control’ might entail, each of these words carries with them a rich baggage of ideology and rhetoric which may or may not be helpful to the improviser.

limits and boundaries, purpose of

At some point or another improvisers come across the idea of ‘improvising within limits.’ Sometimes the rationale given for working within limits is that such limits give ‘structure,’ as if the presence of, or desire for, ‘structure’ (whatever that is) was somehow justification enough. A strangely circular logic that feels to me like the result of a composerly desire rather than a performerly one. (I will return to this idea of structure in a future post.)
Nevertheless, the success of schemes using limits and boundaries may convince the aspiring improviser to buy this justification.
What’s wrong here?
Well, nothing, except that the aspiring improviser may begin to worry more about the limits themselves rather than the qualities that made those improvisations successful. If they aren’t careful, instead of varied, high-contrast, information-rich performances, they will end up with performances that amount to little more than ‘Demonstrations of Limits.’
Schemes, strategies and scores that invoke limits on the improvisation are successful not because they impose ‘structure,’ but because they allow the improviser to take flight beyond known limits. They enable the permeation to other (technical or cultural) areas that had previously seemed inaccessible.
Or put it another way, temporary acknowledgment of one boundary allows for renegotiations of others.
For example, by improvising on a fixed set of pitch intervals, an improviser may discover a larger set of possibilities in other areas in, say, dynamics, timbre, complexity, spirituality or silliness.
Improvisation is a liminal act, and we are trying to find out exactly how porous the boundaries are. Limits should mean that other parameters (not under self-imposed bounds) should be explored, maybe uninhibited, bordering on the riotous, embracing diversity and, perhaps, contradiction.
With that in mind, we’re in a good position to examine and explore some of these limits and boundaries.