Regarding band practice…

Basically, I am free

Monday before 2 and after 3.30
Tuesday after 2.30
Thursday after 2.30
Friday after 12.30

Magicians talk magic

There’s a lot we can learn from this:

two magicians (Criss Angel and Penn Jillette) talk magic

Improvised music can be magical, but are we sometimes reluctant to examine the mechanism(s) under the hood for fear of reducing everything down to tricks and sleight of hand?

teaching diary 29/10/08: the art of ending

We tackled two major elements during this class:

1. getting to get the class to crit
2. how to end and improvised performance

The Big Crit

the good

Play: there’s a several minute stretch of discussion by Andrea, Owen and Paul after the first improvisation. I don’t need to add anything to this; we’re talking about our work.

But…

the bad

Play: are we happy with that? (Our contract made during our first class was to be frank and critical of our work.)

Andrea says we have room for improvement. Owen asks how we might improve. Andrea suggests through more playing and discussion. …But our discussions pretty much exclusively fixated on our successes, and we’re afraid to discuss, in specifics, our less desirable traits—our flaws, our failures, our near and not-so-near misses. How are we going to achieve ‘high-quality’ performances if we don’t apply the same criteria that we bring to bear on the work of our elders and models?

We also tend to propose ‘solutions’ without fully specifying the problem, without asking what is wrong with what we are doing? what dissatisfies us about our current state / performance?

(This will potentially, and eventually, relate to examining criteria.)

the ugly

Kevin: we could be more pig headed.

Owen: did not like my playing. (Excellent! a proper crit!) “The jazz parts put me off.” But if you didn’t like my playing, what could you do to stop me? (An unasked question: what could you have done to redirect, redefine or subvert my playing?)

My crit: I don’t trust the group (but this is actually my problem, not the group’s fault). What sucked? I agree with Kevin, we performed like sheep. Paul could be more assertive, less polite; Kevin could demonstrate more nerve; Andrea could make strong statements by dropping out. We rarely do endings that go bang…

the art (craft? science? magic?) of ending

ending a

Andrea sees a convergence of agency [sorry, my paraphrase] between performers signaling an ending. But is that what’s really happening if, as we’ve discussed before, this kind of interaction, as observed from a third party, is extremely unreliable sign to navigate by.

Owen desires a more abrupt ending… What do you need to do to get that ending?

ending b

Owen feels a need for signals.

We’ve done a lot of ending in the last few weeks, so we are capable of doing endings. What is the mechanism?

Kevin rephrases this question: how do you signify an ending? (This is an interesting, and telling, way to think about the problem… wonder where this leads to.)

Andrea: stop playing, and wait for the others to stop. Certainly works (this is a pretty good answer).

Kevin talks about leaving your options open for coming back in if the others do not take the exit. However, if I guessed what Kevin was doing, and I sabotaged it, what’s happens then?

Andrea brings up the audience as creator of meaning and possibly somehow the arbitrator of the ending. (But how?)

(The answer to our question is between Kevin and Andrea’s statements.)

If two performers desire different kinds of endings, what happens? What can you do in that situation?

ending c

This one, for me, sounded cool. None of us got quite what we wanted, but the results were interesting. (Something to return to.)

How was that? did it suck? was it better? We’re good at describing what happened, but not so willing to make ‘quality’ assessments.

Andrea talks about an ending being a consensus or compromise. Andrea is on to something here: the last improvisation, for him, felt like “we’re have an ending; oh no, we don’t; oh yes, we have… everyone did their own ending… it was cool in a sense, but it was also… forced. Or not an ending as such. [emphasis mine]” Some of this was desirable (“it was cool in a sense”), but held back by some other notion of an ending (“not an ending as such”). Where does this other notion of an ending come from (this ‘real’ / ‘true’ / ‘authentic’ ending)? And if we don’t push this somewhere (“forced”), if we don’t make it happen, then how does the music happen? (Andrea thinks the music can happen without the group making it happen.)

Me: “You’ve actually articulated the idea [of how endings work]… but we’re stuck on this one word [actually two] which is ‘false ending’… There is no double bar line… but we can end, which I agree is magical, but like magicians… the person doing it knows full well that there’s a sleight of hand.” Are we unwilling to open the hood and examine the engine? Improvisation can appear magical (is magical), but are we afraid to loose this sense of magic by examining the sleight of hand?

other notes

Are we imagining a preordained ending? (If we are, is this a useful concept?)

An unanswered question: Kevin, last week, expressed a possible improvisative tactic as “continue as you mean to go on”. Why? Why would you continue as you mean to go on?

Owen suggests prepared elements several times during this class. I’m resisting this: prepared means (scores, compositions, etc) are useful things to bring to improvised music, but, as stated in the first class, we are not going to be dealing with them (at least during this first term). I want to see what is possible within an open improvisative context before resorting to other means.

Andrea, like last week, brings up the word ‘control’. Do we not have significant amounts of control (25% share/stake in a quartet, 20% in a quintet)? Is there a question of responsibility for our performance? it seems to me that we cannot hold anyone else to account for the music…

homework

Listening to some endings:

Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker, ‘ParkBrax 5’ (from Duo (London) 1993).
Derek Bailey, George Lewis and John Zorn, ‘On Golden Pond’ and ‘The Warning’ (from Yankees).
Marilyn Crispell and Gerry Hemingway, ‘Billy Duck’ and ‘Jump’ (from Duo).

Bonus DVD Commentary

I feel I should put a disclaimer here that I don’t generally think through improvising strategically. Before we started this improvisation I had already made my mind up about what technique I was going to start with; a juxtaposition of glissandi and harmonics, something that I had been getting excited about because of how it worked physiologically. Deciding on a technique beforehand is something that I tend to do quite often, the idea is that it will inject some enthusiasm into my playing, but I’m now reconsidering this as a tactic.

Okay, so this was at the August Stet Lab and the line up was Mike Hurley, Marian Murray, Tony O’ Connor and myself. Mike I heard for the first time on the night (he had done a pretty awesome piano
solo earlier on), Marian and Tony I had played with before.

they’re going to demolish the music department

0.00 Marian opens with some screechy glissandi and Mike follows her phrasing. I jump in with my harmonic/glissandi juxtaposition. Tony begins to make sparse interjections.

Mike begins to switch between following what Marian is doing and what I am doing. To be perfectly honest my train of thought at the time went something like “okay she is doing such and such, I’m doing this, he’s doing that, etc..” as opposed to “she’s doing X, I wonder what will happen if I do Y…”

After a while I became a little frustrated with what was coming from my instrument, the thing about the harmonic/glissandi thing is that I am basically throwing my hands around and so my control over the pitch that comes out is fairly limited, which is normally fine, but what was coming out was a lot more sweet than what I was hoping for. Because of this I lay out for a bit and…

…I start playing clusters at about 3.30. Tony’s playing becomes denser.

Things start to become thicker around the 4.50 mark. I return to the glissandi (no harmonics this time). Some chromatic movement I do is mimicked by Mike (5.25). It seems strange to me how much Mike is following everyone, I haven’t improvised with someone like that before. I continue to mull over this because it really is weirding me out and I can’t put my finger on why. Absent-mindedly I start to play a little two note figure at the same time that Mike does something at a similar tempo, the group’s volume (excepting Tony) swells and there is a really nice contrast between what Marian is doing and what Mike and I are doing. Marian lays out, the density dips, Tony plays descending arpeggi and I follow. Mike finishes off.

my side of the story of a duo improvisation with Kevin Terry

the opening piece of The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) of Kevin and myself at october 2008 Stet Lab in O’ Riada Hall

commentary of the first minute and a half..

the track link is this:

know these guys?

i decide to open using the teaspoon.. it’s one of my favorite tools, much lighter than a steel tone bar enables me to do fast slides across the strings or across the length of the string/s..its great for mallet-ke bouncing ((might use it to try to get that deep low resonant sound i found last week while playing with Kevin– possibly the lowest frequencies i can get with this guitar and they were hiding right where i usually find the highest ones: above the bridge pickup)) and of course like scratching the side of the spoon across the strings, this another thing that can be done extremely fast.. at the first hit (0.00) it sounds like the wah is halfway down, better push it all the way because i want all the highest waileyslidey sounds to be available.. don’t really worry too much about where Kevin’s at, think i want to use the very high frequencies.. i tap the strings quite fast (0.08) and move into sliding mode just after that and alternate between flat slides and side scratches.. K seems to be on a similar territory of fast swooshes so i think this will work.. might be a mixture of the politeness of the situation/context and the stormy rain around us that s me into upping the acidic content of the atmosphere.. need some distortion (0.33) .. will it work? let’s see.. scratching fast on the first few seconds gives certainly a loudness boost, some kind of break from the previous mood, at first it doesn’t seem to generate a reaction in K, but here he is.. getting louder and slightly more percussive (0.43).. i continue on the fast scratching and percussive mode for a while, then decide for a more sustained sound (0.52) to leave some space to K and focus a bit more on what he is doing.. after 5 seconds feel i can’t sustain that any longer and move into a percussive space (0.57) then need to dull the sound with the wah (1.01) and then start the bouncy percussive thing close to the bridge (1.03), alternated with more fast slides (1.09) seems like i tried the low frequency trick but not sure the pick up setting is the right one, then scratching hell ( 1.11-1.16) and things seem to get a little out of control, and that’s not a bad thing because normally it’s when i lose control than the interesting things start to happen..drop the spoon and pick up the wooden mallet with the felt tip.. a little hardcore break for a few seconds and then rotate the mallet and let it bounce on the strings.. distortion is on, the tone gets a little more dramatic…

commentary: Campbell & Park (Brighton, 11-28-07)

Moment-by-moment commentary of a group (in this case duo) improvisation as promised. BTW, yours do not have to be as wordy as this one, and you are very welcome to take a short snippet of your performances (30 seconds, 5 seconds, whatever) if you are short on time…

0:06 start

Here’s pretty much the kind of opening I did at the last class. I know Murray’s not quite ready yet (nor, I’m gambling, is the audience), and I jump in, make a bold statement, hoping to shape the rest of the performance in those stark tones

The sweeping, fluttering gesture’s fairly comfortable to play (a choice partly dictated by the fact that we’re performing cold without a warmup), and I also know there’s a few other places I can go with this—I’m familiar with the technique. I’m hedging my bets with the harmonics at the 11 second mark, saying that I may go there, or set up an alternation. I abandon this for the moment, save it maybe for later, because the ultimate tactic I decide to pursue does require the harmonics…

teaching diary 22/10/08: how to begin

as a contrast (?) to Oxley-Taylor

…we do very self-aware improvisations. (…or is it really as big a contrast as I make it sound?)

play

Fine as far as it went, but I miss some of the density and complexity of last week.

discussion

Any comments? criticisms? (A question that I did not ask in class: if we’re afraid, or unwilling, to say we’re dissatisfied with an improvisation, how do we move on from here?)

Andrea feels being “relaxed” has helped un-stuck the group. Kevin would like to be more alert.

my crit

The good: interesting challenges and choices because of the stark volume discrepancies.

The bad: the start, for my tastes, was a little too timid for me.

how do you start an improvisation?

Play and talk through the process. In the discussion, try and articulate what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it both in terms of effect desired (where we’re pushing it), and how we’re affected (how are choices are shaped by others’ actions).

You want it to go somewhere, but of course it does not… and that’s okay.

A step-by-step articulation of choices, consequences of actions, etc.

some observations

Kevin: two ways of opening: something known, or free of premeditation. Kevin is thinking in terms of individual state. (…but how does this map on to a group?)

Andrea: two ways: slow, gentle; fast, dense. Thinking, broadly, in terms of aggregate group behavior. (…but how is this useful if a group is composed of, say, competing agencies?)

how do you start an improvisation? redux

Play and discuss. Okay, for me, this improvisation rocked—interesting contrasts, moments of density, sparseness, etc.

expectations

If you’re surprised by the result, you must have expected something. What are our (imperfectly) predicted consequences of our actions?

sports commentary

Play, while trying to do a DVD commentary. I admit this is hard (talk and play), but Andrea gets this pretty much straight away.

BTW, great little ending to this…

other notes

Paul realizes that it’s okay to ‘play notes’—we don’t have to do ‘extended techniques’.

homework

Write up a moment-by-moment sports commentary to one of our past performances (either in class or with another group, but ideally with a recording that’s available online…). I’ll also do one, and post it up here…

potential questions to tackle

1. how do you end an improvisation?
2. what might ‘control’ mean in this practice? (Andrea was hovering ’round this word.)

other business

performance-practical

Everyone present is good for anytime during the practical week (8–12 December) as long as it avoids the jazz/pop practicals (checked with Paul O’Donnell subsequently, and the jazz/pop practicals will be on Wednesday).

Kevin will do the program notes; Andrea, the poster.

Need to think about how to bill ourselves, performance format, and, eventually, examination criteria.

open day performance

Everyone present is up for doing a performance at the open day on Saturday, 8th November.

“Everything is possible. Nothing is real.”

must say i liked the ‘lecture’, in the sense that a lot of valid points were made, quite eloquently, and we seemed to have reacted with some good playing… (and pardon me for choosing E-Prime forms such as seems to, appears to be, as opposed to is.. i know it might result in heavy boring prose, but i still see it as good exercise, and generally closer to what i think and want to express than the is of identity)

Han’s indication of the tactic, his take on the Taylor/Oxley method and how it applies on group improvisation, finally got us out of the impasse we found ourselves in the last few classes.. from my angle it seemed like some kind of release finally happened, and applying the tactic gave us a bit of the confidence we were lacking up to this point

also the indication of the role of the audience in generating meaning seemed spot on.. i would add that we could include the musicians in the audience as well, in the sense that they too are listeners.. they listen to their own thing or to the sum of all things.. and some kind of filtering or interpretation goes on in their brains, this in turn resulting in attribution of some meaning…of course this meaning can manifest in a different way for each listener.. everyone in the audience will have a different experience and the music will mean a different thing to each one of them

i must say that when i was talking about active listening i was wandering about what kind of direct influence/impact can the audience/listeners have on the musicians and the music played by simply listening

(think Rupert Sheldrake’s research on the sense of being stared at.. how come we often turn our heads when there’s someone staring at us?  does listening to someone have the same effect? OK, im on a tangent.. will leave these questions for Safety First class of 2023/24)

what puzzles me is that i still can’t answer the question Han asked after Kevin and myself played trying to ignore him (on the 10/08/08 class)… what was wrong?

doing a different thing when the others make different thing seems a good working strategy..but what makes it better than a call and response strategy? or in other words, why shouldn’t we choose strategies on the go.. and use whatever seems appropriate to use at the moment, between say, listening/not listening, playing in response to others or doing whatever we want regardless of the others??

i think i find myself at the starting point again..some sort of moral dilemma i can’t seem to answer better than using the Hassan ibn Sabbah quote of the title of this post

it seems the only measure of how good or bad an improvisation was lies with the audience.. having a look at them (and their posture) during the performance, and listening to the reaction/applause at the end can possibly give a measure of how they felt during the piece.. this applies also if the musicians are the only audience present.. how did it sound?  good? or did it suck?

this leads to the other (huge) issue i feel coming… but won’t go deep into it now..

talking about music often leaves me with the impression of trying to play a 64bit 24million colour videogame with a shitty blackandwhite 8bit console..

well, time to let the fingers and the instruments do the talking, it seems..

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

Playing with this strategy in mind seems to facilitate both the energetic playing that came with letting listening slide on the list of priorities but it also allows for a much greater amount of ensemble interaction. 

Everything gelled. The playing was slick.

 
Listening to Han, Veronica and Jesse perform at the October Stet Lab showcased (as Han pointed out) a huge difference in approaches to improvising. This strategy (does it have a name?) allows for ensemble interaction on the scale of large gestures, but whatever Jesse Ronneau was doing seemed to eschew interaction on this “scale” in favour of a much smaller one. At one point he set up a “canon” of sorts, quoting Veronica’s phrasing, rhythm etc… Veronica’s method seemed somewhere between these two.

Just a speculation, but,  (to generalise and polarise) Han’s approach to improvisation caught me as being more typically instrumental, whereas Jesse’s seemed to come from the same place that (I imagine) vocal improvisation comes from. Maybe that is way off like crazy but it’s something I’ve been mulling over.

 
It seems funny that something so tricky to get your head around works out so simple in practice. I feel a little sluggish when it comes to making those jump-cuts so that is something I will work on.

Looking forward to week five.

teaching diary 15/10/08: towards tactical improvisations

general comments

I did a little too much of a lecture in class (I suspect the desire to play more and talk less is a response to this).

I also somewhat jumped the gun, indicating the exit out of our current dilemma. I wonder if this will turn out to be a mistake: the last thing I want is for the class to regress into a model in which the teacher generates direction. I hope everyone holds on to their responsibilities (and I don’t exercise too much executive control).

Playing wise, for me, this is the class when we hit it, and it really starts to cooking. (I have no real explanation for this, but I’m also interested that no previous Safety First course has hit such a high mark so soon into the course.) It remains to be seen whether we can keep this up, or if the spark, fired by the various revelations (and reevaluations) of this week’s class basically die down. Either way, the next few weeks shall be interesting.

towards a improvisative tactic

Quick summary of the dilemma: avoid both the autocratic command-and-follow model and the Cagian denial of agency. …and can we (and should we) bring our egos, histories, prejudices, etc to the negotiating table?

What do you want to do? Kevin say talk about Taylor and Oxley.

reverse engineering Stylobate 1

Kevin: Oxley just keeps on following Taylor.

Kevin talk us through what Oxley is doing. Here, Oxley picks out this from Taylor; here he picks something else out.

Question: but what about the other moments when Oxley’s playing doesn’t correspond to Taylors?

Andrea says his initial impression was also that Oxley was following Taylor, but then began to hear the reverse as well.

The rhythm sometimes ‘locks-in’, other times it does not.

How is Oxley following Taylor.

Kevin hears a myriad of ways in which Oxley follows Taylor (imitation, accentuation, etc).

Owen hears Taylor as the dominant voice—the leader.

Question: that’s what it sounds like, but is that how it’s constructed. What’s the underlying mechanism? (Note to myself: we should try and separate audience POV and the reverse engineering of performances.)

Kevin: Perhaps Oxley is accompanying Taylor.

Question: What do you mean by accompaniment? (I didn’t ask this in class, but the question, in a sense, is what does it mean to accompany, when idiom, and style (the usual reference points for this kind of break down of roles) is up in the air?)

Kevin: following… trying to compliment.

demonstration of accompanying

Duo: Kevin as Oxley, Owen as Taylor.

Sounded good. Very interesting playing.

Andrea and I had a hard time deciphering who was accompanying who.

what’s the Oxley algorithm?

What generates that complexity [of response]?

Kevin suggests that Oxley takes his cues from Taylor selectively.

Question: Under what conditions does he take his cues?

my take on what’s happening

Taylor is jump-cutting between several contrasting, distinctive ideas/gestures. Oxley also jumps between contrasting ideas/gestures, locking his changes with (what he perceives to be) Taylor’s changes.

They are, in a sense, missing out the aesthetic or idiomatic ‘judgment call’ (“he’s done that, ergo, I’m going this”).

Thus, sometimes the music ‘locks’ and other times he doesn’t.

Talk very briefly about how the performer’s negotiations are partial (e.g. Oxley’s take on when Taylor makes a jump is subjective). May need to return to this idea…

the audience and ‘active listening’

We return to the idea that the audience’s interpretation of the onstage relationships is subjective. Thus, as performers, all we need to do is generate a certain degree of complexity, and the audience hears the rest. In reference to Andrea’s notion of ‘active listening’, I add that audiences are active because they actively create meaning. Performers delegate responsibility to the audience, the audience (partially) creates the relationships onstage.

play: try out the algorithm

Trio: Andrea, Kevin and Owen.

Playing wise, for me, this was a high point of the course thus far. High-energy, interesting and complex; as audience, the relationships and negotiations were just that little bit out of grasp (that’s a good thing).

Andrea liked having a tactic: not worry too much about shaping the music. I say that the shape should sort itself out if you do your part. (There’s my tired soccer game metaphor…)

what does Taylor do?

Given Oxley’s tactic, talk briefly about what Taylor’s responses might be. Kevin: prolog a ‘section’ if he likes what Oxley’s doing, etc. We really need to return to some of these ideas because they are at the core of real-time tactics and musical negotiations.

egos, histories, etc.

Following on from last week’s discussions, briefly cover the idea that selflessness is often synonymous with musicianship, and how this may be a problematic idea in group improvisation.

Andrea: Oxley is slightly less egotistical.

Yes, but Oxley is keeping his own identity: he is not subsumed into Taylor’s gestures in a straightforward way. Oxley’s moves are his own, and Taylor’s has to deal with the resultant—Taylor’s life is not made easier by Oxley’s choices.

Andrea: in this music, the self is more necessary than in others. You need to bring yourself (material, background, ego) to the group.

(A peripheral issue that I didn’t say: I think Andrea’s right, but with one modifier: in other musical practices, the self is just as important, but we like to pretend it isn’t. In other words, we often value music, and musicality, that is unmarked.)

You can, and I think it would be good to, bring other traditions and idioms to the performance. You can play the Delta blues, but you cannot expect others to necessarily join in.

play

Quartet: Andrea, Han, Kevin and Owen.

We have a cooky, dramatic little ending: ppp flutters from Owen, just when it threatens to die down, I interject, others join in, etc.

what are we doing next week?

Now what? Owen: less talk, more play. Han: play until we come across a problem.