1/15
conversation with gabby fluke-mogul; notation from Mira Martin-Gray; reviews
Christopher A. Williams, Caroline Gatt, and Joshua Bergamin recently announced (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics, a project to develop an understanding of its titular subject through collaborations with the klingt collective, Splitter Orchester, and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Similar to Williams’ Tactile Paths, it will have its own site for exploration and interaction along the way.
April 15 is the last day to answer the call for text scores from The Center For Deep Listening, which will be published one a day for 365 days starting May 30 to celebrate what would be Pauline Oliveros’ 90th year.
The Spring issue of Point of Departure is available. With an emphasis on large ensembles, it features: Bill Shoemaker on Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and Lennie Tristano’s Personal Recordings 1946-1970; Troy Collins in conversation with Ohad Talmor; Stuart Broomer on Cecil Taylor Ensemble’s Göttingen and Umlaut Big Band’s Mary’s Ideas; Werner Herbers on Floris Nico Bunink; David Grundy in conversation with Dave Burrell; and excerpts from Daniel Barbiero’s As Within So Without and Karl Berger’s The Music Mind Experience.
An intermittent reminder that this newsletter welcomes feedback of any kind at harmonicseries21@gmail.com. Especially now, we are seeking feedback on ways that might encourage you to sometimes contribute a donation when you can if you appreciate the efforts of the newsletter. We treasure the kind words we’ve received but donations make this a slightly more sustainable project and allow us to offer something back to the musicmaking contributors that make the newsletter possible.
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conversations
gabby fluke-mogul is a New York based improviser, composer, and educator. Over video chat we talk about places, spaces, relational experiences, listening, playing, violin, voice, text, words, duration, ritual, and Flora the cat.
Forthcoming projects include RUE for solo, duo, and trio with Nava Dunkelman, Ava Mendoza, and Zeena Parkins, commissioned by Roulette and scheduled for a May 18 premiere that will be available to stream.
KP: Hey! Can you hear me?
GF: Yeah. Can you hear me, Keith?
KP: Yeah, perfect. Good morning, good morning.
GF: Good morning, how you doin’?
KP: Good, how’re you?
GF: I’m good [laughs] yeah.
KP: Nice. Do you like your new place?
GF: I do, yeah. I love it actually. I feel super, super thankful to be here. I’m like three blocks from the ocean and, yeah, it feels really good.
KP: Awesome. Do you like to take ocean walks since moving out there?
GF: Yeah, I’ve been going at night actually. Especially with the full moon the past few days, it’s super beautiful.
KP: Very nice. It’s good to hear it was a good move. I couldn’t tell if it was a good move or a, yo-I-hate-this-landlord type of move or something.
GF: Yeah, for sure. No it was… I moved to New York March 2020 and I had been living at the same apartment that I had moved into since then, for two years. It’ll almost be two years in two weeks or so. Which is pretty wild, to say the very least. So yeah it was time for a big shift for me… it kind of happened very quickly and fortuitously and I decided to go for it.
KP: Good. I know you moved to NYC at a strange time, or a strange moment. I know you’ve got a good group of friends in both the Bay Area and NYC, but have you noticed anything between the two locales that makes musicmaking feel a bit different? Whether that’s the funding that’s available or rent or even the landscape or the weather?
GF: Totally. All of the above. I think improvising or being a musician or making music with other people is so deeply relational. Whether on a global or a local level or perception. Whether it’s the landscape, the land, the indigenous land that you’re in relation to, or just the geography, the city, how things are laid out, how you transit, how you get place to place. I think that all deeply impacts how you relate with other people and other musicians and then that also impacts the spaces you play in, if they exist, what those look like, how accessible they are. And, yeah, the Bay and New York are incredibly different places. I feel like they just move at super different paces. Time is very different, at least in my experience, between the west coast and the east coast and I guess that’s a cliche thing to say or whatever - the west coast is slower - but it kind of is, in a way. Or at least my experience. When I lived there and with the communities that I was part of, there was less of an urgency to make music in the ways I was interested in. Most folks around me were kind of settling and were heavily partnered and were either done with touring or taking a breather and were kind of fine, stable financially or et cetera et cetera and I was none of those [laughs] and just really wanted more community and more energy around being an improviser and meeting new people and playing with new people and wanting to tour and wanting to record.
KP: Yeah. I guess if I had to place the talking fast caricature I would also say the west is known for its big spaces and I would imagine - this is probably not true but - hopefully more natural spaces and a little less urban noise. Or at least you’re able to find spaces with a little less urban noise. Do you find that living in such a noisy city like NYC has impacted you at all?
GF: Yeah, it’s funny you say that, I was just… I’ve been thinking this past week, on the train… like I never wear headphones, and I remember having a conversation with Pauline Oliveros years ago and she was like, why would anyone wear headphones on the train or in transit, there’s so much to listen to already. And I’ve always felt that way, I just never heard anyone else say it. To me, yeah, I’m already so saturated in sound that is awesome, terrible, painful, bizarro, whether it’s human conversation or tiny squeaks from a loose screw on something but, yeah, I’m always interested in taking it in because it impacts me in some way, whether it’s conscious or unconscious. The Bay has its own soundscape and noise in a big way. I lived in Oakland for six years. I moved every year I think to a different kind of zone but, yeah, I think no matter where I live just organically I’m gonna be impacted by the noise.
KP: Yeah, I mean - you were saying it earlier - the environment, whether it’s natural, societal, whatever else, that creates its impression on the mind and the body and I imagine that’s impossible to not filter consciously or not through an instrument while you’re playing, it just depends on whether or not you’re keeping an ear out for it... I guess this might kind of sound so obvious it’s silly, but in some of our back-and-forths I got the sense that listening consciously while performing is a big part of what you do. And I think you mentioned in particular communication between your body and your violin body. But I was wondering if there are other things that you consciously try to listen to while you’re playing, whether that’s the audience or the space, and whether you try to incorporate that in the conversation, if you try to feed off the audience sounds, the vibe, the resonances of the space. I guess to bring that a little narrower [laughs] whenever you’re playing, what are some things that you’re consciously listening for?
GF: Well, everything [laughs] yeah, I feel like when I’m in a flow state, when I’m in it, whether I’m alone or playing with other people, the body and bodies I think are always consciously or unconsciously - whether you have an awareness of the unconscious listening is a whole different thing and whatever that really means or looks like… I’m kind of more interested in the, you know, psychoacoustic, spiritual nature of that all and I guess, yeah, of course that intersects with Deep Listening and it intersects with so many people’s thoughts and ideas throughout history and time of what it means to listen. It’s so deeply cultural and so deeply personal. But yeah I’m listening to the space, I’m listening to the physical architectural space, to the energy in the space, and I think in some ways the past, present, and future of the space, like what has been there before and what’s there now and perhaps what’s the potentiality of what comes next. And of course the other people I’m making music with. The bodies, if there are, of the audience who is there as well. I think there’s a lot of unconscious listening, or global listening, that’s happening for me and my body. And then there’s stuff that comes more forward, like someone’s cough or the slight squeak of someone’s chair or the floorboard or I was playing the other night in Queens at Outpost Artist Resources and it started to rain and it was amazing [laughs] I was playing solo and I’m not sure what the roof is made out of or whatever but there are also glass windows and super high ceilings and the rain was just fucking amazing. How could that not impact what I’m playing, or how I am present in the experience. I actually immediately became… I stopped playing for a minute and immediately remembered something that Roscoe Mitchell had said when I was at Mills… or said often I guess [laughs] he always said that nature and silence are perfect. And I was just… yeah, of course I think about that all the time but it was just one of those strikingly powerful moments where I was like, what could I have to say or play that could be more perfect than this. Or more sublime. But I guess I decided to speak to the rain and the way that made sense to me in the moment. But, yeah, I think I’m always listening to what’s going on.
KP: Yeah, yeah, and I don’t know if this is weird or not but when you are in that mode, does it feel more like you’re juggling those experiences or does it feel like you’re going from one place to the next, kind of like on a map or something, having known where you were and having a view of where you’re going.
GF: Hopefully and ideally I’m not thinking. About anything. Any cognitive processes that are happening when I’m improvising are hopefully very quiet or in the way background of my body. This past solo set that I played I decided to structure very specifically, compositionally for myself. Sometimes I do that for solo work, sometimes I don’t. There’s always some kind of thread of composition going on of course but this was a more concrete and specifically structured set that I wanted to play. So for example that, structurally and cognitively quote unquote, I felt in the back of my body. Just kind of like the bones of the house, you know. It’s just like, OK, this is how I’ll move. But other than that I’m just taking things in as I go. Occasionally something will become more in the foreground I guess, like if someone's phone goes off it’ll kind of take me out of the moment…or I’m still in the moment but it becomes more forward. And then I can make a choice of how I wanna deal with that or not. They’re all choices, whether I’m consciously, cognitively thinking about them or not. They’re always gonna be happening. They’re always in the flow. But it’s not like I’m like, oh I’m listening to the audience right now and I’m just gonna respond or make choices based on how they’re sounding. Now I’m gonna listen to the cars outside and respond… I mean I think those are awesome choices if that’s what you’re interested in doing, but that’s just not how I roll [laughs]
KP: Yeah, and in those moments where there is a step back and you’re kind of pulled out of, I guess for lack of a better term like a singularity or something, is there any time at which you become aware of the violin as something else, something that’s a filter for your own expression? Or are y’all always a duo, a dyad?
GF: I guess I think of us less as a duo and we’re just us [laughs] We translate through one another. I speak through violin; violin speaks through me. That’s how we do this life together. I mean, yeah, sometimes I am taken aback by certain things, like my bow gets caught, stupidly, in between my bridge and my tailpiece, or I’ve hit the instrument in a way where… like this happened where my bow wedged itself in a weird way and I was just like, damn [laughs] that’s really dumb [laughs] but then I’m like, huh, I wonder what’s happening there. Or, wow, that’s a sound I didn’t expect to hear and now I have to deal with that and maybe that is now pushing me in a way that I really needed to go, in a way that’s gonna shift what’s happening, musically, like what’s gonna come out of that. And something always does. I guess it’s also a translation of… that impacts my whole body when things like that happen. I can feel it in my stomach and my chest and then of course that feeds back into the instrument and how I interact with it. It’s not a feedback… it’s just we’re always translating to and from one another.
KP: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’m sure at this point you’re tired of hearing about it but I feel like one thing everyone picks up on in the sounds we’ve heard from you, at least within the past year or two, is a kind of physicality. And I think one of the things that strikes me about what I’ve heard is how dynamic it is but there are moments of intensity, whether that’s through speed, volume, noise and I feel like there’s maybe a biased association of that real-time listening and response being associated with a slower or quieter music and I wonder if in those more intense moments there’s a fluctuation of listening or a fluctuation of consciousness or if you ever have to take a step back and calm things down… I guess, yeah, how are you feeling about that [laughs]
GF: [laughs] I think there’s so many processes always going on in my body. Period. Always. Whether I’m playing or not. And I don’t think it’s dissimilar when I’m improvising. I mean we’re all improvising bodies. The context, the language, time is always changing and is always different, I feel. And so, yeah, there are always quote unquote compositional processes happening for me whether I’m playing or not. I’m always thinking about shit. Or narrative or song or noise. These are such huge words that mean completely different things. But I think the more I live my life in those ways, just always moving through life thinking and feeling about these things, it translates into how I play. It’s like I can be full of a surge or a big wave of something that perhaps is perceived as intense or visceral, corporeal, physical, all these words that people have been describing my playing by. And for me that’s just my experience of my body [laughs] and who I am internally. But of course in a musical context I think then there are issues at play of like what comes next. What comes after that climax, if that’s perceived as a climax. There are so many choices that could be made, decisions, you know. I know those are processes that are happening for me when I’m in those moments. Sometimes something really conscious-forward, structural will come into play for me and I’m like, OK, you know, now I’m gonna make this choice. But I think, regardless of whether it’s a super conscious thing, I am always making those choices when I play.
KP: Yeah, perfect. And I guess another one of those things that might convey that physicality to me, probably because it’s recognized as from the body, is your voice in something like threshold. It kind of reminds me of Charlotte Hug, her exclamations, but even more on the side of a redirection of energy, like a yell during a karate chop or something. But I wonder if there’s a particular way that you think about the voice or approach the voice when you’re playing.
GF: Yeah. I grew up singing in a children’s choir. And those were some of my earliest memories of music and being in my body in a way that I felt like I had agency over. Or that I felt like, oh I’m a child but I have power or I can be part of something… or I’m part of something bigger and spiritual and energetic and I’m respected in this way and I can feel quote unquote safe or seen in this way, which all of those things… that was kind of the only place that I felt any of those things as a child, for lack of going down a whole rabbit hole [laughs] of, uh… of trauma. But I think having those super early experiences at like four or five years old of connecting with my voice and body in that way was transformative and so essential to who I am and how I experience quote unquote vulnerability. I feel like that’s also a word I hear describing my work. It’s interesting. I’m super aware, somatically, of my chest and the vibration of my vocal chords and what I hold in my throat and my chest specifically throughout time whether it’s… it just has such a direct relationship for me to a lot of really intense things [laughs] My vocalization or my use of voice or audible sounds that come out of my throat and my chest and my mouth and my lips are pretty much involuntary. Those are not… I don’t have a lot of… I have some control over… I guess, yeah, I don’t have any control over when they happen or what triggers them or how they’re expressing themselves. Of course once they are happening I sometimes make choices, again whether it’s a very structural choice or not. I mean a lot of the time it’s just another part of translating my body through my violin body. We can be similar in those tones or sounds, we can be different, we share language, like I recognize so much of my… so much of the sounds I make as a body are such translations to where I am on the instrument or how I use my bow in certain ways, whether it’s emotionally or just my experience. Like if I’m in pain or if I’m experiencing pleasure or whatever hue of intimacy I’m experiencing it’s so sometimes in the moment. Or afterwards I’m like, oh, that’s so interesting, that feeling, I totally know what that sounds like when I’m playing and vice versa. And I can sometimes just have the auditory experience whether it’s huahuahua whether you wanna call it a hallucination or not, I can hear that when I’m away from my instrument. But I think for a long time I… that part… like my voice and my vocal cords were super closed when I played and it wasn’t until a few years ago that that shifted for me and it was a huge life-changing shift in my playing and my life. It’s such a deep part of my experience of what I do and how I do it.
KP: Yeah definitely. I mean it’s the first way of musickmaking that we’ve got, right. And it’s not just felt through the fingers or the lips or something, it’s felt inside our bodies. You mentioned composition a little earlier and, maybe sitting next to the voice, I understand you use text scores sometimes?
GF: Yeah.
KP: So what are some of the decisions that might go behind writing something down or using a text score versus not doing so?
GF: Sure. I think I’m interested in how text can create different experiences for improvisers to interact. I came into text scores through Pauline’s work, kind of in my super early twenties, and I had never seen that before, and I had never encountered text as composition as a form of notation. And I got into the whole… did the deep dive of - and still am in it - of alternative, experimental, non-western notation. And for awhile I was interested in - and I still am - a hybrid, using western notation, graphic, text. I’m curious about those intersections or how people encounter multiple languages. But I guess at the time I found Pauline’s work, I was really interested in how improvising can be accessible to children - and to older folks too - who don’t necessarily encounter being part of musical spaces in the ways that I do. Like how can text create a world for people to feel like they can come into making sound without the gatekeepers of traditional notation, or stuff like that. And I started composing text scores for young people, for toddlers and elementary folks who I worked with in schools, after school, and in community spaces and whether it was using body and voice or if we had access to egg shakers, anything really. Or violins. Or with older folks, their own instruments, et cetera et cetera. I’m curious how people embody, or internalize, just think about words [laughs] and how words or directives or just asking, making very clear compositional choices, but through text, how people respond to that. And how that shifts the quote unquote composer/musician dynamic, if that’s possible, in terms of power, quote unquote hierarchy, you know, all of those questions that are always being talked about and shit, you know, very intentionally and intensely examined. Mad respect to everyone who’s doing that work, don’t get me wrong. And, yeah, I’ve moved through phases of time where I’m like, wow, no [laughs] that didn’t work for me. Or maybe this was just an ensemble or a group of people that this doesn’t make sense with. And I think that’s no different than any other type of composer’s relationship to an ensemble or a group of people or a band playing their work. Sometimes the personnel doesn’t work out. Or sometimes you just need a different drummer, due to feel, due to… all of the things. But that’s been really good for me too, throughout the years, and it’s really shifted the way that I think about composing with text. Like how to ask for what I want but also… or what I’m hoping to hear, or the space that I am imagining. Of course, I don’t know how it will be filled because the scores that I compose are mostly compositions for improvisers so who knows what will happen. But at least I know what color the floorboards are [laughs]
KP: Yeah yeah. I’m kind of getting the sense that what you do write tends to be more a kind of very general direction for action more than something that leans more poetic with an implied translation to music…
GF: Actually, mostly the latter.
KP: Oh, nice, OK.
GF: Yeah I compose mostly for internal processes that then get translated to the external. Or work that deals with… I’m really interested in duration. Like duration over… a score starting day one and on day thirty-six it’s performed. And the text will often involve some type of process throughout that time. It isn’t necessarily an interaction with your instrument, or with the other people involved, but I’m curious how interacting with text or words imbues the body. Like how people hold certain types of asks around a process, whether it’s encountering a poem or poems for thirty-six days or trying to find the spaces in your body where you hold certain experiences or trying to really connect the threads of experiences you have in your life in relationship to how you encounter your instrument. And then what happens when you perform that, being witnessed if there’s an audience involved, or how you perform that then in relationship to the other improvisers involved. Like with these super intimate individual experiences, how do you then be in relationship to other people and to the audience, to the space, to the present moment, after a long duration. I guess I’m mostly interested in the relational. And that goes back to the beginning of our conversation. Improvisation is deeply relational to me, and so I’m curious about really emphasizing and exposing certain processes for individuals and what happens individually and then collectively when everyone comes together through text.
KP: Yeah I think… there’s the I Care If You Listen interview where you talk about duration and time a little bit and I've been thinking about it and music is always put in relation to time, right, whether it’s standardized meter or clock time or something. And it struck me that, similar to what it sounds like you’re trying to achieve, if you think about the time of words, to me it implies like you’re almost kind of speaking them, like your cadence. These interviews are always weird because people can’t hear how we’re talking, right, it’s all transcribed. Compared to most of the people that I talk to, the speed of my talking is like molasses and when I say one word it might be much slower than when someone else says the word. So it kind of emphasizes people’s relative time whenever people are performing, or rather digesting, that text score. Just some thoughts. I guess when you are thinking about words and what they convey to people, do you tend to lean more into the meanings of words or is it more the kind of rhyme, cadence, and poesy of words, or a mix?
GF: I think it’s a mix. And I think it’s so much based on the experience of audiation or hearing the words or the sounds in your head. I think so much of it is about the remembering of the words or of the text or the directive or what I’m asking myself and/or other people to think about or encounter or experience. I hold so many… like I can hear the timbre and the tone and the texture of so many voices, phrases, things people have said to me, things I’ve heard, things I’ve said. I think about those things a lot. I’m always holding them. They’re always with me. Sometimes I play them and sometimes I don’t. But I guess that’s my relationship to when I compose with text. I can hear myself in my head speaking those words and where they sit in my body and then I’m curious how other people experience and hear them in their own and then how they translate through their own instrument body and what that sounds like. And of course everyone experiences time, like you said, in such different ways. And, yeah, I’m interested in that. And sometimes that is really a mess [laughs] Sometimes it’s really a failure, like yikes, shit, oh no, man, wow, that is so different than my experience of these words, my voice, time, painfully so compared to the other people I’m playing with if I’m playing my own score or if I’m working with a band or group of people who are playing my music and I’m witnessing as a composer and I’m like, wow that is just so different than what I expected. But for me on one hand that is such great information and am I OK with that? With how… as a composer, composing for improvisers in this way, yeah, this is an interpretation. This is the process. This is how these folks are playing this score and interacting with one another in these super relational and intimate ways. And then on the other hand it’s like, huh, do I need to shift the way I write these scores. Maybe, huh, that doesn’t work for me in a way that really doesn’t work for me. And that really makes me think about Stockhausen’s text scores or Pauline’s work or text scores that I really admire that are really consistent. At least in my experience, in my listening of recordings or my experience of performing them or witnessing people perform them, they’re really consistent and they always conjure an experience or a quote unquote result - which is a terrible word that I’m gonna use - that is powerful or really compelling in a way that when I think about traditional notation et cetera et cetera, yeah, I mean some things don’t turn out like that no matter how you compose them, and that’s the craft of composing or the work of composing. But I guess when I think about hearing text scores throughout time, the ones that I’m really compelled by, I go back to them like, what’s happening here that this is composed in a way that elicits such a specific engagement from the musicians that consistently creates this music. And I try to really learn from that and be curious about it. Yeah, so again, on one hand I’m open to people’s interpretations of course and on the other hand I’m like, huh, how can I keep working on this? How can I keep being curious and experimenting with this type of composition that hopefully… yeah, period.
KP: Yeah that can be tricky too ‘cause… I’m not familiar particularly what you’re talking about but already I’m questioning whether or not that consistency would come from something in the score or whether, sometimes, especially with recorded music, a recording of a particular performance gets enough power and applause behind it it almost becomes a paradigm. People put their own spin on it but it’s almost copied in a way. That’s a trap to be aware of, but not sure if it applies.
GF: Yeah, I guess the text scores that I’m really inspired by and affected by are the ones that are able to consistently create space for a very specific gestalt. Like for the experience of improvisers, it’s a specific world created, and specific to how improvisers relate to one another in the gestalt of the moment. And with whatever is present of course but is held by this compositional experience of people encountering text in this way. It involves them interacting with themselves and the processes that come up with them, for them through this text and then with one another in the moment. And the scores that I find really compelling are, again, the ones that consistently happens, that gestalt is there, that relational ability happens organically. So I’m curious and I’m interested in that.
KP: Nice. And beyond score writing, do you like to just write creatively for fun, poetry or prose or…
GF: Yeah I do. I’m trying to get back into… or I guess the past couple months I’ve been trying to get back into my writing, both poetry and prose. For awhile that was a really big part of my life and I think it’s something… it’s good for me. And I’m trying to get back into it. There’s a lot of resistance I feel, from myself, to write for myself. I feel very stubborn about it often, I don’t want to do this, no, no I do not want to sit down and write in this way, no. And then I do and I’m like, oh [laughs] that brought something interesting up for me or I didn’t realize I was carrying… you know my pockets were full of rocks [laughs] like, oh yeah these rocks were pretty heavy. I finally stopped being so goddamned stubborn with myself and was like, huh, I should probably empty my pockets.
KP: Yeah yeah and sometimes almost - I don’t know, maybe not similar to what we were talking about with the gestalt thing but - sometimes you have an idea that feels so firm in your head, you maybe even have word choices and the cadence of things going on in there, and then that firm feeling is the resistance to do anything because it feels done. But when it comes out on the page, it actually comes out so differently.
GF: Totally. I think I struggle with that, because I do hear, as I said, so much in my head. And I have a really loud critic that comes into play that stops me from writing but once I start [laugh] if I can fucking get there and actually allow myself, give myself some slowness, give myself some, I don’t know, the permission to just start or say something then it often starts [laughs] I can often be in flow. But I definitely get into arguments with myself about it.
KP: Yeah, and not to get too hung upon words but because you strike me as someone who chooses their words carefully, again in that I Care If You Listen interview and then with Brad Rose over at Foxy Digitalis, you mention I think in both the ritual of performance and I wonder if that has a special meaning to you… I guess everyone has their own associations with words and my association with ritual in particular kind of implies a volatile space inbetween a couple of states and if you think of weddings or quinceañeras or something it’s always on the backdrop of a cultural tradition, and there’s a right and a wrong way to do things to get to the other state. So I guess, is there tidbits of that in your sense of the meaning? And if so, if there are right or wrong things to do in a performance, is there a tradition in mind?
GF: I guess when I think of ritual I think of liminal space. Or I think of like the air between worlds, whether they’re past, present, future, living or dead, and then all the inbetween. And all the timelines that are inbetween, whether I have words for that or not. And about the hue, the sensation and the sensualness of it all. I think that’s, whether it’s coded or codified in a certain way or… it’s more about the intimacy for me than anything being right or wrong. It’s all very fucking queer [laughs] you know. Yeah. And it’s expansive and it doesn’t for me… I’m open to it all. I mean, I’m not gonna set my violin on fire any time soon [laughs] I know my lines. I know them very well. I know them in my bones. And I know them in my blood. So I’m not worried about that. And if there are times where I feel like I don’t have a knowing or something is shifting or my lines are being pushed in a certain way by something or somebody, I know that that’s when I need to take a minute. And sometimes that happens to me when I’m playing and of course it happens to me in life. And that within itself is a ritual. I think ritual can be micro, tiny moments, whether they’re of breath or they’re of a cultural tradition or something really concrete or a practice that you or many people or your family or your people have done for generations. I think, yeah, who am I to say what a ritual is but for me the ritual of being with my instrument, of being with my violin, and whether I’m alone or if I’m playing with other people, it’s always there, you know. It’s always there and I know it’ll always be there.
KP: It was kind of cropping up just then and it’s been cropping up throughout the conversation, but the difference between solo playing and a group context. Are there some, beyond having more information to listen to and to react to and also the relationship with the actual people that you’re playing with, are there some things that you like or dislike of one of the other that is exclusive to that context, group or solo?
GF: I kind of love it all. I love meeting folks for the first time and playing a gig or getting together and figuring that out. That’s super exciting and awesome to me, that kind of… how do you speak to one another, how do you move together, how do you be together. And what comes of that. That’s something I love and then I also love working with people over time. My dear friend Nava Dunkelman comes to mind, who I’ve had the pleasure of playing with since 2014, and just the extreme privilege of working with someone over time and developing and deepening, all of those processes mentioned previously… not saying that… I mean I think also when I’ve toured or when I have played with folks for the first time, I think that can always happen, it can always just be right there. You know, so deep and so just killing like, dang, this is happening. But then, yeah, being able to develop language or how we move over time is awesome. And then I also like the ritual of getting together [laughs] when that’s possible in this pandemic. Of meeting up weekly or regularly to play. I guess it’s different than a super longitudinal, long term thing. I think it could also get that way or be that but, huh, how do we interact each week, how do we develop language, or work on tunes, songs, structures, come up with things together. I love that too.
KP: Nice. Well that’s most of what I think I had lined up, did you have any direction that you wanted to go? Or any direction that you wanted to shout out?
GF: I guess I’m curious what brings you to this music? Not necessarily mine but where’s… when did you or how did you start wanting to do interviews like these?
KP: Uh, I think like most people’s paths, it’s been a slow, windy one, but I probably found my way to…I mean I was listening to some free jazz from the 60s and 70s beforehand but my now partner introduced me to more modern improvised music in 2014 and it kind of took off from there. And at some point - actually since I’ve picked up that you’re a fan - there was a Leroy Jenkins recording, it was his Driftwood ensemble minus Min Xiao-Fen, they released an old archival thing from like 2008 and I just had this urge of, you know, this is something I know that no one else is going to talk about, so I want to talk about it, to just share this experience. So I found a blog that would take amateurs. And the words have not been kind all the time, my outlooks have changed, but I think I got to this path wanting to approach music in a way that I wanted to see it approached. With a little curiosity towards the details. A little more open without so many assumptions. With a little bit of the evaluation stripped away. As far as the specific interview style, I really ripped it off of this blog called Tone Glow. Their review side can be a little harsh sometimes but their interviews are quite personal and presented raw. And I think… I had done a couple interviews before, and for one I approached three musicians, Sarah Hennies, Lisa Cameron, and Claire Rousay, and I just approached it from a bad point of view. I have things that I go for in these interviews but I was very specifically approaching those interviews from the perspective that they all happen to be trans percussionists and queer percussion instead of as individual practices and I found out through that process that I’m just incredibly uncomfortable embedding someone else’s words in mine like in features you usually see. Whenever I saw Tone Glow I thought, this is great, this is something that I’m comfortable with, just having a conversation and presenting it raw. It’s been super interesting. Sometimes there are hangups about wanting to write for clarity and stuff, many people bring that up, but I find that in conversation sometimes people are talking a little past each other and it’s hard to deal with some of these headier things on the fly but what comes out is usually super interesting and telling of the kernel of what they’re trying to get at in its own way. Sorry, that’s a long answer [laughs] but that’s how I came to these interviews. But yeah, just really trying to approach it with a little more attention to detail and care in a rawer way. But, yeah, anything else?
GF: hmmm, I don’t think so. I’m getting a cat today.
KP: Oh nice.
GF:: Yeah, I’m very excited.
KP: A rescue or a kitty?
GF: A rescue. Yeah, this has been the longest time period of my life where I’ve lived without a creature, the past two years. And I’m really looking froward to playing violin for a cat every day [laughs] we’ll see how she feels about it.
KP: Yeah you can interact with the meows.
GF: Yeah you might be hearing some more meowing and chirping from me in the near soon.
KP: We’ve got a dog, like a big one, a 100lb dog, and the past couple years in particular would be even rougher without being able to hug an animal. Humans are great too, but there’s something special about something fuzzy.
GF: Totally. I’ve really missed living, sharing life and a home with a creature. That’s something that comes very organically to me. I had been living with a giant rabbit in Oakland before I moved to New York named Cardamom. I’ve never quite met a creature like her. Very demanding. Had a lot of very big feelings. And ate an entire piece of drywall out of my wall when I told her I was going to move to New York. She was gonna live with a friend, an ex-student of mine. I came home around 2AM from a gig and found that hole in my wall and was like, holy shit. So yeah Cardamom didn’t join me in New York. She is still living her best life in California but I think it’ll be really great to live with a fuzzy friend again.
KP: Yeah and luckily cats don’t really… well your furniture might be an issue but probably not the walls.
GF: Yeah we hope not. I don’t know what could surprise me anymore in this life but definitely a cat eating through drywall might be something that would get me. Fingers crossed, bottoms up that that’s not gonna happen.
KP: Do you have a name picked out?
GF: Yeah, her name is Flora. After Alejandra Pizarnik, the poet. Her first name was Flora but she went by Alejandra. Yeah, Flora the cat.
annotations
annotations is a recurring feature sampling non-standard notation in the spirit of John Cage & Alison Knowles’ Notations and Theresa Sauer’s Notations 21. Alternative notation can offer intuitive pathways to enriching interpretations of the sound it symbolizes and, even better, sound in general. For many listeners, music is more often approached through performances and recordings, rather than through compositional practices; these scores might offer additional information, hence the name, annotations.
Additional resources around non-standard notation can be found throughout our resource roll.
All scores copied in this newsletter are done so with permission of the composer for the purpose of this newsletter only, and are not to be further copied without their permission. If you are a composer utilizing non-standard notation and are interested in featuring your work in this newsletter, please reach out to harmonicseries21@gmail.com for permissions and purchasing of your scores; if you know a composer that might be interested, please share this call.
Mira Martin-Gray - music for two friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time (2021)
Mira Martin-Gray is an improvising musician, producer, composer, sound artist, and multi-instrumentalist who frequently works with feedback, voice, and percussion and whose work also appears under the monikers Tendencyitis and Cypro. Some working groups include Overleaf with Heidi Chan and Kayla Milmine, 3M with Mark Zurawinski and Mike Lynn, and Quartz Ibex with Kurt Newman and Olivia Shortt, the latter of which appears on her label, cette records. Some recent releases include I Have Eaten From The Timbrel I Have Drunk From The Cymbal (as Cypro), Stick Control for the Air Drummer, and, particularly pertinent here, socks and sandals with Germaine Liu.
music for two friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time was written specifically for Martin-Gray and Liu to perform at The Guelph Jazz Festival’s Autumn Echoes Series, though is adaptable for others. For two performers on drum kit, drum machine, and no-input mixer, it presents text direction and word cues for feel alongside corresponding graphics whose interpretations should have a maximum duration of 10 minutes and segue into each other. It contains standard notation for repetition and indicators for percussion and mixer parts, but the orange notes during small talk and other symbols signify improvisation.
In so many ways the score conveys the comfort of catching up with an old friend. My eye is drawn to the laughing emoji and the smiley above that, each suggesting mutual exchange in spatial balance and venn convergence. Comparatively, the irregular figures of small talk indicate the awkwardness of finding footing when first meeting after so long. Beyond the titles, some phrases in the descriptions do more to develop the feel of the music than any words about the mechanics, “awkward,” “finding common ground,” “screaming and laughing like a tickled saxophone or an electric hyena.” Interestingly, the two find their groove when their parts separate, as if to show that a good conversation with a good friend entails being able to be yourself. And while the standard symbol for repetition doesn’t change, its effect in these non-standard contexts might, the rote catchup of small talk, the rolling laughter of something that hits just right. While other means of notation might provoke a similar narrative, I doubt its fun and its friendliness would be as infectiously instilled in the call for performance as it is here.
- Keith Prosk
reviews
Alvear-Bondi - Latidométrica [Bárbara González Barrera] / Definite body, at sea [Mara Winter] (INSUB, 2022)
Cristián Alvear and Cyril Bondi perform a Bárbara González Barrera composition with electric guitar and percussion and a Mara Winter composition with electric guitar and bowls on the 43’ Latidométrica / Definite body, at sea. It is the third in a series of three recordings showcasing performances of compositions from Chile and Switzerland commissioned by Alvear-Bondi, preceded by performances of pieces from Santiago Astaburuaga, Nicolás Carrasco, d’incise, and Anna-Kaisa Meklin.
Listen to “Latidométrica” like a heartbeat. A woody click and short tone mark the minutes. In between, severe silence makes each sounding bear more gravity. The cadence of guitar tone, with quick attack and clipped decay, might shift but only rarely does it ring out or sound a chord stroke, like a leaky valve or an arresting arrhythmia. The timbre of percussion is comparatively varied, wobbling skin like fluttering, circular cymbalwork flowing, big bass drum contractions. They are just out of time with each other. Perhaps it’s just the kind of variations someone attuned to their heartbeat is sensitive towards. Until the minute pacemaker misses its mark. There is a minute of nothing but silence. But then the most lively chord and lub dub drum yet seem to reawaken the beat. It is a terminal rally. And the guitar tone becomes the beeping life support song of vital monitors. More than a minute of silence signals death. And it was not meant to be like ours but another’s life whose sounds we were hanging on. A crushing narrative from silence.
And again following the title, “Definite body, at sea” appears to be a broken chord tossed among bowls’ waves. The chord changes its shape. Times its movement around crests or on top of crests. Cannot find its footing among bowls’ rogues and refractions. Loses and regains pieces of itself but remains the chord. But by the end it finds its sea legs, and sounds steady, resounding its own wave to resonate with the others.
- Keith Prosk
Nat Baldwin - Blind Field (Dinzu Artefacts, 2022)
Nat Baldwin arranges three solos for multitracked contrabass and voice on the 26’ Blind Field.
Sounds seem closer to rubbing cellophane with a dry thumb, ripping polypropylene tape from plastic, or a quick unzipping, frictional textures that express strings’ corrugations and creak the bones of the bass, crosshatched tensive bowings suspended in vertigo, glissandos or the illusions of them, a throbbing polyrhythm of pulse. A tender choir in delay, trumpeting cherubic ah-ahs into humming, harmonizing, beating together, amid a field stippled with harmonic plucks, and close mic’d mouth sounds with saliva. A sandy woodworking and a quavering whimpering expand into heavy scraping like dragging wood furniture in fits across a wood floor or a draining whirlpool yawning and sonorous arco radiating beatings, freckled with shimmering crepuscules in fitful music box cadences. Always a pulse with interdependent interventions, something gentle and something brutal, in tempestuous harmonies.
- Keith Prosk
gabby fluke-mogul, Amanda Irarrázabal - Rayas (self-released, 2022)
gabby fluke-mogul and Amanda Irarrázabal - with violin, contrabass, and voice - play and record their first meeting on the four-track, 43’ Rayas.
The two move together through motifs, stay close in momentum and texture and share a comfort to independently stray towards something new too to nudge each other elsewhere. Bass as drum and tapping violin. Hard plucks that thwack the neck from each. Low end elephant roars for violin’s squeaky trumpet (and at another moment bass might mimic trombone). Rubbing plastic and squeegeeing glass. Airy whispers with kettle whistles. Scratch and saw. Scrub and scrape. Voice emerges from strings like extensions of them, wails from whines blurred until one pauses. Complementary communication and contrapuntal too. Bowing especially sometimes foregrounds register differentials and the possible speed associated with them, the two feeling like the columned shear of a stream surprisingly powerful for its depth in the difficulty of finding footing in its bed. And they differentiate themselves in glimpses of folk tunes and romantic swings, shifting sub-bass clouds more felt than heard. Hear phone tones and sneezes but I don’t think the duo responds to these contingencies.
- Keith Prosk
Takumi Ikeda - Musical Procedure (Ftarri, 2022)
Fumi Endo, Takumi Ikeda, and Kokichi Yanagisawa perform four Ikeda compositions for solo, duo, and trio with piano, electric percussion & objects, and electric guitar on the eight-track, hour-long Musical Procedure.
The three “Delimiter” versions for paper score and piano play with similar material, a broken dyad with variations on a third tone, a dyad with variations on a third tone, a broken dyad with variations on a third chord. Though these are significant differences they are iterative in themselves and iterations of each other but each also cultivates a harmonic aura fluctuating and stable, at the boundary of repetition and change at every level. A linchpin of this portrait, in Ikeda’s words, is that “an awareness of patterns precedes sound image,” weighting the process more than result. An openness in result paired with recognizable direction through repetition no doubt develops an informed manipulation of the musical material available to performers, creating new pathways towards interactions either could not compose on their own.
The other five pieces are all for video score. A frame-by-frame presentation might undercut the synchrony paper scores can foster and puts the interpreter in the moment. This diachronic approach underscores that interpreters adapt appropriately based on listening to previous soundings and, from these recognizable patterns, what they know will need to happen, which feeds back into the flexibility of sounds allowed by the score and the greater emphasis on process over result. Some games are at play here, and among them speed determines shape, sequence determines speed, and ex machina indicators determine speed while it also gradually increases. It can feel repetitive, random, rigid, playful, like a systematic experimentation of harmonic, melodic, and dynamic juxtaposition but with an artful sensitivity towards sound placement that might coalesce into whimsical romps and erratic dance.
- Keith Prosk
Annette Krebs - Six sonic movements… (Graphit, 2022)
Annette Krebs performs a 37’ realization of a composition in the Konstruktion#4 configuration on Six sonic movements through amplified metal pieces, paper noises, strings, sine waves, plastic animals, objects, voice, a quietly beeping heating system and street noises. Similar to the previous presentation of Konstruktion#4, it offers alternate mixes illuminating the relation of its sounds to the tones of home, namely the heating system.
Those familiar with the series will recognize some core aspects. Movement, textures, sources metamorphosed into nuanced disorienting meanings, lynchian, strange. My ear is drawn to the presentation of mixes. Traffic is easy but while I can decipher an anonymous hum too constant to be traffic I cannot hear the beeping the title references. Maybe a sine relates to a siren or the heater frequency, maybe quiet electric utterances find spaces in the roomsound, maybe I imagine these things because I’ve been told to hear them. My pitch poor ear is unsure of how the musical system incorporates the heating system. But the traffic effects a tangible change. Whereas before silence amplified its weirdness, these odd morphologies appearing and as quickly disappearing from the void like alien objects arced through space, now its aura is grounded and mundane. It reminds that this is a person performing, not a phenomena. It transposes the sound from an imagined space to the real one. It puts the personal relation between them into the construction, which is perhaps why parts of this system are subtitled Corona Variations, not only for their coincidence but because the pandemic instilled a hyperawareness of our bodies and space - in distance and our homes - that could only communicate with our creative works.
- Keith Prosk
Charmaine Lee/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Gabby Fluke-Mogul/Joanna Mattrey/Weston Olencki - Live in Accord (Notice Recordings, 2022)
Live in Accord documents four roughly quarter-hour sets from a summer afternoon event organized by the label, including: Charmaine Lee with voice and electronics; Lee and Weston Olencki with voice and electronics; gabby fluke-mogul, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Joanna Mattrey with violin, cello, and viola; and Lonberg-Holm and Olencki with cello and trombone. Sienna Blaw, Chelsea Enjer Hecht, and Emily Kessler joined the latter two sets in dance.
Find Lee’s fast cut feel. Flapping. Fluttering. Groaning. Coos. Stressed respirations. Muted screams and babbled phonemes. Random-noise bursts with radio live transmissions. Dreamy EVP interference. Swinging grooves from twisting feedback. Arcade falls and failures intoned. Clipped glitch shear a strange turntablism. Glottal beats like ventricular claps and a galloping, distorted, like a horseman of the apocalypse in this context. Strings rip, saw, whinny, scratch as a turbulent unit, a cacophonous chorus, contrapuntal plucking a bed for arco monologues, though not too fast for the cadence of the dance. Vulgar trombone meets cello creaks and groans, equine raspberries, tragicomic slides, lispy sustain, and a gurgling yawning vocal multiphonic meet two stabs at throbbing double stop harmonies and twinning glissandi. Beyond its noisier corners a throughline is their tether to the moment, birdsong and cock’s crow, the crunch and shake of passersby on grass. The internal rhythms of the dancers imagined to complement those from the sounds in their footfalls. Like three sirens anthropomorphised from the birds and cunningly close, or three graces a balancing beauty into this cacophony, or three furies driving the passion of the instrumentalists.
- Keith Prosk
Alvin Lucier & Jordan Dykstra - Out of Our Hands (Editions Verde / Important Records, 2022)
The ensemble Ordinary Affects perform sidelong realizations of an Alvin Lucier composition and a Jordan Dykstra composition with cello, viola, violin, and percussion on the 39’ Out of Our Hands.
“Corner Church and High” is endless gliss so slow its movements feel ambiguous. A kind of koan. Strings’ beatings establish shortly and vibraphones’ measured march’s decay ripples through them like drops in a pool. Harmonic interactions carve out ethereal streams, glow thrummingly, sing like sirens.
“32 Middle Tones” feels similar but cellular. Packets of sustained sounding with walls of silence. Cello tones combine in string trio chords for revolving harmonies, textures. Assorted percussion adding depth of field in jingling shaking, winding scraping, some kind of rolling thunder, and bowed metal. Harmonica too. And sometimes a sung tone so pure it blends with the beatings. Its serial structure highlights its textural nature. Not just the nuances of sounded harmonies - isolated enough to cleanse the palate but not enough to foster forgetfulness - but the character of beatings each emits.
- Keith Prosk
Ordinary Affects on this recording is: Laura Cetilia (cello); Luke Damrosch (percussion); Jordan Dykstra (viola); Morgan Evans-Weiler (violin); and J. P. A. Falzone (percussion).
Éliane Radigue & Frédéric Blondy - Occam XXV (Organ Reframed, 2022)
Frédéric Blondy performs the Éliane Radigue composition Occam XXV for organ on this 44’ recording.
As each occam ocean recording illuminates the limits of its instruments, this one might draw attention towards the installation of its instrument. And whereas others tend to exhibit the bond between an instrumentalist and their instrument, this one seems as if it could be particularly contingent upon changing specifications and spaces. Interestingly, Blondy directed another occam subject to similar shifts - if changing personnel of an orchestra could be imagined as changing the instrument - in Occam Ocean for Onceim. But maybe Onceim has yet to have to change personnel to perform their piece, and maybe Occam XXV could be considered site-specific to the Union Chapel organ.
It begins not so much as something heard but something felt. The absorbing ambiance of its architecture a seismic shaking settling into shifting bellicose beatings. Whether it’s sighing bellows, pumping hydraulics, or the nearby tube, tunnel whooshes with hissing whispers like rails seem to slowly unfurl an invisible chord. The latter scenario would be unlikely in other occam recordings, but fitting here alongside later moments of emergency vehicle sirens just outside whose doppler songs complement hastening and slowing beating patterns. A kind of humming harmonic breath between bass throbs. And at last something understood as more sound than earth rises and blooms. The embracing warmth of organ pulse. Fields of waves refracting among each other. In the wind, dancing, two pronounced beatings in counterpoint yet not canceling. Hear new tones send apoplectic murmurs through pulses. Complexity and beauty. Angelic radiance. And in the end, a celestial twinkling. As if more than any inspiration from water under the sovereignty of gravity, this piece has pulled light, water, and air from the ether to grow like a tree from earthly low register to heavenly high.
- Keith Prosk
The Rhythm Method - The Rhythm Method (Gold Bolus Recordings, 2022)
The string quartet Leah Asher, Meaghan Burke, Carrie Frey, and Marina Kifferstein perform four of each others’ compositions and three improvisations on the 51’ The Rhythm Method.
An ongoing goal of the quartet is to provide a nurturing space for each of its players. Reflected in each contributing one composition. And an echo of this self-similar moral is in the music. They stay together, attendant, ready to buoy each other up yet stay true to their internal cadences. Whether that’s frenzied bowing in turns or vocalizing a word of “Che Si Può Fare?” each. Endless glissandi in and out of unison and diffusion for an uneasy harmony or bowings punctuating gliss for the meniscused meandering of forest’s falling leaves from desiccating autumn. Spiccato fluttering butterfly kisses, hushed rubbing, gentle humming, all in pizzicato like rain on shelter, and other textures together. Forceful and noisy but tender, with care. A sounded sisterhood like eddies braided between the curl of cutbank and bar to together make the mighty river.
- Keith Prosk
Kaori Suzuki - Music For Modified Melodica (Moving Furniture Records, 2022)
Kaori Suzuki performs one 26’ realization for a retuned melodica with foot pumps on Music For Modified Melodica.
Sustained and overblown, the shrill nasal drone like cousins harmonica, shō, bagpipe. A deep harmonic profile widened by the expansion of its chord, now flanked with low om and high whine. A saturated field of waves, refracting, shifting. Shimmering harmonics’ glistening sheen celestial twinkling. Enrapturing, ensconcing. Ecstatic radiations call forth auditory hallucinations from cicada tanpura. Waves and their automatic interactions surface into and subside from consciousness from it’s shifting chord. So much movement from so little action. Despite its haze something piercing. Like its waves summoned from nothing its singing stays in the ears, ringing, after its end, even at low volume playback.
- Keith Prosk
Lisa Ullén/Elsa Bergman/Anna Lund - Space (Relative Pitch Records, 2022)
Lisa Ullén, Elsa Bergman, and Anna Lund play five energetic environments for piano, contrabass, and drums on the 39’ Space.
Keys’ dizzying flurries slurring, galloping bass, and skittering kit lay down dense loud lines at a quick clip for a nervous effervescence. Free form discrete staccato soundings confer a certain angularity but group momentum can blur it smooth. At their intersection, cymbals’ crash saturates space like piano’s glowing clusters of collateral harmonics cresting miraged melodies, step-pattern bass expansions a contrapuntal companion to piano’s fitful and fiery explorations, and kick drums’ long waves meeting bass’ halfway, tethered together thus. And sometimes in texture too, piano preparations or percussive knocking mimicking a woodpecker with drums’ stick clicks, high register plinks from both bass and piano, or bass’ distressed strings creaking alongside crackling percussion and keys’ crunchy chords.
- Keith Prosk
Biliana Voutchkova - Michael Zerang - The Emerald Figurines (Relative Pitch Records, 2022)
Biliana Voutchkova and Michael Zerang play four scenarios for violin, voice, and percussion on the 54’ The Emerald Figurines. It is the first in a series of duos Voutchkova intends to release with Relative Pitch Records in 2022.
There is always a focused attention towards communication between improvisers. The ear tethers their actions, the mind finds patterns. It’s probably not imagined either. Like in verbal conversation, people absorb pieces of each other, their phrases, their mannerisms, quite quickly. This sense is heightened in duologue, in directness between players but also in details that ears might gloss over in larger contexts. The notes prime expectations towards a responsive relationship between the duo. So like many able improvisers, they deepen and shallow, expand and contract together through volume, speed, texture. Spiraling bowing and friction drum maelstrom. Violin’s saturn missiles and thinner sticks’ acidic attack. Saltating sounds as each overcomes friction together. Seafaring sounds of creaking wood and boisterous canvas. Violin as lamellophone for bells and chimes. Lion’s roars and coyote calls and distorted respiration. Voice extends frictional groans with its own, mousy squeaks with its hiss. And beyond the frictional gyre from these techniques, voice is central to the duo’s grooves, a strange turntablistic scratching between them met with contorted pseudophonemes, or snarling glossolalia chanting over chimes and beat violin. But something about this recording conveys that it is not just about salient highlights but the entourage of the conversation, not just about cool sounds but finding the way to new expressions of yourself through each other. This is also framed as a kind of pandemic initiative and I think that latter connection to others, something sometimes missed these past few years, is what the series intends to showcase.
- Keith Prosk
Nate Wooley - Experiment Three for Untrained Voice (PLAYNEUTRAL, 2022)
Nate Wooley arranges a 25’ track for voice and sine tone on Experiment Three for Untrained Voice, one from a group of nine etudes in the Mutual Aid Music ecosystem.
The score was presented in the first volume of Graphème. Its words come from Moby-Dick, just before the narrator recounts legendary whalemen like Perseus, the first, and then finagles St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo into the club through various dubious means. Maybe there are different manuscripts, but my copy has “enterprises” instead of “endeavors” and I wonder if Wooley changed this to provide a median syllable and symmetry to the composition. But syllables on the page are grouped not equidistantly or radially but to reveal the words they come from, offsetting any symmetry (though interestingly this realization has nearly as many minutes as phonemes). The first sign of its messy complexity or careful disorderliness.
This despite the instruction that it “should not be sung with the intention of making the sentence legible to the listener.” Similarly, that performers should not attempt “to control the attack or decay of the voice in a ‘musical’ way.” But this recording is not a straight interpretation, overlaying what appears to be additional phonemes without distinctive consonants and maybe mixing the sine tone in and out of audibility for something that feels more musical. And some phonemes are perfect cairns in tracing the sentence, the diphonic approach of -vors or the hiss of which and dis-.
It makes for an impactful listening experience. Guttural groans and slow chants. Voice wavering in sustain and grained like a wicking flame. A kind of trilling illusion that could be the sine, the interaction of the sine with the voice, or some uncovered alcove in the profile of the voice. A quiet chorus warbles when voices overlap. Harmonies seem to sound the relational interdependence of rational intonation, not just in the choice of frequency from perception but their mutual interaction. Language begins to change its meaning to be just sound.
- Keith Prosk
Zinc & Copper - Discrepancies with F.H. (#1#2#3#4#5#6) (Pirelli HangarBicocca, 2022)
Robin Hayward, Hilary Jeffery, and Elena Kakaliagou perform their composition for tuba, trombone, and horn inspired by a collection of sculptures from Leonor Antunes on the 26’ Discrepancies with F.H. (#1#2#3#4#5#6).
The sculptures, from which the music receives its name but extend to #8, featured as part of Antunes’ 2018 exhibition at HangarBicocca in Milan, the last days in Galliate, during which this recording occurred. Its forms are an abstracting rescaling and isolation of those that might be found in Franca Helg’s rattan furniture designs. Its material is brass, which along with the natural lighting of the exhibition that changes the experience with the passing of the day might accentuate the material of time in its oxidation. The form and material make them rather resemble a trombone slide. The work is a cluster of works. And they suspend in clusters distributed in space among other similarly clustered clusters of work. Which might recall that a sound is a cluster of sounds that can not only be imagined three-dimensionally in relation to each other but is.
And like art suggests rhythm, music suggests shape. The shape of the room, the shape of the ensemble, the shape of their instruments. The musicians move about the room in various constellations. Sounds pan, get close, feel further. They accumulate in the corners to accentuate the beating patterns. My pitch poor ear can’t tell for certain but it seems as if they stay in similar sound spaces to underscore the effect of space on sound. A warbling call echoes through one side. Or a cloud of pointillistic repetition. And I have a hunch these are a kind of deconstructed ruins of an unseen melody, part of the performance but not featured on this release, an elegiac fanfare recycled ad nauseum. Hard blows swell in a way that conveys changing shape more than changing velocity in Bernoulli’s principle. In these ways it resists the flattening of recording.
- Keith Prosk
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