broken families

“Did you know how loud you were?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“I thought you did.”

[Read the rest…]

the grant application algorithm rev. 1.0.0

For FS.

A very simple algorithm:

1. Choose ‘edgy,’ trendy words and phrases that the arts organizations currently love (e.g. ‘collaborative’, ‘sustainability’, ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘defamiliarize’, ‘hybrids’).

2. Lay those words down as if on a scrabble table.

2.5. Optional: get intoxicated / stoned.

3. Try linking those words to make sentences (actual resemblance to grammar is purely coincidental).

4. Make sure targets and goals are not measurable (how exactly can you compute ‘artistic practice’?).

5. Voila! A completed grant application for the arts.

…Yeah, I was talking to a theater stage manager who hit the nail on the head: “arts funding is turning artists into liars.” Too true.

opportunities

There’s no such thing as a wrong note, just (missed) opportunities.

the three ages of jazz pt. 0: middle age

free jazz central

This gig was, well, not exactly hard work, but it definitely wasn’t effortless. Fun and educational, but it kept me on my toes.
Just before we start, I confessed to JS (the other guitarist) that it’s been about ten years since I shared the stage with another guitarist. Before the gig, I’d expected that impressing (or at least not pissing-off) the elders (one of whom a friend referred to, half-tongue-in-cheek, as a ‘giant’) in the ensemble would be my main concern, but by the end of the first set, I’m surprised as anyone that just about all I was worried about was staying out of the other guitarist’s way.
Actually, that’s pretty much sums up my tactic for the evening (and, I believe, JS’ as well).
Electric guitars are mid-range heavy. That’s fine in that ’bop setting in which the ride fills up the top end, fine in ’metal where the mid’s scooped out, but in this drummer-less improv setting, JS and I are in danger of creating an oppressive sound (especially as neither the horns nor the bass are going to add much above a few kHz).
After the gig, MH (who was there listening) tells me that all guitarists seem to have a love-hate relationship with their instrument. I respond that I love the physical/physiological relationship with the guitar—not every instrument rests against (hugs) your body while allowing for more-or-less full mobility of your arms—but the ‘sound’ (the raw audio content), well, that’s the problem; it just doesn’t always sit very well in an ensemble.
By the beginning of the second set, both JS and I feel like we’re running out of ideas. Between, Arto, Berne, Bill, Derek and Fred, say… or Annette and Keith… or Jimi, David and Sonny… isn’t that pretty much the scope of improvising guitar(ists)? What I mean by that is, as far as breeds of latter-day improvisers go, electric guitarist have a relatively small pool of models. At one point JS plays something, and I think, wait, I could do that too. I stop myself; it’s tempting, but I don’t think I would have been adding anything to the mix by aping JS doing a pseudo-Derek.

By the way, how’s this for the economics of free jazz: I sold a few CDs, but gave away just as many. Conclusion: it’s a good thing I’m not an accountant.

After the gig, a few of us journey on to witness jazz’s adolescent stage…

lessons learned and have yet to learn

Playing half a dozen gigs ain’t gonna kill me, but curating and co-organizing two-thirds of an event is really taking a lot of time and effort. The cautionary tales from AF and MP are echoing in my head (you don’t have to remind me). This blog has suffered from this administrative load, but, to remind myself that I still do musical things, here’s a short list of things I’m learning at the moment.

lessons learned

it’s okay to start in the same place (a lesson learned from listening, watching and following George E. Lewis)
The start point for an improvisation can be as significant or as arbitrary as you want. It is, after all, the journey (what you make of the situation) that we’re really interested in.

it’s okay to repeat yourself (from Keith Tippett and Julie Tippetts)
Let’s face it: even if you did exactly the same thing the context is going to be different. (That’s the reason trying to get the same effect as last night is going to end in disappointment.)

what i’m just discovering

sometimes the simplest interactive strategies are the most effective (from Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley)
They are some of the hardest things to understand and the easiest to hear.

what i’d like to learn

take your time (from John Butcher)
It should be a privilege to experience the performance; why rush it?

something i’ve been trying to learn for over ten years

you don’t fill the spaces (from Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith… and Pauline Oliveros… and Morton Feldman… and Luciano Berio… and Miles Davis… and Noh… and Alfred Hitchcock)
I feel no closer to this than ten years ago: I have this terrible habit of filling up spaces.

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 ;-)

improvising coherence

Just read a review: I’m apparently less “coherent” than the next musician. Should I be insulted? After all, I’m not the biggest fan of coherence.
…Or at least the pursuit there of, for, in a sense, there might be no such thing as coherence. And that’s the thing—there’re discourses, and there’re discourses—if the terms ‘coherence’ and ‘incoherence’ don’t describe reality (whatever, and wherever, that might be), but construct a dichotomy (present / not-present; have / have-not; coherence / lack-of-coherence) through which we make value judgments, then, back to my first question: should I be insulted?

And is coherence something that you can hear?

playing irresponsibly: addendum

One more borderline irresponsible thing I did that I forgot to mention in the last post: at one point in the performance, I set up a steady little pulse (a simple additive ditty). We went with that a little while, but when the drummer joined in, I switched to a much more elastic time feel.
By this time I had a feeling that the drummer tended to follow the ‘leader’—autonomy was not the strong point of the evening—and had a taste for the regular pulse (nothing wrong with that, I do too). I suspected they wouldn’t, but I hoped that the drummer would pick-up on that pulse, keep it going, even as I and the rest of the ensemble (who also tended to play sheep) dropped it.

Didn’t happen.

In the end, the drummer just sheepishly dropped out altogether.

Was I being a stinker?

playing irresponsibly: a moderately weird situation

Just did a gig. The group / collective / band in question, for whatever reason, couldn’t get their numbers up. So I get a call: I get to be the outsourced labor.
In the end I only play for, I don’t know, five, ten minutes—one ‘piece’.

Weird feeling.

My playing of late has been divided between the solo context; ad-hoc, getting-to-know-one-another musical meetings; and reunions with old musical comrades. If you’re playing any significant duration of time (a performance that lasts, say, twenty minutes or longer), you really need to pace yourself. Especially in solo playing, it helps to be judicious with the deployment of atoms / gestures / lexical elements (a lesson learned from For Alto). And there’s a certain tactical advantage in holding your cards close to your chest in novel musical encounters.
On the other hand, the gig I just did (those five, ten minutes) was weird. Knowing that I had only a few minutes, knowing that I was unlikely to be invited back up on stage, I let rip—threw everything (well, not quite everything) out there. With all the chips on the table, I could afford to play a little recklessly. I mean, what did I have to loose?
Bizarre. Was that a responsible thing to do? Probably not, but it felt oddly liberating.

thoughts from a concert

preconcert

Does TA know everyone in this town?

Audience demographics: about 3-to-1 male-to-female, fairly broad age range (possibly not many below their twenties, however), predominantly white (although I’ve seen worse).

support act

That’s a strange choice for a support band.
Do large (very much formal) venues have separate committees for the A and B acts? Do these committees program their acts largely independently, and then try and match the acts as best as possible?
I enjoyed performances by this band in the past, but I’ve brought the wrong set of ears tonight.

MLM’s comment: “I’d hate to be in their shoes.”

Oh god. I hope those balloons weren’t meant as a homage.

main performance

I am so glad I could witness this. [Warning: upcoming tasteless comment] I am in the presence of giants.
Interesting tactics: elements that ‘sound’ serendipitous are actually prepared, each musician picking-up on, and capitalizing on, cues from the other, (retroactively) making it sound like their individual gestures are internally consistent while ‘magically’ matching each other’s.
I know a lot of their moves. Not enough for it to be useful if I were (heaven forbid) on stage with them, and certainly not in the way they can (ir)rationally respond and anticipate each other, but, nonetheless, I know a lot of their moves.
I wish my students were here.

Wow.
Wow! That was cool!

They’re using a tape…?
Is that a tape part…?
…no…?
…that’s the clarinet?!?
Oh. My. God. If you can do that with a clarinet, why would anyone want to (or be compelled to) use a laptop?
I am in the presence of giants. [Apologies for that second tasteless outburst.]
I am lost in the moment.
Questions: does being in the position of having played with the two nominal ‘leaders’ (with formidable egos) put you in the position of negotiator / mediator? Does that position endow you with privileges / powers / controls / responsibilities—look one way, one possible ensemble; look the other, another?
Power flows though the negotiator. MLM: “But he’s hardly playing anything.”
This is dense: compelling, complex, and flying dangerously and dramatically close to the moosh.
I see logic in the choice of reeds. During this dense moment, a sopranino will hover far, far above the rest of the ensemble’s sound space, out of everyone’s way.
How the hell do you break out of this noise? What could possibly put the breaks on this system without creating an anti-climax?
That’s how.
A ‘false’ ending, and / but a little tactical flourish to put the breaks down. (And—feels almost magical—the audience conspires on this ending.)

Man, it doesn’t get much better than this.

final comments

MLM: “So many people walked out.”

I recall AF (a fine sound engineer for this and related genera of musics) critiquing engineers who mix with the expectation of a foreground (solo) and a background (accompaniment). Same problem dogged some of the earlier moments of this performance. Flatten the levels and let the audience do the mixing.

in front of a live studio audience

I hate recording.

…Well, no, that’s a little simplistic.

I have a hard time performing for recordings.

Hmm… that’s not quite right either.

I have difficulty playing for the purpose of recording.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I were actually performing.

I have no comparable or corresponding problem when performing for an audience (which is probably why so many of my more successful recordings were done ‘live’).
Some musicians are skilled with studio recordings (and by studio, I mean without an audience—the studio in question could be a loft, basement, garage, or bedroom). They love the process and/or they have (I’m not sure how to describe this) ‘recording chops’.

I don’t.

I can’t seem to discipline myself into making every take count. At the back of my mind is the voice that says, “don’t worry, there’s always take two”, except that ‘take two’ tends towards take seven, take eight, nine, ten or take forty. Each take comes with ever diminishing returns; further and further removed from that compact, concise, information-rich play that I was aiming for. The problem, for me, comes from not having an audience, not having the pressure of performance, and this process is exacerbated if I’m recording solo. (The only recording, which was, incidentally, in a trio setting, in which I managed to avoid falling back on the psychological safety net of the next take was when I was suffering from the flu, and I was far to sick to be doing more than one take: that take, the one we just did, was going to have to do.)
This got me thinking, what if I just set up a faux-public-performance (like sitcoms ‘recorded in front of a live studio audience’), and recorded the results of that? All the technical resources would be geared up for recording, but the performance vacuum would be re-pressurized with a minimal audience. In the end, only three people constituted this audience, but (I haven’t heard the tape yet) the play felt more focussed.

practicing: systems, routines and shake-ups

Taylor Ho Bynum can practice while watching television. HTP, a bass player, used to practice by playing along to every spot during a commercial break (which has a kind of scatter-brained, post-modern logic to it). I’m impressed (and a little dizzy with the idea), but, really, I couldn’t do that. I need both sets of ears and eyes: I’m afraid that I’ll miss something and screw-up if I let my attention drift.

Okay, as I’ve said before, I’m a systems junkie.

My routine (which goes through the occasional, irregular shake-up) right now consists of ‘natural’ harmonics; scalar patters that alternate open and stopped strings; clusters and ‘pseudo-clusters’; and ‘touch’ playing. (Did you noticed that this resembles humble lexicon?) Thrown into that mix are articulations via the volume pedal. (I also live by the metronome, but that’s another story….)
’Cause there’s not enough hours in the day, and you can only do so much practicing without hitting a physical / physiological / mental / spiritual wall, my practicing ‘regime’ (maybe ‘ritual’ is a better word) has, at the moment, a four day cycle. This also means I don’t practice the same thing more than once every four days. I do, however, try and cover all the bases each day, so I’ll have four sets of harmonics exercises, four sets of cluster based patterns, etc. to cycle through.
Now that all looks frozen and durable, but of course it ain’t. These elements are “exercises to followup on technically curious… gestures and structurings. …These exercises evolve not through some grand plan, but by adding kinks and extra complications.” In his own post about practicing, Dominic Lash makes a similar point:

A given practice regimen for me tends to last a few months before I rearrange things but the broad categories remain the same…. But the regime has to feel fresh for me to feel excited enough actually to pick the bass up, and the best way to do this is change things about periodically.

And recently (and whenever it happens, it comes as a surprise) I’ve found myself at the early stages of going through one of those shake-ups. I’m equal measures excited and anxious about this….

‘responsible’ listening

I was introduced to (for lack of better word) ‘responsible’ listening by some of my teachers, and, as I begin to teach, I’m returning to these ideas, trying to get my students to listen this way.
By ‘responsible’ I don’t mean to evoke an ethical dimension to listening (although that can certainly be a part of it), but I mean parsing, and engaging with, the social function of what you are listening to. It is a form of analysis, but, unlike Music Theory™, we’re listening out for the social.

It’s simple:

Put yourself in the position of the players.

I don’t necessarily mean this in the sense of putting yourself in, say, Marilyn Crispell’s shoes in a ‘what’s my motivation?’ kind of way, nor anything like an interpreter ‘channelling’ (dead) composers. I’m not asking you so much to understand the psychology or ‘intentions’ of the musicians, but I’m asking you to imagine what your choices might be under similar circumstances, stimuli and context: what would you have done surrounded by A and B? Or between B and C? What’s the effect of A doing bloop-bleep in this context of B doing bleep-bloop (while allowing for contrasts and juxtapositions)? What are the implications and consequences of their actions (keeping in mind the performative in all of this)? How does that shape what is to come? How does that (re)contextualize—(re)invent, (re)construct—what has already happened?
As you learn more, you can hear more. As you learn to recognize, for example, the pitfalls and hazards of collective music making you’ll begin to hear how these pitfalls and hazards that are (perhaps deftly, perhaps dramatically) circumnavigated or subverted. Musicians might have their standard responses—you’ll learn to recognize these—but among these you’ll find many surprises. I have little concern for whether these choices are good or bad, but getting to grips with each choice/tactic can open up new possibilities, and that’s the important thing.
Hopefully you’ll learn to recognize these surprises in your own playing—those moments when you escape from habit and formula. Maybe you’ve already been making out-of-the-box choices without recognizing them. These surprises don’t come as often as maybe you might wish, but I think you’ll find they come more often then you think. Whatever the case, once you can spot these moments, you’ll be able to capitalize on them—feed it back into your playing. (I’ll return to this topic in a future post.)

Incidentally, when I’ve caught Fred Frith in performance, I’ve felt (and I hope he won’t mind me saying this) I could almost (but not quite) anticipate his choices. I had similar experiences listening to George E. Lewis: I knew (some of) his moves even though his were made quicker, and with greater fluidity (if that makes any sense) and ease, than I could ever manage. And knowing Lewis’ playing (I still have a lot to learn, but I think I know his sound reasonably well by now), I was still bowled over—struck by the fantastic (and fantastical) choices and tactics that were being made and executed.

(This post is a bounce-off from ‘the face of the bass’ at Bottom Lining.)

comments and responses

Just got back from outta town (a trip that, as always, was a learning experience) and I find the comments have been pretty active…. Thanks to all for the feedback, and apologies for not responding sooner.

On ‘training (the) quartet pt 2: network topologies’ both Devin Hurd and Daniel Melnick address the question of whether the results of these exercises are ever ‘musical’. Devin points out that ‘pre-determined intent’ can ‘open up a range of composed improvisations/interactions’ (a line of reasoning that, perhaps, informs the composer-improviser practices of, say, the AACM). The effort required to make these exercises musical, I think, makes it training for the stage; for when you may be called upon to make-the-best of a less-than-optimal situation. A tactic that might be applicable to all improvisations, and maybe to all performances (perhaps to life in general).
Dan makes many of the same observations, but adds a note of caution that treating these exercises “as a systemic ideal” can lead to problems. I think this has to do with the purpose of engineering such ‘constraints’. The hazards that Dan sketches out are very real: it’s all too easy to turn such strategies into a “Demonstrations of Limits”.
Yet, on the other hand, responding to ‘practicing: the journey (and the destination)’ Herr Adorno (mediated by sjz) makes a cameo appearance to apparently plead for a more ‘abstract’ or ‘free-floating’ sense of ‘musicality’ (of material and approach).

Not sure, however, what to make of the statement of skepticism (other than to say, well, try it and see for yourself)….

Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts, and thanks for reading.

training (the) quartet pt 2: network topologies

Before we delve into (re)engineering the protocol, let’s have a look at some simple combinations and topologies. We’ve already been introduced to the clockwise arrangement, so it’s a relatively trivial matter to come up with variants.(Incidentally, there are 6 possible ‘closed-loop’ networks in which all members of the quartet are sharing affinity with one other and none are orphaned.)
Now, recalling the subgroup formations of a quartet……we can now begin to implement these.In your experiments, you are likely to come across further possibilities; take each possibility and see where it leads you. (A simple variant is to individually select your source of affinity without sharing this information with the group.)

some (unanswered) questions:

Same question as last time: can interaction ever be so simple?
No… but why not?

Do we ever use these schemes in ‘real-world’ performance?
Yes… no… well, maybe. My guess is probably not, but why the exercises? How might they be useful? What might they be articulating?

Are the results of these exercises ‘musical’?
Possibly not, or at least not without a lot of work. Given that these schemes do not lead effortlessly to musical ends, and given that we’ll probably never use these schemes on stage, why might this training be of use?
And never mind if the results ever approach ‘music’, does it ever make sense—are they culturally decipherable?

How do we start?
…?

practicing: the journey (and the destination)

Is practicing (as in ‘exercising’, ‘training’ or ‘preparing’) improvisation a peculiar concept?

It’s a topic that fascinates me. What do you practice? That question elicits a spectrum of answers from improvisers. Take a couple of drummers: as far as CC’s concerned improvisation has no place in practicing. Rudiments and exercises, sure, but improvising? no. On the other hand, EK only practices by improvisation (no rudiments for EK).
My practicing is a little closer to CC’s (although I probably admire EK’s more). My current practicing ‘regimen’ is arranged as a four-day cycle. A lot of it, actually all of it, consists of exercises to followup on technically curious (there really isn’t particularly good terminology for this) gestures and structurings. By ‘curious’ I mean that there seem to be possibilities even if the gestures and structurings are, at the moment, musically incomprehensible. Additionally, these exercises evolve not through some grand plan, but by adding kinks and extra complications.

sjz, via a (mis)reading of Adorno, asks if “musicians who play repertoire” and those who do not, share the same musicality? Perhaps, in regards to practicing, the two musicalities are very different.
Here’s the deal: if I were a repertoire based musician, I would have some kind of known outcome—a destination, a goal—in mind as I practice and as I design exercises; but as a musician that has, at best, a very irregular relationship with repertoire, the possibilities, implications, or outcomes of practicing are never clearly evident. I’m not so much going on a hunch (which would at least imply that I had some vague notion about a goal), but mostly just interested in the journey itself. The journey ends when these gestures and structurings become musically comprehensible (at which point it’s time to abandon it or add another complication or two).

As far as uncertainties in this line of work goes (and I have no sympathy for those who glamorize the financial precariousness of a musician’s life), this one can be exciting and productive. Most of the time this journey (and the destination) was worthwhile…

…and that’s good enough for me.

the art of persuasion

There I am, at the far end of the venue, listening to members of the class performing. It’s (more-or-less) a public performance, and the group is a little nervous—a little on edge. They’ve also been pushing themselves a little hard; everything’s a little longer, a little bit more complex. They’re sometimes loosing concentration; momentarily, but I can hear it, and I think they can too.
Inexplicably, four of the five performers drop out, leaving EC in solitude.
The quartet executed a textbook ending; except, well, it was a quintet on stage—one got left behind. You know how it goes: the texture—the density, the noise level, the information concentration—goes from 100% to 20% in a blink of an eye. If you’re left behind, you can feel vulnerable; if you’ve stopped, you feel like you’ve goofed up. (The key to this is that you cannot be left behind, nor can you have goofed up, but that’s a story of another post.)
I’m there willing EC to go on—go on—do a solo! I’m willing the rest (in rest) to resist the temptation to jump back in. Show some backbone. Come on, people, I think, I’ll give you As all ’round if you pull this off.
Unfortunately they don’t. The four join back in, and not even abruptly, but gently—tentatively. I’m left unconvinced (as I guess is the rest of the audience). It takes nerve; nerves that this group is a little too exhausted and nervous to call upon.
I realize, then, that so much of teaching improvisation is akin to teaching rhetoric—the art of persuasion.

solo: primary territories

Given that my lexicon is so pared down, what do I do—what can I do—with, or within, it? I could atomize theses elements further, but I prefer to see these as regions in which I have a certain amount of mobility. Here again is where the language metaphor breaks down: to borrow (admittedly out of context) a term from Anthony Braxton, these three elements—harmonics, clusters, and ‘touch’ playing—are primary territories.
I can get a certain amount of movement within each territory. Natural harmonics can be, for example, melodic or rhythmic, concerned with intervalic color or timbre.



Clusters and ‘displaced’ clusters (pseudo-clusters which I’ll explore in more detail in future posts) can be approached, say, pianistically (à la Tippett), or more guitaristically (à la Frith).



Circular-breathing wind players (e.g. Parker, Mitchell) get incredible creative milage from constructing illusions of polyphony and lines that are impossibly long. And while, I admit, it’s strange to bring these tactics to bear on a polyphonic instrument that doesn’t need to breathe, two-hand ‘touch’ playing nonetheless gets me within, maybe, commuting distance of this neighborhood.
In addition, since, without radical techniques that are alien to me, I’ll never be able to deploy clusters to approach the complexity, density or noise-level (I’m not talking about loudness, you understand) of pianists like Taylor or Crispell, a variant of ‘touch’ playing is maybe as close as I can get.



But none of this gets me very far, certainly on stage. Time to perhaps renegotiate boundaries….

[BTW, the audio recordings were made quickly, so apologies for the quality (or lack there of).]

updates:

04-05-07: Use the XSPF Flash Player. Please let me know of any problems.

training (the) quartet pt. 1.1: protocol of affinity

revision notes:

It’s not everyday that I post up a revised version of a post, but having sat on this a while, I think it’s worth it in the long run. The previous version of this article was titled ‘protocol of mirroring’ and I’ve pretty much simply substituted the word ‘mirroring’ with the phrases ‘sharing affinity with’ or ‘creating affinity with’.
Looking back on my old scribbles and notes on these exercises, I noticed that I used ‘affinity’ to describe the main protocol, and that’s the word that I use to describe this in practice (in rehearsals and in class), so I don’t know what stroke of anti-genius (what is the antonym of ‘genius’ in this context?) made me choose ‘mirror’ instead. Whatever the case, having re-read Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ recently, I was struck by the following:

Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town. (Affinity related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity.)

Donna J. Haraway (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge), pp. 154–155.

Not political alliances because we are the same, not alliances because we are related, not an alliance based on some intrinsic quality, but alliances borne out of contingency and necessity, because we can work towards some collectively desirable outcome. (I am reminded of the recent anti-war demonstrations which I’ve tangentially blogged about.)

revision 1.1:

Having specified the quartet formation, let me introduce the protocol in the context of this ensemble: affinity. Well, I’ll be calling this thing ‘affinity’, but when one is sharing affinity, or creating affinity, with another, it can, for example, mean any of the following:

imitating
impersonating
mirroring
creating similitude
corresponding with
correlating with

This is the elemental behavior within these exercises. When one improviser shares, or creates, affinity with another, the improviser modifies their behavior to correlate in some way to the behavior of the other. Affinity may be implemented as imitation or impersonation, behavioral or stylistic equivalence, etc. Don't get too dogmatic about this, improvisers will find various (creative) ways to implement this idea.
A simple arrangement of the quartet is in a circle in which each improviser creates affinity from the behavior of the improviser on one side (behavioral information is passed in the opposite direction).This sounds simple, and it is, but we’ll be developing and twisting this idea as the training continues.

some (unanswered) questions:

Does the concept of affinity hold up to scrutiny?
Given that improvisative interaction may encompass juxtapositions, contrasts and contradictions, how can we engineer, or justify, such simple interaction? Affinity is somewhat an arbitrary protocol, but I find it easier that others to explain and implement. I’m, however, very interested in hearing of alternatives.

Is the dualism embedded in this protocol (similar OR different) culturally restrictive?
Yes, it is, and this will come to haunt any ensemble, particularly those composed of inexperienced improvisers. Does anyone have any solutions?

Can interaction, under any circumstance, really be thought of as unidirectional?
Of course not….

solo: my humble lexicon

Having critiqued the music as language metaphor, I’m now about to talk about lexicons.
Let’s be clear here: by lexicon I don’t necessarily mean a kind of musical building-block—the atoms by which a performance/piece is constructed—although, interestingly enough, atomizing tends to be the first step in creating a lexicon (but that’s a discussion for another time…). I find lexicons—vocabularies, palettes or classifications of gestures, relationships, tactics or sounds—are useful not so much for generating material, but as a “temporary acknowledgment of one boundary [that] allows for [the] renegotiations of others” (Devin Hurd made a similar comment in regards to two-note scales).
My vocabulary has changed significantly over the years, and substantially over the last four years or so during which I began to seriously explore the solo context. And although there’s a kind of (irrational) logic to my vocabulary, much of the choices are arbitrary and ad-hoc—it’s what I can practice and train practically.
My vocabulary is also, for lack of better expression, non-formally multi-dimensional (but more on that in the future). However, in its bare-bones, ‘flat’ form, in the solo guitar context, I have only three elements that make up my improvisative vocabulary: open strings plus natural harmonics; chromatic and ‘displaced’ clusters; and two-hand ‘touch’ playing. Never mind Anthony Braxton’s hundred or so ‘sound classifications’ (Braxton, 1988, pp. v–x), ‘impoverished’ does not begin to describe my lexicon (it’s a small part of why ‘lexicon’ is entirely the wrong word for it).
I’ll take closer looks at these elements from various angles in future articles; discussing some of the (irrational) logic behind it, and exploring some of the implications of it.

references:

Braxton, Anthony (1988), Composition Notes, Book A (distributed by Hanover, NH: Frog Peak Music).