tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9452805682039333892024-02-06T21:12:26.787-08:00erstwordsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-74689271297352844912015-07-26T13:49:00.000-07:002015-07-26T14:44:31.666-07:00A Philosophical Approach to Silence<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I wrote the following text as a public note in my concert
program of my compositions at Kid Ailack
Hall in Tokyo the other day. I did not add any modifications since then. I wrote
the note rather in a hurry, so there might be some parts that are difficult to
understand or were not quite written with the right words. As for these issues,
I would like to write more to explain better in the future.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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In general, I probably prefer to raise an issue rather than
trying to find the answer to the solution. I am not a kind of person who likes
to deepen a thought based on some particular idea or system. If you read my
note, you may have an impression that I simply arranged casual thoughts that I
hit on. That is understandable. To be honest, I would like to leave in-depth
discussions to other people. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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- Taku Sugimoto (November 11, 2005)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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-----------------------------------------------------<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<h3>
<b>About Philosophy of Silence</b></h3>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I often hear people saying that my music that is full of
intervals and gaps of silence must be just an adaptation of John Cage's works.
If I composed my works with more normal musical notes instead of so much
silence (that is exactly the thing most composers are doing - rehashing of
predecessors' old ideas), then people may not say that. Since there is a rest
in a series of musical notes, some people may say that I could simply use the
rests instead of silence. But that is a different issue. If there is a long
series of hundreds or thousands of rests without musical notes, the part will
be considered as a silence in most cases. And if the silence part lasts for
hundreds or thousands of measures, the part will be torn off from the structure
of music consequently, and the listeners' ears could be shifted to focus on the
environmental sounds naturally. But this is just the natural sequence of
events, and was not what John Cage had in his mind. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Then, what was silence to Cage? To put it simply, I guess it
was 'unintentional sound'. Then, what is unintentional sound? This question
seems to be quite contemporary, because I think that the current situation in
the music tends to involve sounds that are hard to tell whether they're
intentional or unintentional just from listening to the sound itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Radu Malfatti also mentioned before, the idea of 'Silence
= Unintentional Sound' had existed even before Cage started to give meaning to
it, and the idea still exists now. However, the concept of 'silence' that had
already existed before Cage clearly started to change in a particular field of
music. How it has changed is the very interesting issue concerning the
contemporary sense of 'silence' that we are facing now. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From the present point of view, if a performer does not play
his/her instrument for a certain duration in a certain situation, that can be
considered to be his/her intention to let the listeners start to listen to the
environmental sounds (or to make the situation where environmental sounds can
be heard naturally). If the performer plays 4'33" and the audience knows
the concept of the piece, there will be a consensual situation where people
listen to unintentional sounds in silence. But in this situation, the
'unintentional sounds' are actually intended by incorporating the silent space
into the music intentionally. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/323/19845890978_6215200712_c.jpg" /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Spaces are controlled by performers to some extent.
Otherwise, (it may sound odd but) the piece will not come into existence. In
fact, when a performer is going to play this kind of music, he/she has to
consider the environmental sounds and the noises from the audience (today's
definition of 'silence' must be this) as predictable factors to some extent.
Normally, silent music is performed in this way on the premise I mentioned
above. The situation might not be perfectly controlled, but genuine
'unintentional sound' does not exist in this situation either. How about in a
different situation? Would it be possible to play 4'33" on a stage where
musicians are playing some other music? If a musician plays 4'33" in the
middle of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven, I guess that the
part might be still considered nothing but a part of Beethoven's piece even if
the musician insists that it was 4'33". However, this resembles in the
above-mentioned case, in the sense that the originally so-called 'unintentional
sound' was already included within a predictable range of events to some
extent. That is, there are so many ways to play Beethoven, and these different
ways are all considered to be within a predictable range. Conversely, to play
4'33" in the middle of Beethoven can be considered to be the similar event
as the environmental sounds in a point where the event was not controlled with100%
confidence. This consequence would also be inevitable when a performer is
playing sounds using an instrument. It is just a matter of degree. Whether it
is the sound of Beethoven's piece, or the environmental sounds, or the sound of
an instrument, there is no big difference in the point that the performer has a
rough sketch (plan) in mind in advance. (If so, isn't it possible to consider
that Beethoven's music has the silence - although we will face an obstacle in
this idea to overcome.) And will the unintentional listening become possible if
we get rid of the sketch/plan from our minds? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we are listening to a particular piece, the only thing
that could determine whether it is 4'33", or Beethoven's music, or some
simple daily life sounds is the title of the music. However, I doubt that it
was just due to an ideological difference. If the concept of 'unintentional
listening' can only function relatively, and if the concept is related to all
the complicated processes of recognition, everything can be regarded as a
silence, and vice versa. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well, after writing the preface like this, I would like to
add my tentative conclusion below. After that, I will just continue to write
with vigor. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First of all, as long as any kind of sound could be
intentional or unintentional, it will differ depending on the context whether
it should be regarded as a silence or not. I think that the sound itself does
not contain the information to be judged (if it is regarded as a silence or
not) any more. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Next, there is another issue: "Is it really necessary
for us to analyze whether a particular sound could be a silence or not when
listening to music or thinking about music?" I would like to express my
standpoint on this question as clear as I can.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is of course a legitimate opinion that whether the
sound should be regarded as a silence or not, and whether it is intentional or
unintentional, are not big issues. The only thing that would matter is 'sound'
when we appreciate music, and how it should be recognized is not important.
Well, that might be true. It is hard to argue with it, but as my simple
question, is it really possible for a listener to 'just listen to the sound as
a simple sound'? If that is possible, that means this way of listening is exactly
the unintentional relation to the sound in a true sense. If so, every sound
could be regarded as something not worth bothering about (or a trivial matter).
Can music exist if this is the case? Music has been developed as a complex
relationship of sounds and something besides sounds. That is how music should
be. It is clearly a different issue whether a sound can exist just as a sound
or not, and whether we can recognize it as a sound or not. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I doubt if we could simply say that one particular sound is
more significant than other sounds. Is an E note more special than a D note? Is
the start-up sound of a computer more interesting than the sound of rain? If it
were possible for us to hear sound in such a simple manner, any of these sounds
would not be more than any other sound. When we listen to a series of sounds,
aren't we evaluating the information each sound delivers in relation with other
elements? I think that every sound - like an E note, the start-up sound of a
computer or the sound of rain - obtains a nature as a unique sound by its
relations with each other. The identity of the sound must be formed on the
basis of the common understanding of the sound to some extent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If we define a particular sound that has a particular pitch
as the sound that contains a corresponding frequency, we can mathematically
prove the fact that (for example) a C note can be in harmony with an E note and
a G note by comparing the frequencies of the three. This data can be trusted in
regard to the consonance of sounds, but when perceiving consonance phenomena as
sensuous impressions, can this sensuous value be absolute? Conceivably, the
fact that the notes C, E and G are consonant with each other could be an
incidental event. There might have been a chance that these three notes would
not be regarded as the consonant sounds or a chord or the sounds with pitches.
There might also have been a possible chance that some completely different set
of notes - whatever it was - became the consonant sounds, which could have been
proved to be consonant mathematically by means of some different method (or
could be the same method in a narrow sense) of reading the frequencies. If that
had happened, the music would be a completely different form as it is now.
Perhaps within the possibilities, some new form of expression that is not
regarded as music today could be included, and it might not be impossible to
perform a stunt to aggressively insist that this is music. But in order to
justify this statement, we need a common concept on what can be defined as
music as an initial <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>premise. In fact,
the notes C, E and G are considered to be consonant sounds in the premise we
share today, and the other sets of notes that have no relation with each other
do not gain important positions in today's world of consonant sounds. That is
because any thought experiment regarding music has to be carried out using the
foundation of the present situation of music. On the other hand, the aggressive
statement, to insist that some form of expression can be regarded as music even
when it seems far away from the conventional form of music, naturally derives
from the current situation surrounding the music. It should be possible enough
to recognize a particular sound as something different from how it was identified
in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
However, if some particular sound - whatever it is, like the
start-up sound of a computer or the sound of rain, anything can be substituted
for that - can be perceived as something different from how it used to be
identified, what does that mean? If a particular sound can be something else
while holding its original identity, we could simply give a new name to it. For
example, we could say, 'The sound of rain is the C note'. This is not so
absurd. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am fascinated with the idea that the context of a sound
can be displaceable with different contexts, while the sound keeps its original
identity. It is not quite the same meaning as the diversity of interpretation, as
it's often referred to.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/549/20039463731_2989cbd96b_z.jpg" /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I will give a specific example, my album 'Live in
Australia'. This is supposed to be my music recorded at my concert. The reason
why this album is considered to be so is because I claimed so, and a certain
system accepted that. But in a different context, it can be perceived as
something else while holding the same contents of the sounds. For example, this
concert was recorded by an Australian musician, Matthew Earle, so this album
could be regarded as his field recording work that he has recorded in a certain
situation. For him, my concert could have possibly been a performed 'silence'
in my concert situation, and he could have possibly released the recording of
the silence under the title of 4'33". Or it might have also been possible
that some composer gave him a score on which the composer's direction was
written as "Record a certain situation". Or there might have been a
musician (or it could have been me) who plays a CD at his concert, and this was
a record of him playing the full-length version of my album 'Live in
Australia'. These examples show that it would be almost impossible for the
listener to judge whose music it is - or what it is - from simply listening to
the sounds whatever the music is. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Furthermore, the issue whether some recorded material has
strictly held to the original sounds or not should depend on the context. For
example, the claim that the sound quality of a MP3 file is bad should be made
on the presupposition that it is reproduced sound of a recording. But if the
same MP3 file was played as a part of some musician's performance, it is not
right to criticize the bad sound quality of the MP3 file (which contains the
same content as the previous case) recorded at the live concert. In these
cases, both MP3 files have exactly the same sound quality. When people hear some
sound and judge that it has poor sound quality, the judgment must only derive
from the listener's experience of listening to the same music with a different
context in a superior condition surrounding the music. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some music is closely connected to a certain context. The
reason why Beethoven's pieces sound like Beethoven, or the environmental noises
sound like nothing but environmental
noises, may be related to this fact. This makes it possible for us to appreciate
music naturally. We can say the same thing as to silence. But isn't it too easy
for us to regard contemporary silence as the currently generalized idea of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>silence? Isn't it too simple to determine that
'silence' is equal to 'unintentional sounds'? Perhaps the silence in Cage's time
might have been unintentional, but in this present time, I think that the
silence can be also regarded as something intentional. More likely, the silence
has been used easily with some intention these days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To go back to the initial subject, I would like to think
about silence and the musical rest in sheet music. When we listen to music in a
normal situation, we do not regard the rest as silence when the rest appears in
a certain pattern between the notes. For example, when quarter notes and
quarter rests alternate in the music, or when a whole note rest is repeated for
a rather long time, these rests will be recognized as a part of a certain
pattern. In both cases, or in most conventional music, the rests are necessary
materials in the structure of the music. But when we feel we are experiencing a
certain pattern in the music, the experience is restricted within a range in
which the notes and the rests are associated with each other in certain
patterns. Logically, the length of a quarter note can be one second or even one
hour, so we could claim and understand the music has a certain pattern, even in
an extreme situation where a one-hour rest follows a one-hour continuous note.
However, is the silence during the one-hour rest always the same? Of course,
nothing is different in an audio point of view. But when a certain context is
predominant, if we replace it with some other context, there will be some
change in our recognition. This change of our recognition must influence at
least somewhat how we listen to the music. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What if a long rest part is actually not a rest? If a long
continuous note is supposed to be a rest (for example, if the continuous noises
are coming from the refrigerator in the room), and if a long rest that is
regarded as a rest with no sound is filled with almost inaudible sounds that a
musician plays in a certain musical rhythm (in this case, if the sounds are
almost inaudible, it would not matter if the musician is playing some sounds or
not), our listening attitudes will be different. Whether we listen to the rest
or the silence assuming that it is the rest or the silence will definitely
change our mental attitude toward the music. It will differ depending on
whether it is a rest or silence. With this theory, there might be a chance that
the sound will stop being the same or stop holding its identity (this may be in
contradiction with what I wrote before, but if the identity of the sound itself
is formed on our recognition, it would be possible.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The various issues I raised here may show that the concept
of silence needs to be revised (reconsidered) in this contemporary time. In the
shadow of the long path since Cage, there have been countless trials and
experiments and debates, all of which led us to new findings and new
possibilities in the history of music. For this reason, it is necessary to
practice some actual music in which one-hour notes alternate with one-hour
rests with various viewpoints. After this point, a new issue will emerge
naturally. This does not mean that there should not be an old concept of the
silence. There will still be the situation where the usual operations of the
most notes (or directly dealing with some sounds) including the rests are sufficient
enough to compose music. Of course there will be unusual attempts to make music
from now on, too. But beyond that, I think it is now about time to bring a
reinvention to our ways of recognition. This reinvention will come from the
issue of how to face the silence in this contemporary time. It is a result from
Cage's idea of silence, which has developed more intricately than his original
contemplation - which should be a blessing to us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Translation by Yuko Zama, July 2015)<br />
<br />
(originally posted on the Improvised Music from Japan site in Japanese in December 2005: http://www.japanimprov.com/tsugimoto/tsugimotoj/essay3.html)</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-68990521235991669202011-02-28T05:01:00.000-08:002011-03-16T03:16:10.562-07:00malfatti/rowe interview<img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1274/5179616600_2c6c0f5c54_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />in November 2010, Keith Rowe and Radu Malfatti met at Amann Studios in Vienna, where they played together for the first time ever in their lengthy careers. both musicians have extremely strong opinions and perspectives, sometimes conflicting and sometimes agreeing with the other. over the course of the week, many fascinating discussions were held, and at the end of the three days of recordings, I asked the two if they'd be OK answering a few questions. all of us were a bit on the tired side, having just finished recording three CDs of widely varying material in about a 48 hour period, and so this shouldn't be regarded as any kind of in-depth interview, but more a version of what you might have heard if you sat at our table in the cafe next door to Amann in between recordings.--Jon Abbey<br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1224/5165140040_14f2ef8efe_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />Abbey: So, both of you guys have been involved with the world of free improvisation to different degrees for four decades or more. Why originally improvised music and not composed music?<br /><br />Rowe: I think, in my case I was ill-equipped or non-equipped to perform music from scores. Because what I do actually in some respects has very little to do with music as we know it. I mean, the process on the table is the process from painting, from the plastic arts, everything on the table is justified primarily by visual arts. So, though I did in life later actually study music, I didn't at that point where I started to play, improvisation was the only open avenue.<br /><br />Malfatti: It's true, it's the same for me really. First point, I'm not well enough equipped to perform the so-called composed music, whatever that is. I mean, not classically, not contemporary, but I started off with Dixieland and that was what interested me the most. I played some stupid pop songs of the fifties on accordion or something, and then I heard Dixieland on the radio and I thought like "wow, what is this? fantastic!".<br /><br />Abbey: When was that around?<br /><br />Malfatti: I must have been, I don't know, 10, 11, 12. Which was almost unheard of in Austria, in Innsbruck, and it was kind of an avant-garde feeling. So I was interested in that, and that carried on for a very long time, and only after that, when I started to hear Anton Webern, for instance, which you have to in Austria, then suddenly there was a world of music, which, I mean "wow". Like the first time I heard Dixieland, "wow, what is this? fantastic!". The first time I heard Monk, I thought "this is horrible but so fascinating", I was like a bit scared and I was like "who is this guy? I have to get more." <br /><br />And the things I am doing now, with this Wandelweiser group, again, it's not the classical, well-trained, obvious virtuoso people who are doing this kind of music and this is as fascinating as when I heard Monk for the first time. And I tried to play like Monk, I tried to play like JJ Johnson, I tried to play like Jack Teagarden, I tried to play even like Kid Ory, and it never happened, of course, you know, because I am a white Tyrolean (chuckles). But basically I agree with Keith, it's the same reason.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4111/5167180173_15f34c5a48_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />Abbey: The followup is for Radu, which you just touched on a little bit, what specifically changed for you around 1990 (or whatever year it was), when you withdrew from the improvising scene, and moved into Wandelweiser and the group of people that you've been a part of ever since?<br /><br />Malfatti: First of all, it didn't start in the nineties, it started actually before. And I think it is the fact that I found that so-called improvised music came to a halt, a stagnation in evolution and it became very very idiomatic, I found. And there were certain things that are not allowed, because you are "free".<br /><br />Abbey: When do you feel like you felt that for the first time? What year do you think that was?<br /><br />Malfatti: I don't know, you can't put it down on like Friday morning or something. I don't know, must be early nineties somehow. I can't put a finger on it, but it was an organic evolution for myself, "why is that not allowed?". Actually I even talked to John Butcher about it, with 'News from the Shed', you must know when that happened?<br /><br />Abbey: 1989, I want to say.<br /><br />Malfatti: OK, yeah, yeah. And he was very young at that time and we were talking about it, because in improvisation with 'News from the Shed', we quite liked to play unison, long notes in unison. And then, once I said, "you know, it's very interesting, it's such a wonderful sound and it seems you're not afraid of playing the same note and I don't seem to be afraid", and he said a fantastic thing. He said "yeah, the first generation, they seem to be afraid of the obvious." I thought it was very nice. <br /><br />So, gradually, you know. And then I had this orchestra, this 13 piece Ohrkiste, and I was working with them already and I still wanted to work with the improvisers because they were not only close friends but also I liked their images and language. But what I tried to introduce was things which were exactly that, things which were not allowed in free improvisation, to actually do something and build something up, and then everybody comes in at the same time doing a certain thing. And, that made me a lot of enemies actually from the improvising scene. <br /><br />And then more and more and more I came to a certain point where I knew, I knew what I didn't want to do anymore, but I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do. So, you might know this concert in Italy with Gunter Schneider and Burkhard Stangl? And we did a trio improvisation, and I was talking to myself, thinking, which I normally don't do, and I said "Why are you doing this? You don't want to do it anymore". And at home, I didn't, but then on stage, the familiar situation, boom, I went straight back into my old clichés. And I didn't want to do it anymore. So I went home and I wrote a piece for myself where I left all the things out. I didn't want to but on stage, I still fell into it. And the first time I played this piece in public, it was hard, it was so hard. <br /><br />Abbey: Is this the solo piece on the Wandelweiser CD?<br /><br />Malfatti: Exactly. But that changed again, in the first version there was still much more which I had to rub out. But, because I had the notes, and I wanted to play what's there and every now and then I felt "now I would like to do this", but then I told myself "no, you cannot." So that was a very interesting fight against my own routine, which I'm very interested in.<br /><br />So that's why I love to talk about today, much more than what happened in the past. <br /><br />Abbey: Keith, you answered this somewhat already, but I know that you're a student and a lover of many eras of classical music history. So why, even going forward past the beginnings in the sixties, past when you studied with Michael Graubart, why have you chosen to express yourself almost entirely via improvised music, and maybe more interestingly, is this something you've found yourself questioning in recent years?<br /><br />Rowe: I mean, improvised music, I go along with the term, because I don't actually have another term for it. I actually don't like the term "improvised music" very much. I think that if I'm honest there was a period where I thought maybe it was a legitimate term and maybe I could see what my dear friend Eddie Prevost meant and he was probably quite right at one point to actually emphasize improvisation's importance and its quality, because it was not recognized. So I think to give it some kind of recognition, some kind of status, rather than "well, it's only improvised", it's something that was very important at a point. <br /><br />But I would say for the last 20 or 30 years, you would very rarely catch me using the word, but I'm forced to use it in a way, because I don't think I have another term. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4044/5159409742_632d0918a8_z.jpg"><br /><br />Do I question it? Yeah, of course. Of course, because I know emotionally and intellectually why for me, the guitar had to be laid flat on the table, to be detached from myself. I understand, I didn't copy it from someone, I really understand that process. And in a way that process runs directly opposite to the conventional way of thinking on how you should play the guitar, how you approach the guitar, and then consequently what music comes from it. So driving me since I was in my late teens, driving the agenda towards more and more and more abstraction, reduction and abstraction, reduction and abstraction, it's who I am, it's what I am. And I know it from those standpoints, I know it from music, but I also know it from visual arts, and philosophy.<br /><br />That doesn't answer the question, does it? (chuckles)<br /><br />Abbey: You've both obviously been invigorated and inspired by the younger generation of Tokyo musicians. Can you each talk a little bit about that, how initial contact with their work affected you, and how you think your ongoing collaborations and contact with them has changed your own approach?<br /><br />Malfatti: Hmm, it's an interesting question. I don't know, I don't know, did they influence me? I don't know. I had the impression that we met exactly at the same level, I might be wrong, maybe they think differently. I get a lot of food for thought from them, but I don't think more than from other people. To me, they are very very interesting, but I had the impression that we met actually on the same level, in a way of understanding. And Taku Sugimoto, he came up to me one day, and he said "Hello, I'm Sugimoto-san and I like your work and maybe we can do something together." And then the first time we played together, it just clicked. I thought "wow, now this is improvisation again", I don't have a problem with the term of improvised music. I had problems with a certain kind of improvised music. <br /><br />But for me, there is quite a big difference between improvisation and written music and I think we realized that today and yesterday, the difference. Because Jürg Frey's piece, we never would have improvised in that way, because it's really a specific thing. I would say the same with 'Pollock '82' because I was actually really following the score, and I didn't want to add anything, and I decided I'm going to only use the white noise, the breath and then interpret the signs. And with improvisation, what we did now, I wasn't even thinking or feeling in that way, and looking, "now this will appear" or something. It's a completely different emotional situation to me. So I don't have problems with the terms. <br /><br />And with the Japanese guys, maybe there is a certain aspect in their culture which appeals to my understanding of their culture, because we don't really have it in Europe. There is some, of course, and in America, as well. So I don't know about the influence, who influenced who, and I don't know if it's important. Not more than if I talk to Keith or play with Keith or talk to somebody else, there's always a mutual and even contagious thinking. <br /><br />Rowe: Well, I think for me, the important Japanese influence, I think the first one, was having an invitation to see a demonstration of zen archery, when I was about 24, in London. It was part of a secret society, and we also had an invitation to go and see a Gagaku orchestra, both those things were very important. And then that Jac Holzman recording of Japanese classical music, so I'd say the mid-sixties were the start. And then through Cage and conscious rejection of rhythm in favor of pulse, which again came from Japanese and Chinese music. For me, I have to conflate Japanese and Chinese because we were very very influenced by Chinese thoughts and the book of Joseph Needham's, "Science and Civilisation in China", to the extent where we actually learned Chinese and to speak a little bit of Chinese and to write it in preparation for "Treatise". <br /><br />So all that came way way way way way way way before, and I think I would concur with what Radu is saying. Toshi is the first major person I interacted with and I would say it was the same experience for me, it was like meeting a brother, a musical brother and we just clicked.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4031/5164530561_11dce84e08_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />Abbey: Well, that was 2001 or 2000, but before that there was the Sugimoto record you heard and working together a bit with him, the session in London and the concerts in France and in Wels? You've talked to me before about when Julien Ottavi played 'Opposite' over a club speaker system in Nantes, about the effect that had on you.<br /><br />Rowe: Well, that's right, one could say that how one is influenced, one way of being influenced, is that people give you permission to do things. I always feel that Cage gave us permission to do something...<br /><br />Malfatti-Yes.<br /><br />Rowe: And I think the permission-makers...<br /><br />Malfatti: And you can get permission from other people as well.<br /><br />Rowe: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's one of the very important things in one's own life is to pass on permission to other people. It's very very important thing that we do. So when I heard Taku's recording for the first time, it was like a permission to think about doing that.<br /><br />But I've said to you before, that when I first played with Toshi, it was almost as if I'd been hanging around for thirty years (chuckles) waiting for someone to turn up where I could actually play like this! Because I couldn't play like that in AMM, I couldn't play like that in any other situation, I could only... Maybe it's not strictly true, but I didn't meet anyone.<br /><br />Abbey: Yeah, I have that note you sent when we were finishing Weather Sky, where you said almost exactly that. You wrote "in many ways it's a kind of music that I've waited to make for 30 years, but there was never anyone who felt the need to do it".<br /><br />Rowe: Yeah, exactly.<br /><br />Malfatti: Right, same here. Very good.<br /><br />Q; Yeah, that's kind of what I was driving at for both of you. Maybe there wasn't an influence for you, Radu, or no more of an influence than from anyone else, but it does seem like some of your strongest collaborators now come from Tokyo. And I'm not saying necessarily influence, but it's always nice to have collaborators, and it must have been invigorating to find Sugimoto and find someone who shared...<br /><br />Malfatti: This is certainly true, this is certainly true. Yeah, yeah. And because of the old idiomatic way of playing, actually I stopped almost 100 percent and I was together with the Wandelweiser people and that was fully satisfying for me. And I had to learn how to play this, this was not easy, it was not easy to begin with. I had similar or sometimes the same idea of what it should be, and then I met Antoine (Beuger) in Cologne. And it was a little bit the same, it was like "wow, there is this guy who does what I want to do". So I got more and more into that, and improvisation, I put that aside. <br /><br />And then when I met Sugimoto, I hadn't heard any music of his before. So the first time we played, that was the first time I heard him, even though we'd met a few times. And that was the first time I heard him, and I was really like "whew, wow" (Rowe chuckles), so in this way I would love to improvise again. But it's not really an influence...<br /><br />Abbey: It's not really an influence, it was the invigoration.<br /><br />Malfatti: It's like Keith, I was waiting. I was waiting for somebody, and then great!<br /><br />Abbey: I remember reading your Improvised Music from Japan back and forth and thinking it was like you found a brother, like you found someone who shared your belief system, from halfway across the world. <br /><br />Malfatti: That's right, yeah. Fascinating, isn't it?<br /><br />Abbey: Over the last few years, my perception is that 'our music' (whatever that may be) has moved away from collaborative improv being the primary driving force and more and more towards solo work and composed music. Do you feel that's accurate, and if so, why?<br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1239/5162820760_3db1fe8d73_z.jpg"><br /><br />Rowe: One thing that one might be trying to attain is some sense of clarity in what you're doing, and I think it's certainly true that if you're solo, you have the clarity of who you are. You know what it's like, when you're in an ensemble, you can be doing something that you're really interested in following a path that you want to develop, and someone will do something which totally wrecks it. And if you're working solo, then you have this chance of this particular kind of clarity, and obviously composition too. <br /><br />But maybe it's also the fact that we're just balancing. Maybe so-called free improvisation is something that historically can't go on and on and on forever, it needs to be balanced out with some other thing, so the improvisation would become more sparse after this concentrated, in-your-face, full on, high volume maximum amount of information and it's quite often in the arts that you'll swing to a different perspective. This is all very healthy, you know. And I think at the moment it's going in a particular direction, but as sure as eggs are eggs, in 5 or 6 years time, it'll go back to some fully saturated world, where the investigation of silence which we've undertaken in the last half century or something like that will have exhausted our interest for the moment, then we'll move on to pitched sounds or non-pitched sounds or orthodox sound production. It will move. It won't stay like this.<br /><br />Malfatti: I think it did already, actually.<br /><br />Rowe: Yeah.<br /><br />Malfatti: The only thing is, about the solo. That started much earlier than...<br /><br />Abbey: Yeah, I'm not saying that there were no solos.<br /><br />Malfatti: Yeah, of course, there always were solos.<br /><br />Abbey: I guess my issue is you can have a clarity and control when you're playing solo and someone isn't going to mess you up, but the flip side is you're much less likely to be pushed into an area that you wouldn't be pushed into otherwise. My own taste is towards collaborative improvisation in an ideal world, because of that, because musicians can find themselves pushed into places that they've never gone.<br /><br />Rowe: Well, you need both. I don't think anyone's advocating that you only do solos. <br /><br />Abbey: Sure. I guess the point that I'm driving at and the point where I was going to with the next question is that for me, we've almost gotten to a point, and Radu may have felt like this a while ago, but for me it's come in the last couple of years, where I almost feel like it's impossible, or close to impossible, to make a great collaborative improvised record anymore. Of course, I'm saying that an hour after we probably just did that, but I think in general, it's very hard. When I look at what's come out in 2010, there's less than a handful of records like that, and for me, that's the issue. Of course, there have always been solo records, there's always been composed music, there's always been collective improvised music, there will always be all of them. It's a question of which are more interesting and which are actually doing something, and to me the balance there has shifted in the last few years. And I guess what I wonder about with your perspective, because this is my perspective: do you really think it's possible that an area like free improvisation which theoretically at least has an incredibly wide range of possibilities, I mean it's not jazz, where there are defined boundaries. So despite this seeming openness, do you think nevertheless that we've come to the end or are coming to the end of that era?<br /><br />Malfatti: Well, first of all, I don't think so. But maybe the definition is to be questioned, but again, that's why I really don't distinguish between composed music and improvised music, because you have very boring composed music, obviously, and you have compositions full of cliches of the cliche of the cliche of the cliche, and you have that in improvised music as well. The most interesting part for me today is what are the three most important aspects in music, but not only in music, in different areas as well, is the material and the structure and the form. So the material was a very very interesting topic, let's take Helmut Lachenmann, but there were of course other people before. So he is talking about "klangzertrümmerung", which means "the scattering of sound", and he didn't want to have a clear note anymore. The thing is, the structure of his pieces, they were actually very old-fashioned in a way. He had sonata structures, I'm not talking about the form. So one of the first people who really took care of a new understanding of structure was actually Cage, and his compatriots. And so now I think my main point of interest is the structure. I'm not interested so much anymore in the material; it can be noise, it can be sound, it can be distorted, it can be a very clear sound, a very clear note on a traditional instrument. <br /><br />But what do I do? I have a big space, and I decide I want to build a house in it. And then there are many possibilities, I can build 273 rooms, so every room is just a square meter or something, I can decide I want 3 rooms, or even just 1. So the form from the outside is still the same, but the structure is what you are doing. But for me it is like I have a sound, a note or whatever, a sound, and how do I structure it in relationship to the other sounds. So in that case, with a full understanding, I wouldn't be afraid at all to do a collective improvisation with 20 people, if those 20 people have a similar, not the same, but a similar concept of structuring. Which means, in other words, there is no single way of thinking, there is no "let's fill this space", there is no "what else can I do?", but for the sake of the overall building and produce your sound and willing to listen to the other sounds for half an hour maybe. And I don't feel the need, that there is something missing and I take the opportunity to be listening to other sounds, and this for me is what is very interesting in composed music if it has the same aspect. One building with one or two big rooms, instead of all the little cells in prisons, maybe even locked doors. <br /><br />So for me this is the most interesting part, and therefore I don't see a very big difference between improvised music and composed music, because in composed music you can arrange the sounds in a specific way. In improvised music you can as well, but you really need all the other people with the same understanding, the same feeling. But that's nothing new, because that always has been like that, even in free jazz or Dixieland, you need the people to produce a certain thing. So as I said, I think the main topic, the main interest, is the space and the structure of how to place rooms or commas or sounds. For me, this is the most interesting bit today. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4053/5162214911_5f09aca2bd_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />Abbey: That makes a lot of sense. <br /><br />Malfatti: And that's why you don't find it very often., because most of the people, they are just busy to fill up the space, the structure, fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. I don't want to use the term "Louder, Higher, Faster" because that's 30 or 40 years old, but then it was in a positive way and now it would be a criticism. <br /><br />Rowe: Yeah, I think for me, likewise, I don't have a distinction between composed music and improvised music. It's why I have a problem with the term "improvised music" because I'm not sure how much of it is actually improvised.<br /><br />Malfatti: But you don't have a better term, so you might as well use it.<br /><br />Rowe: Yeah, exactly. But for me there is just music, there is only music, there is just this term we call "music", even that is slightly problematic. Because I liken it to if I walk into an art gallery, there are paintings, and it doesn't matter to me if the painting was made in 1350 or 1628 or 1922 or 1956, the work needs to resonate with me to have significance or meaning or whatever you want to call that. And it doesn't matter what the genre is, the genre of painting is for me not relevant. <br /><br />So I think it's true too with music, that I'm not really worried about what the genre is. But my experience is that there are certain areas of music which I just find more rewarding to spend time with, like Haydn's string quartets, Bach-St. Matthew Passion, or David Tudor playing John Cage-Variations II or John Tilbury playing Bunita Marcus or Horowitz playing B Minor Sonata in St. Petersburg. That's the only thing that interests me, is the quality of the thing, and I'm really not worried about how it's notated, how it's written and all of that.<br /><br />Malfatti: I agree, yeah.<br /><br />Abbey: Fair enough. The rest are hopefully more interesting questions (chuckles all around)...<br /><br />Where (and obviously you don't know, but I'm asking anyway), where do you think our music will go in the next year, five years, ten years? Do you see any new galvanizing force like (at least in my opinion and I guess for your guys also) the Tokyo musicians were?<br /><br /><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4147/5165126238_45741fb8a2_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />Malfatti: First of all, I have no idea where it will go. Second, I'm not really interested. Third, it's impossible to know. You could ask me how the weather will be in April 2012. <br /><br />Actually I'm almost quoting Monk, I think, and somebody asked him a similar question and he said "I don't know, even if it goes to hell, I don't care. It's now that I'm interested in." So I have no idea, and it's impossible to know, I don't want to know, I can't know, and I would hate to make any predictions.<br /><br />Rowe: Yeah, I mean, of course, it's really really difficult to know with any certainty. I suppose that one can say with certainty that 98 percent of it, like the music of any age, will be garbage. <br /><br />And I think the problem is if you're working quite hard on what you're about, if you're consciously participating on what you're about. I've said in other places, if you have your nose so close to the canvas, that it's actually very difficult to be objective about other people's work, let alone your own work, and very difficult to track what's going on. And I'm not a promiscuous type, so I don't have lots of info flowing into my system which will lead me to know with any certainty what's going on. <br /><br />I just think, though, and maybe I share this with Radu, that probably the most important thing is to keep moving in your own world, keep discovering, keep learning, pressing the refresh button, trying your very very best not to slip into bad habits. And that would be true for every artist of any distinction, any musician who takes their craft seriously, whether you're playing Bach or whether you're playing whatever it is. It's the same issues for all of us, we all share the same issues.<br /><br />Abbey: Just to follow up, and maybe you answered this already Radu, and if you did, I'm sorry, I wrote these out before. <br /><br />But just the same exact question on a personal level instead of an overall level, where do you see your own music going in the next year, 5 years, 10 years, if you have any idea?<br /><br />Malfatti: Same answer. Same answer, really, I have no idea. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1387/5165126236_3668882d9a_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />I'm curious, I'm curious about it and I'm looking forward to see what's happening and hopefully, probably not, but hopefully, I would love to change again once. Actually I don't think I'm trying to change, I don't want to change the world, I don't want to change anybody, maybe myself. Rather I'd say I'd like to be alert and aware, and really feel and observe very closely and critically my own doing, my own thinking. Probably it's enough to observe it because we all change, and usually people who stagnate, they don't allow themselves to observe themselves, because they move already, but then they say "no, I'd rather stay here where I'm used to, that's my field where I'm comfortable". But I think if you're really alert and aware of yourself, then you might change anyway. Probably. <br /><br />And if it comes to a point where I have the feeling "wow, I feel another change coming." I'm probably too old for that, but it would be great if I could experience that once more the way I did 20 years ago and 40 years ago and 60 years ago. I thought I had three, to me, major changes in my musical way of thinking, even though the first one I wouldn't call it a change because I grew up in a certain way and I was rebellious enough to try to break out and it was a necessity more than a conscious change. But the last one was not a very conscious change either, maybe. It was a necessity, it was a saturation. As I said before, I knew I didn't want to do this anymore, but I didn't know what I wanted to do, where I would go.<br /><br />And if I'm lucky enough to get once more to that very shaky line of uncertainty, "where am I going now?", I would be very grateful. But I'm looking for it, and I can wait, and allow myself to do it again. <br /><br />Rowe: Well, of course, for me I suppose the most drastic kind of change was very early '66 where we formed something called AMM. Both in terms of that very difficult, finding a completely new language for your instrument, it's quite a difficult thing to do. It's very hard to keep doing that, I imagine very few people do it once, let alone one person doing it a number of times.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1331/5162215877_6dcffdeab8_z.jpg"><br /><br /><br />It's kind of interesting, I remember sitting on the seafront with Eddie down in Marseilles, a long long time ago. He looked at me and said "do you think we'll ever be involved in another musical revolution?", and I said "no, probably not". But I think in a way there have been other minor ways of working, so for instance the sound world like what we did today, particularly in the improvisation, which we're wholly responsible for (as opposed to the composed pieces, which we're only partially responsible for), I think there's a kind of change in the emphasis of the language, the degrees of abstraction, which comes as a result of everything else that has happened, but it's actually quite a complex subject to try to unravel. <br /><br />(Photos by Yuko Zama)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-40427438603446089862010-11-03T09:11:00.000-07:002010-11-03T10:11:14.897-07:00Two Worldsby Taku Sugimoto<br /><br />What I am going to write here is: What is the distinction between the two worlds of art? What is happening in the boundary between them? And how is the transition from one world to the other made? It may not be easy since the distinction between these two worlds, that I am going to mention here, is rather vague. In order to avoid waking a sleeping dog, I will try to focus on talking about the music - especially about a particular field that is called 'experimental music' or 'improvisation', or more precisely, 'Onkyo-style improvisation'. My purpose here is to think about the reason of the current stagnation of this music scene.<br /><br />However, I am not totally sure if I can have a clear judgment on the question: Is it possible to classify everything (even the music which is supposed to belong to the above-mentioned genre) into these two worlds that I have in my mind? So I may try to keep the issue rather vague in an arbitrary manner - but I will also try to be assertive in a way to make the point. <br /><br />Meanwhile, "distinction between the two worlds" may be a somewhat strange concept in this issue - not because one world seems to support the other or both worlds seem to need each other, but because it seems to me that each of these two worlds belongs to a different dimension in the first place, so it seems impossible to conflict with each other.<br /><br />To make it convenient, I will call the two worlds as 'something solid' and 'something attractive'. 'Something attractive' means everything but 'something solid', and 99 percent of music belongs to this category - that are predominantly popular in general. Already at this point, I can predict various objections and rejections from readers, but I think I should not wimp out here. Of course I am completely aware that this classification (and what I am going to write here) might be horribly extreme and dangerous - but I chose to start from this point. Otherwise, I could not find a clue on how to start or how to develop my story at all. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1159/5142795593_fe73c06ffe.jpg"><br /><br />As a start, I can say that Derek Bailey belongs to the world of 'something attractive'. There might have been the time when he was not (perhaps for sure!). But from the present point of view, it seems difficult to say that he was recognized to belong to the world of 'something solid' - since we cannot listen to his music in the same way as we used to do any more. The way his later works were received after a certain period of time was completely that of "something attractive". The reason why I am critical about his later works is because I don't think he ever tried to search for alternative ways or even felt the necessity of doing it, when the general recognition of his works started to be stereotyped in a certain context. Bailey was obstinate. He didn't hesitate to stop going for the general recognition as "one of the most avant-garde guitarists among many others". Bailey's self-parodying way of applying (or being applied!) and Duchamp's "Boîte-en-valise" in which he contained the duplication of his past works are completely different. <br /><br />I cited Bailey as a start since I think we can see the boundary of the two worlds here. Originally, my idea in this essay was approaching this issue of the classification of the two worlds as just a matter of form. It was Tsunoda's question that triggered me: "In the world of art, why do execrable works tend to be more supported by the overwhelming majority than solid works?" His words synched with my long-term question on this issue, and I thought I should tackle it finally. But then I realized that it couldn’t be ended with just talking about the superficial differences of two worlds. <br /><br />My initial interest was carried toward the question: "How is an artwork (or an artist) recognized?" Bailey appeared on the scene with his one and only style. The quickest way to attract people's attention in a certain field is to acquire a unique style with a strong impact. Of course Bailey had it. But the real strength must have been somewhere beyond that. It could have been the appearance of genuinely innovative music that held potentials beyond just "a new style of performance". However, Bailey ended up allowing the general recognition that just covered the style of his performance. At that point, his music became something applicable. <br /><br />As a more familiar example, it may be inevitable to say that the area of improvisation called "Berlin Reductionism" had been just scattering around the applicable materials, if we see it from the present point of view. I will discuss the details later, but there was no real reinvention either in the form or the structure. Of course, there were the attempts of bold expansion of the usage of musical instruments and the ways of playing them, as you can see in the achievement of Axel Dörner, but it was nothing beyond the succession of the "special technique (and its tone)" which contemporary classical musicians like Lachenmann had tried already (although I have to admit that there was a certain newness in the way of incorporating the technique as a main feature into improvisation.) <br /><br />However, in the case of both Dörner and Lachenmann, the form and the structure that supported the music fundamentally were outdated. The newness of the materials distracted us from the most crucial part - genuinely innovative music should have a new form and a new structure, which is unfortunately rarely found. Dörner did not have them, but Bailey had them once - he had a new form, a new structure, new materials, and he knew how to combine them all. <br /><br />Improvisation which emphasizes the materials tends to be swayed sensuously both by the performers and the audience, and tends to go toward the direction of pleasing the sensation. Performances that only emphasize the materials (or textures) tend to focus everything on the stimulation, meditation, pleasantness and catharsis just like the CGI and SFX of today's Hollywood movies do to us. They tend to be received like that, and this is the entrance to "something attractive'. And in order to make use of the materials efficiently, the next step many musicians started to move into is the realm of 'composition'. <br /><br />At first, these musicians started collecting a certain quality and quantity of materials. In their compositions, the desired materials were the ones that had a strong impact so they could appeal enough on their own. Otherwise, the similar effect could not be attained. In terms of controlling the materials, every composition may have this similar aspect, but in those musicians' concepts of compositions, the 'effective material' meant something that had a powerful magnetic nature itself. And their compositions that best took advantages of these materials were the ways they could apply each material into some conventionally-known methodology or format. That was more likely the concrete control rather than abstract control. The methodology or format could be anything - improvisation, rock, jazz, or contemporary classical music. The materials to be applied could be anything as well - Bailey (or Bailey-style performance), Dörner (or Dörner-style performance), some regular loop, noise, records, silences - anything with an established status could be used. Which means, however innovative the performance was, the material itself was unable to escape its destiny to possibly end up with the material for some DJ. This is the start of 'transition'. <br /><br />I think that the so-called 'Onkyo-style improvisation' which I myself was involved with was about the (rather delicate) layers of the performances and the materials that were based on each musician's uniqueness. From the methodological point of view, it was not so different from what the European free musicians including Bailey had aimed for. The difference was just the texture of the materials (though I must say the difference was significant). <br /><br />Next, there appeared another style called "random improvisation'. This was more like the methodology that emphasized the spaces between sounds. But here again, it still contained the overconfidence in the materials. By trying to present each material separately from the previous or next material in the context (which I doubt would be possible), there was a risk that the materials became even more emphasized. Sometimes there was some interesting effect that was born in the contrast between the sound and the silence, but when it failed, the only thing that was worth listening was the material only (at least, to me). That was the possible risk. And once it failed into that, it was not so different from self-DJ. (If you narrow down the materials, there is always a limit. The issue is how to define the randomness. In the end, it is difficult for a musician to get out of the randomness that feels right to him/her. But this is another issue.) <br /><br />I am not saying that the above-mentioned approaches were all in vain. I think that they were necessary in some way and there were some great achievements as a result of those approaches. However, "improvisation which emphasized the texture" is completely stuck in a dead end by now. It had already come to the point where no methodology can make a profound change in this field of music in its context. The CDs produced in this genre (and other genres as well) everyday have the same contents basically - the only difference is the combination of the musicians, which cannot be no more than objects for a small group of curiosity seekers. But why is this kind of music is acquiring more of an audience now than it used to have? Isn't that just because there are more curiosity seekers than before?<br /><br />Then, how should we define "something easy to understand"? Perhaps it means some conventionally known form. Of course, every form is meant to be renewed, but since the renewing process happens very slowly and gradually, the original identity of the form will stay the same. For example, how can we define the music called "jazz"? Today, "jazz" must mean something that keeps changing as time goes by while keeping a certain particular form. Most jazz musicians seem to try to incorporate some new elements into their music, believing that it has to have a certain form as jazz but it is also necessary to add something new in line with the times. What is being incorporated there are generally some unique styles of performance or new materials. As for the structural change, the only thing they can adopt might be something like a bluff or just a seasoning - since any structural change beyond that could violate the form. Whatever the genre is - in the field of rock, folk or contemporary classical music (it can be classified in smaller categories), in every genre that has a history, similar changes are happening. <br /><br />"Material" can also mean a certain set form. The material can be applied in any genre of music - free jazz, techno, funk, Onkyo, noise, ... and anything. There are good matches and bad matches among them. If too many materials are applied in the music, it may lose its original identity (though it can be said that this is a new genre of music). What is required for the contemporary music craftsmen is the skill to incorporate the materials into the best combination. In a way, they are tailors. Some tailors have good taste, some have bad taste. There may be even a great tailor among them. However, not every piece of music is in the hands of the tailors. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1327/5143401000_cbffd420fd_z.jpg"><br /><br />From here, I want to talk about the less than one percent of the music I mentioned before. About five years ago, I went to the composer Antoine Beuger's concert. There was no one in the audience besides the organizer and some musicians involved (including me.) The concert was five hours (still a shortened version of the composition), and half the piece was with silences. Even in the part which some sounds were involved, Beuger read the text from Spinoza's Ethics, one word in every eight minutes. It was a hard experience. (It was Antoine Beuger "calme etendue" - 'spinoza'.) No one may want to come to such a concert. If they knew the content, they would be even more hesitant to come. It seems not so fun. But in reality, it was not like that at all. What I experienced during the concert was a quite bizarre sensation. I still remember that the sound of the entrance door opening felt like some art object that I could feel in my hand. I am not going to describe what I felt from the concert further here, since the way people may feel about the music would be different depending on the individual. I rather want to talk about the more important and crucial matter - that the form, the material and the structure of this kind of music are all in a close relationship to the extent that none of them can be separated from the others. This will help to explain what the difference between the music represented by Beuger and other cheap music that is just easily influenced by the atmosphere of the music of Beuger and such. <br /><br />Is there any element, in the above-mentioned Beuger's piece, which can be applied to other music? First, let's look at the form in which the part of sounds and the part of silences come alternately. It might be possible within a certain range. If it is about 10 seconds (or up to 30 seconds) sound part and silence part to use alternately, it could be applied in rock or jazz without so much hesitation. But it is impossible to extend each (sound and silence) unit to 10 minutes, and considering that the units will be used repeatedly, the duration will end up to be beyond the limit. Meanwhile, in Beuger's piece, the length of each unit is almost 30 minutes (or more or less depending on the performance), and there is a fair amount of the repetition of the alternating units (or we can say that the repetition is almost the only thing happening). So the overall scale is very different. <br /><br />How about the structure of Beuger's piece? The voice during the sound part and the density of the silences must be the core of the structure. But this structure is closely connected with the form in which each unit changes its content, so if you try to take out the sound part only to apply to some other form, it will be a completely different music from the original piece. It might be possible to apply the idea of "one sound in every 8 seconds" to some other form, but then it will lose its advantage of the original structure. (But there are so many pieces of music that incorporate something like that - with slightly altered rules like changing from 8 seconds to 7 seconds, from one sounds to two sounds. Most of those musicians are just trying to randomly incorporate some interesting idea like that into some outdated style without thinking so much. This ends up in a not-so-different-from-old-stuff kind of music, because they are lacking in their own ideas.)<br /><br />The last thing is 'materials'. In the case of this Beuger's piece, the materials are his own voices. Voice is not regarded as anything so new - it is everywhere now. I think that Beuger himself did not give so much absolute meaning to the material itself regarding this piece. His material here seems to be more like the material in an abstract sense, like the pitches and the instrumentation in normal compositions. Actually, this piece has various versions for different instruments. What Beuger wanted to try in this piece was, I think, to see what kind of differences could occur when it was performed with different instruments in various versions. This concept is clearly different from the idea of bringing something new to Onkyo music by incorporating some ear-catching material needlessly. To me, it seems that the Beuger's piece showed us a new way of dealing with the materials with a question: Is it possible to maintain the identity of the music even if the material part is undecided? <br /><br />In compositions like Beuger's, the form, the structure and the materials form the originality of the piece by closely connecting with each other, even though part of them can be applicable. It is not like just one of the elements sustains the composition. On the other hand, if Axel Dörner plays trumpet in his familiar tones, it will be recognized as 'Dörner's sounds' in whatever situations they were heard - in a rock band, in a jazz band, in a techno band, or in a microtone improvisation - because only the materials and the styles of the performance are connected with his music. From this point is a problem. Once improvisers are recognized by a certain amount of people, most of them start wandering around here and there simply carrying their own materials. They start trying a bit of this and that. The more unique their materials and styles of performances are, the more they tend to have a false illusion that they can play their music wherever they are (or that their unique materials are contributing to the current music scene). They may say, "I am pursuing various possibilities", but what they actually do is often just incorporating their materials into different forms. Even when they play in different genres, it is nothing more than taking out their materials from different drawers. Dörner also plays jazz, which is not so bad, and also he has a good sense for improvisation - but after all, there is nothing beyond that. There is no potential in this style in a true sense.<br /><br />Materials include the performers' styles as well, of course. However, when they bring those materials into (so-called) improvisation sessions, many of the cases tend to fail into random use of them. Or some musicians may try to incorporate their materials into some conventional form (the improvisation they are doing itself is already a conventional form), in order to make their materials sound as effective as possible. In doing that, they seem to try to increase their prestige under the name of 'composition'. But in most cases, the results are musically even inferior to the previous step (the improvisation in which musicians just present their materials). But in reality, somehow this kind of music seems to gain a wider audience. <br /><br />What kind of style do these musicians stick to? In terms of the nature of the styles that can be fit in any kind of genre (if they try), what on earth is the difference between their styles and something like Eric Clapton's guitar style or Frank Nagai's singing style? Doesn't the original sense of "style" suggest how the whole music should be? 'Unique style of performance' can bring newness temporarily, but it is difficult to achieve successful results musically in a true sense. However, many musicians are engaged in making disastrous music without realizing that. They are just blindly pursuing for some new materials and new styles of performance, to apply them to various forms. Isn't it always the repetition of that? In the so-called Onkyo improvisation scene, there were perhaps fewer flavors of personal egos in musicians' materials, but their aggressive attitude trying to present their materials was not so different from the other improvisers (most of whom are disgusted by Onkyo improvisers). In fact, there are even many worse examples in Onkyo improvisers than the others. <br /><br />As I repeated to say, while the materials are constantly replaced with others, the most crucial thing (music itself) has not changed at all - especially in the improvisation scene. Perhaps this is because the form of improvisation is basically sustained by musicians' ad-lib reactions and their instant ideas (i.e., should I react or not, should I make sounds or not, should I keep silence or keep making sounds, etc.). If not, they may think about adopting a vague common aesthetics (considered as the highest common factor shared by the participants) in the background of the music. The so-called 'minimal improvisers' (perhaps I am considered as one of them) seem to have this tendency. Many of these improvisers seem to be influenced by only the aesthetics and the atmosphere of Wandelweiser's musicians represented by Beuger and Radu Malfatti, directly or indirectly. <br /><br />But recently, I started to rethink that there might be some other way, too. It must be something that derives from the "vague common aesthetics considered as the highest common factor shared by the participants", but in the mealtime, musicians should be more aware of the form and the structure while re-examining their materials with displacing the context, so they can grasp the whole music. Doing this in improvisation instead of composition must be the key to break through the stagnation. Of course it has to bring different effects to the music from what compositions do. I would like to pursue this topic on the potentials of improvisation further sometime in the future. <br /><br />- January 2006<br /><br />(Translation by Yuko Zama)<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3404/3620676479_81a6f955ea_o.jpg"><br /><br />photos/credits:<br /><br />1. Derek Bailey, 1975 (unknown)<br />2. Stefan Thut with Antoine Beuger (Silvia Kamm-Gabathuler)<br />3. Taku Sugimoto (Yuko Zama)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-44343922403735832272009-09-23T23:02:00.000-07:002009-11-08T21:18:40.213-08:00Wandelweiserby Michael Pisaro<br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2499/3950046226_f6751674a8_o.jpg"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Wandelweiser is a word</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Wandelweiser</span> is a word for a particular group of people who have been committed, over the long term, to sharing their work and working together. I still find it something of a miracle that we discovered each other and have continued to function for over seventeen years: coming from different musical backgrounds, living in different parts of the world, and feeling free to go our separate ways when necessary. In fact, the “group” as such doesn’t ever come together as a whole, and includes others besides composers: musicians, artists, writers – friends. In Haan (near Düsseldorf) there is an office where scores are collected, the web site maintained, and recordings are released. This place, lovingly run by Antoine Beuger, is essential to the continued existence of the organization, but not to the deep connections that exist between us. Our sense of a shared mission is due, I think, to the countless beautiful musical and artistic moments we have experienced with each other.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3506/3949262355_292ebb967f.jpg"><br /><br />Edition Wandelweiser was the name Burkhard Schlothauer gave to the fledging publishing and recording company he formed with Beuger in 1992. I guess it means “change signpost” if one understands it as a combination of <span style="font-style:italic;">Wandel</span> with <span style="font-style:italic;">Wegweiser</span>; or perhaps more literally, “change wisely”– (or, if one understands the second part as <span style="font-style:italic;">Weise</span>: wise man of change?) Whatever it means, I was never completely comfortable with the name, but have always understood it somewhat humorously – as something that just popped out of Burkhard’s linguistically inventive mind, rather than as a description of any kind of aesthetic program. (I’m pretty sure he was not trying to indicate that we were especially wise.) In any case, Antoine had recently met Jürg Frey, Chico Mello, Thomas Stiegler and Kunsu Shim and it must have seemed that they had enough in common (not just musically) to band together. They had a feeling that there had to be a way to do things outside of the rich, overconfident new music organizations in Germany and Switzerland, plus a sense of being outside of the status quo these organizations created. Over the years several more joined – including myself, Manfred Werder, Carlo Inderhees, Radu Malfatti, Marcus Kaiser, Eva-Maria Houben, Craig Shepard, André Möller, Anastassis Philippakopoulos (and several others who have since left: amongst them Makiko Nishikaze and Klaus Lang) and then, at some point, there seemed to be enough people, even though we kept meeting (many) other interesting musicians. (I will say more about this later.)<br /><br />The first years of the organization were quite dynamic. Members came and went. For a while there were connections with Edition Thürmchen in Cologne and Edition Mikro in Zurich, two other publisher collectives of avant-garde music. For a period of about five years, starting in the mid-‘90s, Wandelweiser had an association with another performance and publishing group, named Zeitkratzer (the whole organization then was grouped under the umbrella of the English translation of that name: Timescraper). Burkhard was the only one who belonged to both groups. At the time Zeitkratzer (directed by Reinhold Friedl) was more oriented towards the live electronic side of the experimental music spectrum. Still, there was a fair amount of overlap between the two groups, as Zeitkratzer recorded works by Schlothauer, Malfatti and Beuger, and had as members, musicians such as Axel Dörner and Ulrich Krieger, who shared some aesthetic preferences with the composers in EW. After 2000 however the two groups went their separate ways. (Some associations continue – since 2007 Ulrich Krieger has taught at CalArts.)<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Wandelweiser in 1992</span><br /><br />This was an exceptionally obscure stream of music in 1992 – almost invisible, at the edge even of the experimental avant-garde. There were no signs of it in North America or, as far as I know, anywhere outside of Germany and Switzerland. One would only have discovered it by accident.<br /><br />Here is how I found out about it. Kunsu Shim – who, while no longer a part of Wandelweiser, was crucial to the aesthetic development of the group – was visiting Chicago in the fall of 1992 (with his partner, German composer Gerhard Stäbler). Kunsu, of Korean background, had lived for several years in Germany. He was very quiet (and slightly shy), but friendly – the opposite of the boisterous American “new music types” I knew at the time, and the first person I had met in a long time who wanted to talk about the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2548/3949292171_189d801834.jpg"><br /><br />Cage had been a visitor to Northwestern University, where I was teaching, for a few weeks in the spring of 1992. He had died in August of ’92 and his name was still very much in the air. At that time – and I think for most of the long period after <span style="font-style:italic;">Silence</span> was published (1961) – it seemed musicians were more interested in discussing Cage’s ideas than his music. For Kunsu, the music of Cage, and of those who worked with him and followed in his wake was felt to be more radical and more useful than the writing: because it had so many loose ends and live wires still to be explored (something I would also later encounter with other Wandelweiser composers). Thus <span style="font-style:italic;">4’33”</span> was seen not as a joke or a Zen koan or a philosophical statement: it was heard as music. It was also viewed as unfinished work in the best sense: it created new possibilities for the combination (and understanding) of sound and silence. Put simply, silence was a material and a disturbance of material at the same time.<br /><br />In 1990 I had started to put relatively long silences into pieces, without really knowing why I was doing it. I wanted to stop telling musicians what to do in every detail and to start creating possibilities for performers to explore a particular, individual sense of sound within a simple clear structure I would provide. But I felt as if I was alone in these interests. Part of the circumstance behind Wandelweiser is the uncanny synchronicity: around that time several of us (including Kunsu, Antoine, Jürg, Manfred and Radu) were making more or less tentative stabs in this direction, without at all being aware that there were others doing it. <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Kunsu Shim and my first encounter with silent music</span><br /><br />Kunsu gave me some tapes of his music. One consisted of a recent solo marimba piece called <span style="font-style:italic;">…floating, song, feminine…</span> (1992). There were hardly any sounds on that tape! I was instantly captivated. Tape hiss, a very few incidental noises (a chair, a cough, a few other unrecognizable sounds) and once in a great while a single short and abrupt marimba note, which seemed to appear out of nowhere: like the sharp tip of a pencil puncturing a sheet of paper, or a red balloon in a clear sky. (Later I would learn that the player was on a ladder and occasionally dropping mallets onto the keyboard. I’m not sure if this would have affected my response to the piece.) It was at once so clear, so simple that even a 3-year old would get it, and yet, simultaneously so mysterious and complex in its affect. <br /><br />These early pieces by Kunsu, including in addition, <span style="font-style:italic;">vague sensations of something vanishing</span> (string quartet and contrabass, 1992), <span style="font-style:italic;">marimba, bow, stone, player</span> (1993), <span style="font-style:italic;">expanding space in limited time</span> (solo violin, 1994), and the <span style="font-style:italic;">chamber pieces</span> (1994) seemed to be putting the world on the head of a pin. In <span style="font-style:italic;">expanding space in limited time</span> the bow sometimes moves only half its length in five minutes. If you saw the violinist playing you would think he was a living sculpture installation instead of music. In a performance of the piece at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Hall in 1994 it took 20 minutes for me to hear any sound from the violin at all. Once I did start to hear it, over the course of the nearly two hours duration, the music became almost unbelievably rich: there seemed to be more sound, more tightly compacted in this miniature world, than in the statistical complexities of Xenakis (or the black metal of Burzum). The music also revealed the complexity of “silence” itself. Silence in music was not the cessation of sound, or even a gesture: it was a <span style="font-style:italic;">different sound</span>, one with more density than those sounds made by instruments.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">No apology</span><br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2610/3950099150_c9dde89186.jpg"><br /><br />Why do we like what we like? This is usually the most difficult point to explain. <br />Why would a schooled musician like myself, someone who grew up listening to and studying Jimi Hendrix and avant-rock, free jazz, and classical music suddenly decide that music with very little sound was the most exciting thing in the world? Basically every member of Wandelweiser has a version of this story. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what it was that was so fascinating and inspiring about this piece (and the other pieces from this direction that I was beginning to hear). I have come to the conclusion that, while it’s possible to trace the moments that might have set the stage for such a reaction, the reaction itself is inexplicable. It is, at its root, not logical. It doesn’t follow from anything like a step-by-step process. You make a decision in a moment, and suddenly you’ve turned down one fork in the road. Terrifying and reassuring; strange and familiar; exciting and normal: all at once.<br /><br />There’s no <span style="font-style:italic;">reason</span> to love this music. One just does (or one doesn’t). Aesthetics and history come after the fact. Essays (like this one) will not make you like it better and will not ultimately defend its continued existence. The last thing I would want to do is to <span style="font-style:italic;">normalize</span> something I continue to find strange.<br /><br />Once one <span style="font-style:italic;">has</span> made the turn onto this strange road, a world of difference opens up. What looks like a narrow passageway from the entrance, turns out to have all kinds of byways, pathways, way stations — it becomes a world of its own. Small musical differences that to some might just seem like inflections (for example, the difference between a silence of 50 and of 60 seconds, or of a few decibels, or the difference in timbre between a low trombone or an e-bow guitar, or between digital silence and recorded silence) become intensely interesting to those working with them. Having had some training in just intonation, this was familiar: the difference between an equal tempered and a just (5/4) major third is for some unimportant, and for others of fundamental importance. (If someone says about a kind of music that it “all sounds the same,” it’s very likely to interest me. In my aesthetic experience it’s more enjoyable to make my own landscape out of things that are apparently the same, that to be given a group of diverse things that already stake out their own clear positions on the map.)<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />To finish the Kunsu story</span><br /><br />The recording of Kunsu’s music was definitely much farther in this direction than I had gone. Soon he had provided me with a few more of his scores along these lines (there weren’t many then) and a few recordings. It was then that I first encountered the music of Antoine (his incredible <span style="font-style:italic;">lesen, hören: buch für stimme</span>, for voice and tape from 1991) and Jürg (his very simple and beautiful <span style="font-style:italic;">Invention</span> for piano, from 1990). [Later it became clear that both Frey and Beuger had been moving in this direction for a while – Frey making gradual movements away, from the 1980’s onward, from his orientation in the New York School music of the 1960’s, and Beuger, who already in his teens had put silences into pieces, picking up composition again in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s with pieces such as <span style="font-style:italic;">schweigen, hören</span> for orchestra (1990) – very likely the first piece to sound like a “Wandelweiser” piece.]<br /><br />Kunsu and I met again a little over a year later (1994, I think), and after that, unbeknownst to me, he took the liberty of sending Beuger some of my recent scores. A few months later I received a phone call from Antoine and we had a long conversation (anyone who has had the pleasure of one of these long phone talks with Antoine will know what an incredible experience that can be), at the end of which he asked if I was interested in joining the collective. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2547/3949362887_502448f6dd.jpg"><br /><br />Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Germany, I met a group of the current (Antoine, Jürg, Burkhard, Chico, Thomas), and soon to be (Radu, Carlo) members for the first time. It was an incredible bunch of interesting, strong, diverse, stimulating, and very humorous people! It was like meeting up with some of Walter Zimmermann’s desert plants in the midst of the fertile high culture of central Europe (notwithstanding that some came originally from Korea, Brazil and unfashionable places in Switzerland, Austria and Holland). <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Making sounds with <span style="font-style:italic;">Stones</span></span><br /><br />One thing I took part in on that trip in the fall of 1995 was a recording of <span style="font-style:italic;">Stones</span> by Christian Wolff in the atelier of Burkhard Schlothauer’s apartment in Berlin. I love the disc, but the recording process itself was unforgettable. We had one rehearsal only: just enough to situate everyone to the recording environment and to see what people were doing. Each person made their own realization of the score, given minimal requirements from Antoine – I think ten sounds, however one wanted to understand that, to be made over the course of the 70 minutes duration of the recording. Naturally everyone had a different method of realizing the piece. Antoine had used chance procedures, and it had thrown up a need to make three sounds at once, quite a trick given the kinds of sounds he had chosen (involving balancing something and striking it in two different ways with stones simultaneously, if I remember correctly). This took some amusing acrobatics, but in the end came off successfully. Thomas Stiegler made every stone sound using his violin, intertwining pebbles with bow hair in the strings, dropping tiny stones on the body–it was like a miniature symphony in a violin. Burkhard dragged a large stone very gently over the floor of the atelier for a long, long time. Kunsu Shim’s sounds were all to occur within a period of about two minutes, 55 minutes into the recording. He sat without any visible motion (as far as we could tell, none whatsoever) for the first 55 minutes and then quietly, almost inaudibly, made ten extremely delicate sounds with a few very small pebbles and some cloth. Jürg Frey, as someone who had performed many pieces by Wolff, had determined, Wolff-style, to hinge a few of his sounds upon actions by others, unbeknownst to the people playing. By chance this had created a situation where the sign for the beginning of a sound and its end (i.e., the actions of two different performers) necessitated that he rub two good size stones over another gently for nearly half an hour. At the end of this Jürg was covered in white dust. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2633/3949265355_3c24b054f6.jpg"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Listening to a Wandelweiser disc</span><br /><br />The making of this recording and, especially the idea that we would <span style="font-style:italic;">release</span> such a thing (as happened in 1996) is reflective of one of the most important features of the thinking that was taking place within Wandelweiser. Obviously a recording is different in many ways from a live performance. The most profound difference in my view is how one experiences them. A concert is a series of moments in which something indefinable passes through sound and between people. The moments are sensuously immersive (sights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes), but impermanent. But you have a relationship with a recording. It can be a brief relationship – and can then somewhat resemble a performance. But the best recordings are lasting in their own particular and repetitive way.<br /><br />A recording is also an artifact that doesn’t care what you do with it. You can listen to the same song 500 times; you can refuse to open it (c.f. Brian Olewnick’s review of <span style="font-style:italic;">Sectors (for Constant)</span> by Sean Meehan); you can hang it on the wall, sell it or throw it away. <br /><br />With recording, sound is stored for <span style="font-style:italic;">use</span>. How do you use a recording like <span style="font-style:italic;">Stones</span>? Do you just listen to it like anything else (perfectly possible in this case) or do you find ways of listening to it that suit the recording in other ways: say playing it all day at low volume (so that it can be forgotten, except for those very few moments when a sound rises to the surface, reminding you it’s still there). Or play it so loud that you hear <span style="font-style:italic;">everything</span>.<br /><br />In other words, the recording can be viewed as <span style="font-style:italic;">open</span>, something like an instrument—a particular instrument that makes a limited set of sounds that can nonetheless have a variable relationship in the environment in which they are played. Although there are many discs in the Edition Wandelweiser catalog that can function as fairly normal listening experiences, their presence alongside those such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Stones</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">calme étendue (Spinoza)</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Branches</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">silent harmonies in discreet continuity</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">exercise 15</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">ein(e) ausführende(r) seiten 218 – 226</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">phontaine</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Transparent City</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">im sefinental</span> (to name only the most obvious in this direction), creates an interesting double trajectory: from the recording as <span style="font-style:italic;">concept</span> towards its use as music, and, conversely, the invitation to a listener to experiment in their own way with how to experience the more traditionally presented music. (I don’t mean to suggest that Wandelweiser owns or established this category – just that it plays a role in how I experience the music on any given EW disc.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The first decade</span><br /><br />So, after a while, as concerts started to happen (in Düsseldorf, Aarau, Zürich, Munich, Chicago, etc.) and discs started to be released (with an initial onslaught of eight in 1996) some attention was given to the group in the German speaking new music press and at various music festivals. The presences of Radu Malfatti (I didn’t know any of his work as an improviser yet) and Manfred Werder (having just returned from a few years in Paris) made themselves felt. At this stage (late ‘90s) Wandelweiser seemed very much like a German thing — not just as a basis of operations but where most of the things were happening. This was ironic, inasmuch as most of the members were not from Germany. (I have to add here that the “Swiss contingent” of Jürg and Manfred did a lot to make sure that Wandelweiser was not <span style="font-style:italic;">only</span> a German thing, with many strong and memorable concert series in Aarau and Zürich.)<br /><br />I’ve often wondered about this landing in Germany. It may have something to do with the high regard the American avant-garde was held in Europe, and in particular in Germany, compared to the status it had in the US at the time. It was often my impression that Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Lucier and the others had had a greater impact on the late 20th century musical life in central Europe than they had had in the US. The musical situation in the States, at least in classical and jazz music, had been flooded with more conciliatory voices: the minimalism of Glass and Reich, then the neo-Romantic attitudes struck by the majority of academic composers; in jazz this tendency was symbolized by Wynton Marsalis (coinciding with an apparent lack of momentum in free jazz, and very little improvised music to speak of). My friend, the musicologist Volker Straebel has called this period “the death of the American avant-garde” – and this was precisely what it felt like. So Europe in general, and Germany in particular, with its large resources for culture (even helping marginal enterprises like Wandelweiser) was more fertile ground.<br /><br />There were two centers of Wandelweiser activity in Germany. Antoine, Kunsu, Marcus, André, Eva-Maria, percussionist Tobias Liebezeit, pianist John McAlpine, the artist Mauser, and for a while Carlo, his wife, Normisa Pereira da Silva and Radu all lived in and around Düsseldorf/Köln. Thomas Stiegler wasn’t too far away, in Frankfurt. Antoine has had an ongoing series at the Kunstraum in Düsseldorf since 1993. A huge number of Wandelweiser concerts have taken place there (the list itself would be a piece of a kind – just reading the way the titles change over the years is interesting – at least to me). There seemed to be just enough in the budget to bring musicians together, and so over the years many of us have come to feel that this place is a second musical home. (I just need to close my eyes to hear the sound of the rooms with Jürg Frey’s clarinet echoing through them.)<br /><br />The artist Mauser (about whom more later) had his studio in nearby Cologne and this was another frequent performance location in the first decade. It was a very simple, fairly large and extremely pleasant studio space in the courtyard of an apartment building in a relatively quiet section of the city. Here the practice of daylong concerts (<span style="font-style:italic;">Ein Tag</span>), developed by Mauser and Antoine, really found its footing. For a while these were yearly – and incredible – events, where either very long pieces or collections of pieces would be done alongside time based work in other media: visual arts performance and installation, video, dance and so on. Many would come and spend a few hours there, to watch some of the performance, and to relax on the patio under the trellis and have <span style="font-style:italic;">Kaffee und Kuchen</span>. Others would spend nearly the whole time following the performance, even though often very little would be happening. Although I could only occasionally take part in events there, the days at Mauser’s are easily amongst my most memorable artistic experiences.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3448/3949428547_72d65ce40f_o.jpg"><br /><br />The other center of activity was Berlin. In the first decade the <span style="font-style:italic;">Verlag</span> (the German word for publishing company) was there, housed by Burkhard at his business. Recordings (such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Stones</span>) were made in Burkhard’s studio or in an old church near his house in the countryside a few hours away (Hohenferchesar). Former members Makiko Nishikaze, Chico Mello and Klaus Lang also lived in Berlin, at least part of the year. I was close by for the better part of a year in 1998/1999 on a fellowship from Künstlerhof Schreyahn. The musicologist and close friend to several in the group, Volker Straebel lives there. At the end of 1996 Carlo moved to Berlin. There, along with artist Christoph Nicolaus, he created one of the “founding” Wandelweiser situations. This project, called <span style="font-style:italic;">3 jahre – 156 musikalische ereignisse – eine skulptur (3 years – 156 musical events – one sculpture</span>) took place in the choir loft of the Zionskirche (in <span style="font-style:italic;">Mitte</span>, directly across the street from Carlo, Normisa and their young son Matheo’s apartment), every Tuesday for 3 years, always promptly at 7:30 p.m. Each concert featured the premiere of a new 10-minute solo piece (plus the rotation of one of the pieces of Nicolaus' sculpture – which consisted of stone posts of various lengths laid on the old wood floor of the balcony). Although some friends outside the group wrote works (including amongst others, Peter Ablinger and Wolfgang von Schweinitz), the overwhelming majority of the new pieces came from Wandelweiser composers. I’d venture to say that if you see a ten-minute solo piece in the EW catalog from 1997 to 1999 it was written for this project. Cumulatively over the three years, thousands of people came to the concerts, and had their first experience of this music. Peter Ablinger once described to me his pleasure at taking an hour ride in the U-Bahn to hear a ten-minute concert (with a trip to a café or pub afterwards – where often long discussions would ensue). <br /><br />In any case, even in Germany, we had to exist on a shoestring. All the discs and the performances (after the initial round) only happened because individuals in the group found a small opportunity to do something. A free space close by; the interest of a few creative performers; a little grant money: in sum nothing that would come close to funding an average size music festival, would be enough for several densely packed Wandelweiser events. (A typical example would be a week in Düsseldorf with concerts every evening and two on Saturday and Sunday – with new pieces being rehearsed by various groupings of the ensemble.) <br /><br />When I look back over all the events that took place over the years (certainly in the hundreds, with probably close to one thousand pieces performed) I am amazed by how much can be done with little or no money (still pretty much the case) and relatively little public attention. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Different aesthetics under one roof</span><br /><br />At this point I think I need to mention that Wandelweiser does not embody, as far as I’m concerned, a single aesthetic stance. To be sure, from the outside there appear to be a set of shared characteristics, including an interest in silence, duration and radical extension of Cagean ideas and the work that followed from it. In fact, fourteen years ago, these might have been terms more easily applied to (much of) the music – but even then there were lots of different ideas about where the music was going as well as important differences in taste and philosophical stance. <br /><br />Here is a list of some of the things I can remember discussing with people in the first years (and this might help to suggest how diverse the set of influences and conditions were): <br /><br />• There were several different ideas about which works of Cage were most valuable. It wasn’t only <span style="font-style:italic;">4’33”</span>, but the number pieces, <span style="font-style:italic;">0’00”</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Roaratorio</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Music for __</span>, the <span style="font-style:italic;">Variations</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Empty Words</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Cheap Imitation</span>, the <span style="font-style:italic;">String Quartet (in Four Parts)</span>. What seemed to be at stake here was not only the status of silence, but of the relationship between silence and noise (“the noise of the world”), and the function of tone within that continuum. Beuger’s important essay <span style="font-style:italic;">Grundsätzliche Entscheidungen</span> (1997) deals directly with this issue. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2553/3950172042_8008bfbcd1_o.jpg"><br /><br />• The music of Wolff was critical for many of us. Christian was at the meeting in Boswil in 1991, where Antoine met Jürg Frey and Chico Mello. (Jakob Ullmann, Urs Peter Schneider, Ernstalberecht Stiebler and Dieter Schnebel were also there. Manfred Werder was in the audience for one of the performances.) Wolff has also been a great supporter of our music and many of us have worked closely with him on his (and our) music. Much of his music attempts to tap into the creative power of performance in an explicit way. Christian had been close friends with Cornelius Cardew, had worked with the Scratch Orchestra and had played with AMM – but this feature had been present in his music already quite early on, for instance in his <span style="font-style:italic;">For 1, 2 or 3 People</span> (1964). While I would not call what happens in this piece improvisation, it does involve on the spot decision-making that people who have worked in improvised situations would immediately recognize. At the root, and this I think applies even more to Wolff’s music (where it has been pursued in many different ways) than Cage’s, there is an understanding of a composition as a stopping point, as opposed to an endpoint, in the whole process of creating music. For many of us (all of us?), Wolff proved a deeper source of inspiration for making new work than Feldman. (Which is not to say that Feldman’s work is not beautiful or helpful for some of us–it is.)<br /><br />• There was, early on, and continues to be an ongoing curiosity about the depth and breadth of the experimental tradition, American or otherwise, with a special interest in some of the radical and obscure works. Antoine is especially gifted at uncovering little known, radical work. I first learned of Tomasz Sikorski, Michael von Biel, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Lax, Alain Badiou and even Douglas Huebler from him (this list could go on much longer). Thanks to Antoine, at one recent Wandelweiser event, Terry Jennings’ <span style="font-style:italic;">Piano Piece</span> (1960) was performed and seemed to be right at home amongst pieces by some of us. At a concert in Neufelden (near Linz) this summer, the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble played Toshi Ichiyanagi’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Sapporo</span> (1962) and it almost felt as if it had been written for us to play.<br /><br />• We have had occasional (but ongoing) discussions about the various directions jazz and improvised music has taken in the previous 30 years. This was important in the sense that it intersects in so many ways with the notions of indeterminacy. Radu, having worked his way from Jack Teagarden to Paul Rutherford and then beyond, brought a lot of experience and opinion to these discussions. But for myself as well, growing up in Chicago, playing jazz guitar, and hearing so much of the music of the various AACM combinations, this was an especially important issue. At the beginning there was little idea that what we were doing had much in common with what was going on improvised music – this would come later. <br /><br />• There was a definite awareness of the importance of the German avant-garde: especially Helmut Lachenmann (with whom Kunsu had studied) and Matthias Spahlinger (with whom Thomas Stiegler had studied). From early on, some of the thinking about instruments and the use of sound, and above all, instrumental noise, was influenced in audible ways by these important figures.<br /><br />As kind of a counterbalance there was an interest in many various small and strange things: art and music made by the various members of Fluxus, odd bits of poetry (Hans Faverey, Robert Creeley, Fernando Pessoa), the work of the Gugging artists and poets (especially Oswald Tschirtner) or, especially in my case, American vernacular music of the 1920’s and 1930’s (Harry Smith territory). For me these various oddball streams came together in the one-of-a-kind poetic work of Italian/Austrian poet Oswald Egger (who was introduced to Antoine through the publisher Thomas Howeg, Zurich).<br /><br /><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Deleuze.jpg"><br /><br />• Over the years there have been many discussions amongst us concerning fundamental issues in making music. Because some of the ideas in the pieces attempt, in their own way, to get to the root of a particular musical situation, sometimes it has been helpful to use thought from outside. As Gilles Deleuze points out, philosophy has been, over the last three millennia, the main source of concept creation. (Science and mathematics in his view create “functions,” and art creates “percepts” – sensuous objects to be perceived.)<br /><br />Each of us, without being anything like a professional philosopher (we’re more like non-professional philosophy readers), has drawn inspiration from philosophical work. This is very hard to talk about in depth without sounding pretentious, so I’m not going to. However, not mentioning it also seemed wrong – it’s an important part of the Wandelweiser atmosphere.<br /><br />The conceptual background is present in a lot of the work we have shared (again, especially at first). I think it partially explains why, over certain periods an intense amount of activity was centered in one particular area of musical creation. <br /><br />For a period in the mid- to late 1990’s there was a lot of work done, by several different composers, on the solo piece. Behind it is, I think, an interest in the number 1. This led to a great number of very diverse pieces: exploring the unit of time structure (<span style="font-style:italic;">first music for marcia hafif</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">stück 1998</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">für sich</span>), being alone (<span style="font-style:italic;">tout à fait solitaire</span>), the sonic features of one instrument (<span style="font-style:italic;">die geschichte des sandkorns</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">kammerkomplex</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">mind is moving</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">die temperatur der bedeutung</span>), an expanse of limitless time (<span style="font-style:italic;">calme étendue</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">ein(e) ausführende(r)</span>) or the disappearance of perceived time altogether (<span style="font-style:italic;">ins ungebundene</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">a certain species of eternity</span>) – to mention a few of the many works. One thing that has always been striking about this work to me, is the tangible presence of the performer when <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> playing. This is something that is never communicated on a recording – the continuity of the sound and silence is borne by the particular person, whose singular presence is more important than anything written on the page. <br /><br />At some point the duo (or “twoness”) came into something of a focus (early on, mostly in the work of Jürg Frey, but then most recently by Beuger). Looking at the pieces, one sees a world of difference between 1 and 2, in musical terms. It’s hard to avoid the idea that two in music always implies, at the very least, relationship – if not love. [<span style="font-style:italic;">Lovaty</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">zwischen</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">dedekind duos</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">2 ausführende</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">two/too</span>.]<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The most important conversation</span><br /><br />Many important exchanges happened during the rehearsal process. We all spent a great deal of time getting to know each other’s music by playing it. The Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble is a group of sympathetic performers who nonetheless bring their own styles of playing and thinking. One writes for individuals rather than instruments. When Antoine, Jürg, Radu, Manfred or Marcus play on one of my compositions, I know that their musical character will permeate the work. And I know that their way of playing it will tell me things about my own piece that I could not have known without them. Even the simplest looking piece takes on a curious afterlife, as one sorts through what happened to it in the hands of one's friends.<br /><br />As Jürg Frey has said: the most important conversations took place not in words, but in the music itself, from one piece to another; with one person going a different direction with very similar material to what the other had used. Seen in this way, it is only by getting inside the individual works that one sees the energy that is at play amongst this group of musicians: where notions of what is similar and what is different are replaced by much more complicated (and interesting) trajectories and tensions.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/115/257073692_2093e84800_o.jpg"><br /><br />Radu brilliantly summarized to me the coming together, the commonality and the differences in this way:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I think that these things [i.e., the ideas of what we were doing] are there anyway and that "creative" people are only those who pick it up earlier then the rest, or hear it, or feel it sooner. In the Wandelweiser situation: Who started it? Who is a "follower"? I think we all started to become interested in similar things, even coming from very different angles and directions and therefore we met and got together and felt a mutual understanding right away.</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />A river delta</span><br /><br />That’s the image I can best use to describe what has started to happen as a result of all these conversations over the years, as our work has developed. What might have seemed at first like something of a single narrow stream, has proved to be capable of some variety. Early on, I took pleasure in the fact that I was never quite sure exactly whose piece I was hearing. The overlap and the sense of a truly shared language was exciting and inspiring. Now I take pleasure in being able to recognize, sooner rather than later, whose piece it is – even as it continues to be part of the same stream.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Art</span><br /><br />Antoine introduced me to the monochrome painting of Marcia Hafif, an American artist. The idea behind this work was that “one” kind of material (that is, one color and kind of paint) was already multiple. It is, abstractly, one color, but in reality, when the paint is applied to the canvas by hand, there are many miniscule variations in tone and texture. The fact that the description was simple but the reality complex, did not fall on blind eyes or deaf ears. It is interesting how revealing a choice of a favorite artist can be. Jürg Frey loves the still life painting of Giorgio Morandi: and thus it becomes possible to see in his work the subtle, careful, endless shift of the same basic material – each time somehow just new enough to engage you, and to make you more deeply aware of the possibilities for expression with limited means. It won’t surprise anyone that Manfred Werder is fascinated by the conceptual artists. I can remember him reading Lucy Lippard’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972</span> like it was a suspense novel. Carlo Inderhees has been influenced by the work of On Kawara. (That makes sense, doesn’t it?) Although I love all this art, recently my own tastes run to James Turrell, Juan Muñoz and some of the installations of Sarah Sze. As these exchanges started, I had the sense that much had happened in the realm of the visual arts that had no parallel with developments in music (Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, etc.). Perhaps, with all of the interesting work done in experimental music in the last 15 years, this has started to change.<br /><br />The presence of one artist-musician and two great artist friends of Wandelweiser is a very significant (if in the US, seldom visible) part of the group.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2655/3950044790_bd22ede99a_o.jpg"><br /><br />Mauser introduced himself to Antoine at a concert of John Cage’s in Cologne in the early 1990’s. His work, which kept evolving right up until his death in 2006, was a significant part of the Wandelweiser environment. Entering Mauser’s studio for the first time in 1995, I at first thought it was devoid of art. As we sat and talked, the sun shifted and I became aware of very light, somehow luminous squares on the walls. At some point it was clear that they weren’t just effects of the light, but artworks: very fine translucent paper had been fixed to the wall, and the paper caught light to varying degrees, depending upon the angle with which the light hit it. Could anything be simpler? But nothing is as easy as it looks. The art appeared and disappeared magically and seemed to have its own un-emphatic duration. It had taken Mauser decades of very hard work, filled with uncertainty, to arrive at this solution: at once clear in concept and unbelievably sensual (you took it all in with your eyes before your brain started working). It became a model for musical work for some of us. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2504/3949262969_0c1ef62bcb.jpg"><br /><br />The artist Christoph Nicolaus has been a close friend to several in the group for nearly as long as it has existed. Christoph does many kinds of work: drawing, photography, video and other media. Much of his work is durational in nature: collecting single drops of water from various sources every day and storing them in glass containers (where they create beautiful “clouds” of evaporation); photographing the same location at the same times every year (in spring, summer, fall and winter); making a daily drawing using the sun and a magnifying glass to burn narrow, straight lines onto paper (dark brown images which nonetheless retain the luminosity of the sun). With his ongoing series <span style="font-style:italic;">Garonne</span>, he is making a very large set of videos of rivers (having already covered much of the world to do this) according to a very simple principle: finding a bridge and filming directly down on both sides, using autofocus, as long as the battery holds out (thus creating a series of ca. 60 minute videos, paired for each river, with water flowing from the top to the bottom of the screen in one, and from the bottom to top of the screen in the other). An installation presents a collection of 2 to 6 rivers shown simultaneously, chosen at random from the pile. The differences are astounding: the colors (all shades of green, brown, black, orange and blue), the flow, the wind and weather, the kinds of debris – one would never imagine how singular each river could appear. One of my favorite Wandelweiser events was the exhibition of these videos in Berlin in 1998, simultaneous with Carlo’s solo cello piece <span style="font-style:italic;">für sich</span>. Carlo’s music and Christoph’s videos were in profound harmony – something “multi-media” art often strives for, but rarely achieves. Nicolaus has installed a beautiful collection of Mauser’s work in his large apartment in Munich and hosts monthly concerts there under the title <span style="font-style:italic;">Klang im Turm</span>. It is one of the central current locations for Wandelweiser events. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2482/3949264699_b210995df0.jpg"><br /><br />The least classifiable member of Wandelweiser is Marcus Kaiser. He is a cellist–painter–architect–composer–builder/designer–maker of sound pieces–video artist. Marcus does not juggle these activities – he works on all of them simultaneously as if they were part of some vast rhizomatic assemblage. He paints jungles the way they grow: adding layer after layer of green until it is nearly a monochrome. He records individual layers of sound regularly over the course of many days, until, when simultaneously played back, these recordings reach a point of near saturation (in which, however, sonic features remain distinguishable). He designs desks that serve as workspaces in a communal environment. His work is grand in scope, but not oversized; it is bold, but presented with gentleness and humility. (These last two are deeply personal qualities that anyone who knows Marcus will recognize.) <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mild weather / distant thunder (Wandelweiser events)</span><br /><br />Although over the years there has been great variety in the location, structure and personnel involved in the concerts, the character of a Wandelweiser event has some constants: A great deal of music; many discussions; the feeling of good-natured friendship and community.<br /><br />A strong reaction from someone else (“I really did/did not like that, and here’s why.”) can serve to clarify one’s own thinking. However, in my experience the interactions that emerged from Wandelweiser events, have usually taken place in an atmosphere of general support — where it is a given that one would continue to care about and for the other, regardless of aesthetic differences. <br /><br />Antoine, who in Düsseldorf has staged more large-scale Wandelweiser events than any of the rest of us, has always been particularly clear in his feelings about this matter (and is himself a good model for the attitude): people should not feel “wounded” by presenting their work or ideas. Critique does happen, but to me it has seemed rather far down the list of things to accomplish during one of these gatherings. In any case, with a group of close friends, one usually knows how they feel about one's work. Over the long run, sympathies and differences will make themselves clear in the decisions made in the work itself (as if individual works were part of larger picture). For instance, starting in the mid-90’s one could follow the use of the bass (or low) drum duo from work to work, composer to composer: <span style="font-style:italic;">Ohne Titel (für Agnes Martin)</span> (Frey, 1994/95), <span style="font-style:italic;">fourth music for marcia hafif no. 3</span> (Beuger, 1997), <span style="font-style:italic;">time, presence, movement / one sound</span> (Pisaro, 1997) – finally becoming four such instruments in Malfatti’s <span style="font-style:italic;">l'effaçage</span> (2001). A close look at these four apparently similar pieces would reveal subtle but substantial differences in approach. Although each piece can stand alone, there is also a (wordless) discussion going on between them. There are many such discussions in the Wandelweiser catalog.<br /><br />None of this means that striking events are avoided — quite the contrary. But these tend to be shocks produced by the works themselves. If I think about some of these: the first time I experienced Beuger’s nine hour composition, <span style="font-style:italic;">calme étendue</span>; the endless (and occasionally hilarious) stream of Swiss birds and valleys in Jürg Frey’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Lovaty</span>; the way the density of Marcus Kaiser’s incredible jungle paintings permeates his cello playing; the radical juxtaposition of control and freedom in Radu’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Düsseldorf Vielfaches</span>; the 15-second summary of the orchestral experience contained in Manfred Werder’s <span style="font-style:italic;">2008-1 </span>(just to mention the first five that come to mind), shook me as an artist in a way no harsh words could ever do. I’m still dealing with these events. (In part, my summer two-week festival, <span style="font-style:italic;">the dog star orchestra</span>, is an attempt to find some kind of North American / West Coast parallel to these concert meetings.)<br /><br />Beyond the creative impetus received from discussions and exchanges of ideas, there was, above all, the pleasure of wonderful performances of the music. In addition to the members of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, we have each been very lucky to work with performers whose dedication to the music and to the people making it is responsible in part for the continuity of the work being made.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2448/3949264327_4c307ab963_o.jpg"><br /><br />Here I tip my hat to a special group of musicians who have kept faith for many years in a spirit of friendship and generosity: pianist John McAlpine, percussionist Tobias Liebezeit, oboist Kathryn Pisaro, speaker Sandra Schimag, accordionist Edwin Alexander Buchholz, the Quatour Bozzini (Clemens Merkel, Nadia Francavilla and Isabelle and Stéphanie Bozzini), violist Julia Eckhardt of Q-02 and Incidental Music, flutist Normisa Pereira da Silva, cellist Stefan Thut, percussionist Greg Stuart, pianist Jongah Yoon, pianist Guy Vandromme and saxophonist Ulrich Krieger. I can’t imagine our music without the creative participation of these people. <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />A few statements about composition (concepts, structures, sounds)</span><br /><br />Let us call a musical concept an idea or thought about music at some remove from the embodiment of the thing itself.<br /><br />A written composition contains a concept of how a particular music should be made. (In this way, all written music is conceptual.) <br /><br />In a composition, a small, clear concept might be preferred to a large, overarching one. (For this way of thinking, better a piece that takes up the simple coincidence or non-coincidence of two players than one that seeks to redefine orchestration.)<br /><br />There is greater diversity to be found in a collection of clear concepts than in a collection of overarching ones.<br /><br />Clear concepts can sometimes lead to perplexing results: results that test the powers of perception on some level and are conscious of that test. One kind of sonic pleasure is connected to the effort the mind of the listener makes to understand (or properly hear) the sound situation initiated by the composition. <br /><br />The musical situation will get <span style="font-style:italic;">some</span> degree of its structure from the composition; but the composition cannot account for everything. In the written work, something might be said about the time, or sound, or player or instrument (or all of these), but it is essential to keep in mind that much (most?) of the sonic reality will occur in the situation itself.<br /><br />The performers of the work are capable of being aware of the concept and the structure given by the composition, and of making active decisions at the same time. <br /><br />There is no clear and logical way to affix a percentage of creation or responsibility to any one of the musical actors. The music arises as a result of a whole set of circumstances, almost as if, once set in motion, it is doing the acting and the thinking.<br /><br />The process described here is <span style="font-style:italic;">independent</span> of conventional notions of what might or might not sound good, what is easy or difficult to grasp, or what is easy or difficult to listen to.<br /><br />At its best the surface of the music (i.e., the sounding result) will be engaging enough to draw a listener into the world of the piece. It is <span style="font-style:italic;">inside</span> this world in that significant artistic events (moments that can alter the way we hear and understand music) transpire. <br /><br />There is nothing wrong with a beautiful surface, placid and composed, despite its contact with musical upheaval.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3426/3949264677_87dbd1e76c_o.jpg"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Where are we now? </span><br /><br />Over the years the network of people associated with Wandelweiser has expanded. The regular concerts taking place in Aarau, Düsseldorf, Munich, Zürich, and Los Angeles, along with semi-regular ones in New York, Berlin, London, Vienna, Chicago and Tokyo have done a lot to make people aware of the music and to draw people to it. Given that new music is being written constantly and then performed, the concerts are still the frontline of activity (and represent much more than could ever be recorded and released). <br /><br />As is probably already clear, the openness of much of this work to environmental sound, its more than occasional extended duration, and the frequent use of indeterminacy means that in most cases there is no such thing as a “repeat” performance: the second performance of a piece (in a different context or with different performers) can feel like another premiere. So we all, even after all these years, continue to find many reasons to perform each other’s work, and often serve as advocates for it (which seems to be a rare thing – it was at least seldom found in the contemporary music environment in which I grew up).<br /><br />Now, mainly through personal contact and involvement in performances, there are also a number of musicians of a younger generation who take Wandelweiser as one of their starting points. As influence is such a tenuous thing, it would be hard to know where to begin or to end a list of these musicians. It’s probably best to say that, for a group of younger musicians, the music of Wandelweiser is a part of the experimental music atmosphere in which they learned to breathe.<br /><br />The recent compact disc recordings are, as in the past, not an extension of, but a complement to the concerts. As mentioned above, many of the more interesting EW discs represent things that could never have been performed as such. To choose recent examples, both Antoine Beuger’s <span style="font-style:italic;">too</span>, with recordings of separate duos made in Düsseldorf (Jürg Frey and Irene Kurka), and Tokyo (Rhodri Davies and Ko Ishikawa) combined to make a new piece out of two other pieces — and the duo field recording performance disc by Manfred Werder and Stefan Thut do not represent possibilities available in a concert space (<span style="font-style:italic;">Im Sefinental</span>). My two most recent discs on the label are also examples: both realizations of <span style="font-style:italic;">an unrhymed chord</span> were specifically designed as recordings, and <span style="font-style:italic;">hearing metal 1</span> is a work for recorded percussion to begin with. <br /><br />It is here perhaps that the music of the Wandelweiser group shares something with some interesting recordings on labels such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Erstwhile</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Improvised Music From Japan</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Slub Music</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Hibari</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Another Timbre</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Manual</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Cathnor</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Confront</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Potlatch</span> and others that seem ostensibly more concerned with improvised music. Recent releases on these labels also often confound notions of live and recorded means, and blur the line between what has been spontaneously invented (or improvised) and what is composed (or assembled) in the studio. Perhaps this sense of shared territory is one of the reasons that EW releases have found a successful outlet in the US in Erstwhile distribution (erstdist). <br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1295/531213527_5e668668aa.jpg"><br /><br />I’ve recently started thinking about how much overlap there is between these apparently different enterprises. It is not uncommon for improvisers these days to limit or fix aspects of their performance before playing. One might set a total duration beforehand (as Radu likes to do), or bring only a certain limited set of materials or an (apparently) limited instrument (such as Sachiko M’s sine wave sampler). Or perhaps an improvisational work might find itself in a context where composed works have also been played (a practice which AMM has long engaged in). Recently in concerts and on recordings, works by Sugimoto or Cage might be understood as belonging to “repertoire” of an ensemble that most often improvises. While I think it’s fair to say that something is being shared by these various musical streams, I would prefer at the moment not to name what that is (in part because I have no idea what to call it). At the moment I feel that this unnamed area has a tremendous potential going forward.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Non-national music</span><br /><br />Despite its base in Germany, Wandelweiser is not a national style or trend. It was remarkable that people from Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Korea, Japan and the US felt they had much more in common musically (and often personally) than they did with their own countrymen. The American experimental tradition was gone (or at least, not a part of our generation) and this was being replaced by something else. Whatever it might be called, it was certainly not the province of one national way of thinking about music or making music. Outside of the countries where the members of Wandelweiser live, there have been a couple of strong developments in the last several years.<br /><br />For nearly ten years now a set of shared musical activity has existed between many members of Wandelweiser and experimental musicians in the UK. My wife Kathy and I had the opportunity to get to know something of the scene in London in 1996. As she was there doing her dissertation research on the Scratch Orchestra, we had the chance to meet and talk to John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons and many others (and we heard AMM live for the first time in Chicago not long thereafter). During our stay in London, I learned of the music of Laurence Crane, who I managed to meet on the next trip over. Shortly thereafter, Manfred Werder came into contact with two composers with whom members of Wandelweiser have since often worked: Tim Parkinson and James Saunders. (To this list of UK collaborators, I would also add composers Markus Trunk and John Lely, though this list is growing rapidly.) Members of Wandelweiser have performed at INSTAL (Glasgow) in both 2008 and 2009, and this has led to more contact with the vibrant experimental improvisation community in the UK and elsewhere.<br /><br />Radu Malfatti had of course lived once in England, but is, as usual, a special case. Since his musical shift, many of his friends from that earlier era were no longer on speaking terms with him. However a whole new set of associations with a younger generation developed – mostly improvisers, in London and Berlin, who looked to him as a trailblazer in a new style of making music. (There are simply too many names here to mention!)<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />The Tokyo Connection</span><br /><br />To close this section, I’d like to say just a little about the relationship that has developed in recent years between Wandelweiser and some musicians from Japan.<br /><br />Some of these, in retrospect, had something like an aura of inevitability. Certainly, to choose one example, Toshiya Tsunoda’s somewhat “hands-off” approach to field recording (already present in the very beautiful recordings of 1997) — something I think of as steady state recordings of silence — are not so far away from thinking we in Wandelweiser might have recognized (had any of us known of it then). <br /><br /><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/236/515715974_a9ee928ff0.jpg"><br /><br />When Taku Sugimoto first contacted Radu Malfatti in July of 2000 it might have come more or less out of the blue, but if one looks for a moment at the music coming out of Tokyo from at least the mid-90’s onward there is a sense that there too something radical, having to do with the fundamental nature of sound and silence, was at work. The world of <span style="font-style:italic;">Opposite</span> is not so far from that of <span style="font-style:italic;">Beinhaltung</span>, that of <span style="font-style:italic;">The World Turned Upside Down </span>not so far from the one of <span style="font-style:italic;">Dach</span>. In any event, as their work together (such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Futatsu</span>) amply demonstrates, there was a quick understanding between these two great musicians. <br /><br />When Taku Unami began distributing Wandelweiser discs through Hibari in 2004, the music became much better known (and apparently, appreciated) amongst experimental musicians in Japan. Both Radu and Manfred (starting in 2004) have worked there several times, along with, most recently, Antoine. In a short time some beautiful musical projects between these musicians have developed — including most recently some wonderful recordings: Manfred Weder’s <span style="font-style:italic;">20061</span> on Toshiya Tsunoda’s Skiti label, <span style="font-style:italic;">A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger</span> (produced by Sugimoto for his Slub Music label), and <span style="font-style:italic;">kushikushism</span>, a duo project by Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami (also on Slub Music). <br /><br />Antoine told me a story that may or may not be symbolic of the way in which Wandelweiser is understood in Japan, especially amongst younger artists. When Manfred, Radu and he visited Tokyo in November of 2007, Antoine received many discs, often without any labeling, from young musicians. One particular musician gave him a few, explaining in each case, which ones were “more Wandelweiser” and “less Wandelweiser.” On one of the “more Wandelweiser” discs, there appeared to be no sound at all.<br /><br />As I’ve become acquainted recently with much more of the music made in Japan by experimental musicians from the “onkyo” group and its offshoots, I’ve returned to the thought behind Radu’s comment above many times. Sometimes the concerns, if not the music, seem so similar as if to be almost identical: as if a group of ideas was circulating of which no one was directly conscious – as if they had no real point of origin and were able to place themselves anywhere they could find a “host.” <br /><br /><img src="http://home.att.ne.jp/theta/ny-jazz/4tet_group_06.jpg"><br /><br />In the music of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura there is (or can be) such an intense stillness. Where does it come from? How available is it to others? In the work of these musicians with Keith Rowe I find an inspiring parallel to some of the music I got to know with my Wandelweiser friends. To be sure, there are many differences: the prevalence of electric over acoustic instruments, the fact that the music is improvised, and the various lineages that the musicians have within their traditions, to name the most obvious. Nonetheless, the stillness, the silence and the serene beauty; the sense of taking your time and trusting your audience to take the time with you; the evolution of the work and the sense that an active exploration is going on; to me these suggest a deeper kinship. Perhaps the most representative (and beautiful) example of this is the work of these three (with Otomo Yoshihide) at the incredible concert in Berlin on May 14, 2004, documented on <span style="font-style:italic;">ErstLive 005</span> – particularly on the final disc.<br /><br /><br />When I think about our group now, and especially the large set of friends of this music, I wonder if some of the most fragile seeds planted in the mid-century, by Cage and the experimental tradition, by the certain subgroups within free jazz and improvised music communities, and by the quiet experimental tendencies in Japan (Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi) have, after spending many years underground started to spring to life: invisibly – everywhere. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Summer/Fall, 2009</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I would like to thank Jon Abbey, Manfred Werder, Radu Malfatti and Antoine Beuger for their help with this article.</span><br /><br />photos/credits:<br /><br />1. the wandelweiser composers ensemble (joachim eckl)<br />2. antoine beuger (hartmut becker)<br />3. john cage (ben martin)<br />4. jimi hendrix (photographer unknown)<br />5. desert plants (unknown)<br />6. stones (CD cover/ida maibach)<br />7. zionskirche (unknown)<br />8. christian wolff (unknown)<br />9. gilles deleuze (still from French TV)<br />10. radu malfatti/mattin (yuko zama)<br />11. mauser in his studio (marianne hambach)<br />12. sonnenzeichnungen (nicolaus) (kathryn pisaro)<br />13. marcus kaiser (in sook kim)<br />14. kunstraum (with eva-maria houben, john mcalpine, michael pisaro) (renate hoffmann korth, ew website)<br />15. wolff.beuger.frey (silvia kamm-gabathuler, ew website)<br />16. sachiko m/dan flavin installation (yuko zama)<br />17. taku sugimoto/radu malfatti (eleen deprez)<br />18. keith rowe/sachiko m/toshimaru nakamura/otomo yoshihide (yuko zama)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-32216504830762346742009-07-07T05:21:00.000-07:002009-07-08T06:01:33.505-07:00Field Recording and Experimental Music Sceneby Toshiya Tsunoda<br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2422/3697183775_918b4c0fd3.jpg"><br /><br />I first became interested in field recordings when I was in junior high school. It was in the middle of the audio boom, and many young people were into radio and audio devices. Also, it was popular to use synthesizers or sound effects in making music, and my friends and I were playing with recording environmental noises, like bursts of fireworks. When I tried various devices, such as making a dummy head microphone, I was surprised at the fact that the feeling of the space was captured so realistically. However, this was not so serious, and I did not think that this could be a means of expression then. In those days, I was primarily interested in painting. After entering the art university, I became interested in conceptual art and minimal art works. It was then when I first realized that recordings could be a means of expression. Although I had no musical practice in my creative background, I had been listening to various fields of music. So it can be said that I had already a sensitivity to absorb unique acoustic experiences. <br /><br />It was 1994 when I first decided to release my acoustic works in public. At that time, I was more into art than now. Experimental music shops had field recordings sections then, but the works I found there were different from what I was interested in. Many of those experimental works were electronic music utilizing environmental noises such as insects and birds. The new electro-acoustic movement from France seemed to have a large influence on the field at that time. But I felt uncomfortable with their processed sounds using filtering and equalizing in recordings, since I was more attracted by a realistic feel and texture of the space. Of course it does not mean that I did not understand those musicians' intentions. If I had twisted the materials of my recordings a little bit, it could have produced some acoustic works that could come near those electronic music works. But the “space as recording object” would be distorted by a knob of the machine and would be transferred to some other context that is different from what I expect. Then it would end up in some existing genre of music, and would not be fresh to me. <br /><br />What attracted my interest then was independent artists who had unique political statements on overseas labels such as Selektion in Germany, V2 in Holland and RRR in the U.S.A, and some other independent artists who put out nonsense junk cassette tape works. These two trends were very inspiring to me. The former was philosophical, and the latter had a slight sense of emptiness. To my surprise, artists from these two movements had collaborated with each other occasionally. This free spirit encouraged me, and made me believed in the possibilities of doing label activities. In the art world, there are acoustic sound works made by conceptual artists or Fluxus artists, but those works tend to be less valued as an exceptional way of expression in general, and only a few people would be interested in the artist's intentions. Rather, experimental music listeners knew about those works better. On the contrary from the art world where the artist's self-display tends to come upfront, these independent artists seemed to seek to create another network, totally different from and outside of the existing art system. That was fascinating. <br /><br />The center stage of the art scene in the early 90's was multiple media art that used computers. But most of them were like poor mime performed by sensor-built devices, and almost impossible to bear. Compared with the bright center stage, the experimental scene was like a half-sunken underground. But I believed that there must be some people there who could understand my works. It was the start of my activities in this scene. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2547/3701273754_d8b59a3fff.jpg"><br /><br />My field recordings feature the transmission of vibrations, and any location can be interesting. The question is what is happening in actual vibrations in a specific place. I picked several different locations and repeated recordings to see the depth of activity, which has slight differences every time. Any particular place forms a pattern of vibrations that is specific to the place depending on the physical condition of the space. By seeking the point for recording, I search for the nature of the place. There are various movements of waves such as resonance, interference and overtone happening everywhere. This phenomenon is very interesting. <br /><br />If I use a contact microphone, I can observe the vibration transmitting inside an object. A vibration changes its behavior depending on the object that the vibration transmits. Also, vibrations are easily affected by temperature and humidity. A vibration that transmits from a solid object is not a vibration of sound or air, so we cannot listen to it. But it might be unnatural to identify a wave movement with its medium. Rather, it is better to focus on the interaction between the vibration and the sound. Sometimes I find some unknown vibration was resonant at a high level later, though I did not notice it at the place at all. <br /><br />We grasp a place or a space conceptually as a map or a model. But when we observe a vibration, every space is constantly trembling. If we pay attention to the behavior of the vibration, some new phenomenon different from the conceptual map will emerge. What kind of condition is ongoing at a metal fence, on the surface of pavement, in a narrow passage or inside a pipe? Is it a secondary incident that is like a by-product of the space, or is it considered to be a nature of the space itself? This question fascinated me and drove me into recordings. By fixing the vibration on a tape, I can make a catalog of phenomena that transmit the actual space. This is my field recording works.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.sleepbot.com/ambience/coverjpg/solidvib.jpg"><br /><br />Recorded materials are reviewed when they are compiled as a CD album. It is necessary to have a certain theme that is common with each track. In my "extract from field recording archive #1", I focused on standing waves as a state of the place. In my "archive #2" that was released by Hapna, I focused on changes in a hollow space that were influenced by outside phenomena. In my "archive #3" that was released from Fringes/Intransitive, I focused on a series of solid vibrations. In my "pieces of air", I focused on a relation between aerial vibration and sound waveform. In my later works including "O Respirar da Paisagem", "Scenery of Decalcomania" and "Ridge of Undulation", I worked from a viewpoint of how to capture the place, space and time in my installations and composition works (see footnote #1). Through the series of works, my focus for recordings has changed. In my "Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay" and "The Argyll Recordings", my interest has extended to conceptual direction rather than acoustic direction. <br /><br />Recorded material is like a map. It is not a perfect reproduction of the information in the space. We can say that field recording is considered to be a work which crops a part from a whole complete picture. What does that mean? An incident is continuously followed by the next incident like a domino. What is a criterion to cut a moment and distinguish it from other moments? We can record sounds by setting a microphone wherever we want. Then, what should we select and what should we eliminate? In this sense, field-recording artists are similar to landscape painters. I search for some object at a certain place, and spend hours focusing on it. While continuing to make my recordings, I came to think about the meaning of choosing an object and focusing on it. Perhaps it was similar to a hunter who became more interested in shooting a bow than the prey itself. <br /><br />I am currently making recordings like this: I go to a certain place and choose an object that is interesting to me. I fix a stethoscope with a small built-in air mike onto my temples. The stethoscope captures vibrations of my muscles and blood flows. Because of the nature of the air mike, environmental noises are recorded, too. If the wind blows, some wind sounds are recorded when it passes over my head. The recorded sound is like the sound that is heard when I cover my ears with my fingers. What is this? At this point, I cannot explain this well since my intuition is preceding over my understanding. Of course, some abstract issue is also involved here, other than field recordings. But at least, we can call this recording as evidence of my focusing on some object at a certain place. Recently I set a stethoscope onto another person's temples, and the two of us stood side by side and did a recording focusing on the landscape. In this way, two people create one stereo sound image. I feel that a landscape is highlighted as an object more clearly by two people than just one person, and that something more objective can emerge. The issue here can perhaps be our grasp of the image. It is about capturing one image with two inputs, which is normally what our eyes and ears do. With the space information that is sent from our two ears to our brains, we cannot distinguish the sound which one ear is hearing. There is no relation among temples, air mike and brain waves. Our brain waves do not stir the air. The position of the air mike can be set anywhere near the ears, but I feel that our temples are the best and only place for that. Is this approach just built on impulse? But I am thinking of developing this idea further. And in a way, this can be a method of field recordings with no doubt, too. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3302/3620676413_53af4a0541.jpg"><br /><br />Meanwhile, what about the current experimental music scene? There are an increasing number of field recording artists and works now compared with a decade ago. Field recording seems to have definitely turned into a genre. While there are of course some wonderful artists, many of them seem to be just dealing with space information sensually, like a sort of ambient music. The knowledge about formation of the sound and recording is still ignored by many of them. There are still only a few cases that I can find that I have been interested in. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2607/3697951952_19ffc1c468.jpg"><br /><br />In the current experimental music scene, I am most interested in artists like Taku Sugimoto, Taku Unami and the artists from the Edition Wandelweiser label, not in field recording artists. They are trying to move their sound productions in a conceptual direction. My idea of using a stethoscope might have been born through my work with Manfred Werder. Luckily, there are some serious listeners who question the problem of consciousness in Japan, though they are only a small amount of people. They are watching our experiments calmly. And radical performances are held almost every week here, which may not be favorably accepted by overseas listeners. I have a hunch that something interesting can emerge from here. (June 2009, translation by Yuko Zama) <br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------<br />#1: Excerpt from the liner notes of "o Respirar da Paisagem" (sirr.ecords 2003):<br /><br />…Attending to the space around us, we notice an abundance of vibration-an airplane high up in the sky, noise of the city (for several kilometers all around us), subway vibration, water pipes, etc. I believe we can regard these vibrations as the ‘context’ of constructed space. From this context, we can increase our awareness of living space. Constructed space has limited spatial dimensionality, but our awareness of it exceeds this size. It seems that our awareness spreads over hundreds meters or more in all directions-up, down, all around our location. My suggestion is that we must recognize space as a vibratory system. - Translated by Toshiya Tsunoda and Jeremy Bernstein.<br />--------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3604/3700465469_75450590c9.jpg"><br /><br /><br /><br />(Photos: Akiyama/Okura/Tsunoda by Reiji Hattori, AHORA by Atsushi Tominaga, Sugimoto by Yuko Zama, Werder by Richard Pinnell, Argyll by Toshiya Tsunoda)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-55128163185672331292009-04-09T21:00:00.000-07:002009-04-11T14:21:54.276-07:00Soba to BaraAmi Yoshida and Toshimaru Nakamura both wrote Japanese-only liner notes to be included with their new duo CD, Soba To Bara (buckwheat noodles and a rose). below is our respectful try at translating both sets of these notes into English, upon request of Dan Warburton and some others. <br /><br />a couple of notes on Ami's text:<br /><br />1) the punctuation is exactly copied from Ami's text, the commas and slashes and brackets, etc. for those of you with the actual CD, this is the back side of the notes, with the three larger vertical lines of symbols on the left (that's the title).<br /><br />2) the words in italics are the original Japanese characters, shown in part because of the occasional wordplay. most of this I'm sure is over non-speakers heads' (a group I am solidly in), but one example we can understand is at the start, the three uses of 'aku'. each time it is pronounced the same way, but the Kanji characters used to represent it each time are different, and in the third case, there are actually four characters as opposed to one the first two times, and it has a different meaning each of the three times.<br /><br /><br />=====================================================<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">I Am Watching, Staring At With It</span><br />- by Ami Yoshida<br /><br />I am watching, staring at with it.<br />I have no eye (<span style="font-style:italic;">me</span>). It is not vacant (<span style="font-style:italic;">aku</span>). It is not evil (<span style="font-style:italic;">aku</span>). <br /><br />I mistake a white world for somewhere [evil/scum/open/vacant] (<span style="font-style:italic;">aku</span>). What, were my eyes? Can I call them, eyes? I [hope/care/mechanize/write] (<span style="font-style:italic;">ki</span>) it. I am confused with that I want to [see/bear/beautify/examine/fascinate] (<span style="font-style:italic;">mi</span>) it. I want to [see/beautify/fascinate] (<span style="font-style:italic;">mi</span>) it toward what is [favorable/good/intoxicating/evening] (<span style="font-style:italic;">yoi</span>) to me. I want, to do it. It is me who wants, it. I am a rose. A rose is me. I am the rose. The rose is me. [Perhaps/people say] (<span style="font-style:italic;">tabun</span>) it is single-stem. I just hope, that it is single-stem. It is a steam that [swings] (<span style="font-style:italic;">yurasu</span>) me. The steam fills the room. But, I swing. I stay, standing. I cling to something, instead of standing on my own. I will stand straight. I need courage (<span style="font-style:italic;">yuuki</span>) to stand up. Nobody, will notice, if, I, stand on my own, or, not, here. <br /><br />There is a [sound/voice] (<span style="font-style:italic;">ne</span>) off-and-on, of [grinding/scrubbing/frictioning/mushing] (<span style="font-style:italic;">suru</span>). It, moves. There, are, moves. Breathing. Smell. I, am, looking down. I notice, nothing, but, grains, since I am looking down. I am counting, the number, of the grains. Even if I have, eyes, I cannot see it, if I am always looking down. What is, my hope. To, hope. To, decide, what is [favorable/good] (<span style="font-style:italic;">yoi</span>). To, choose. What, is, necessary, to choose. What, who. Choose something. To, gain. Yes, to gain, I choose. Choosing, is me, you, who, what. Choose [what/whom] (<span style="font-style:italic;">mono</span>)? <br /><br />If it is you, you will, you could, choose, it. I, want, to be, chosen, too. I want to be, chosen. I want it, what, who, you. I do. It is you whom I can [change/buy/return]-[get/capture] (<span style="font-style:italic;">ka-eru</span>). There are grains in front of my eyes. Heavy. What is heavy? Top. Head. My head, cannot, stand, up. I, will, die. I can tell, that I am, breaking down. Death, is, close. My last moment. Death throes. I am not, forgiven. By whom, you, what, I am not, forgiven? To someone except the grains, you, what, I am asking to be forgiven? I [will/want] (<span style="font-style:italic;">shiyo/shitai</span>) to stand straight. Who? Me. I, want. I, think, I will. There is, [someone] (<span style="font-style:italic;">dare</span>). If someone, could, notice me, I will stand on my own here. <br /><br />I decide. I decide who I am. I rule myself. I hate standing on its own with no decision.<br /><br />In the dim restaurant. There is only one small window. A hand opens it. An empty colander. It swings. Steam is up. Wet chopsticks. I swing. And, I stand on my own. It is a moment when, I happen to meet you, you happen to meet me, again. I am ready to fall into the white world. I will be found by you. It was a white world, not a narrow black darkness. A white world of, soba. In the soba that was chosen by you, I throw myself in as something different. To change. To change, you, too. Euphoria of red and white. I am a rose. Forever. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsLBO_jPFb1IUms9QFVfEJ9sje3rokZVrQ4qXYSJy_O1oEdZUOOQtDA0W2AxRHFP0_zhDRcouLObYapH82YrMuIhCSCwc9gI3uFbU2eFwh0YSv9ZffloXqAj-X4K8mzVyWPCqqG_lKwzk/s1600-h/Bara_image.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 175px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsLBO_jPFb1IUms9QFVfEJ9sje3rokZVrQ4qXYSJy_O1oEdZUOOQtDA0W2AxRHFP0_zhDRcouLObYapH82YrMuIhCSCwc9gI3uFbU2eFwh0YSv9ZffloXqAj-X4K8mzVyWPCqqG_lKwzk/s200/Bara_image.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322909492334079042" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Soba to Bara and Man and Man</span><br />- by Toshimaru Nakamura<br /><br />When I walked into the alley just outside of Komae station, the soba restaurant was there. The owner/chef of the restaurant seemed to be about twenty years older than me. I remember his soft smile and polite, slow manner of talking very well. Since the restaurant was open until midnight, I used to go there in the late night hours mostly. There were only six seats at the counter. Even though the soba and udon noodles were all handmade by the owner himself, the prices were quite reasonable, somewhere between standing-up-eating soba places and regular soba restaurants. Anyway, many characteristics of the restaurant were a little unique, including the way they served soba noodles. When they served soba in a hot soup, they did not rinse soba noodles in cold water after simmering. As a result, the soup became a cloudy white and the noodles themselves got slimy and somewhat lost their shape, becoming not so clean and decorative looking. Instead, the soba obtained a special flavor that wrapped customers in its warmth and softness. <br /><br />There was also another unique thing about the place. When customers were about to finish eating their soba noodles, the owner/chef offered to fill the bowl with some hot water in which he had just boiled soba noodles in, carrying a ladle filled with the hot water. I don't remember well now, but I guess I was quite surprised at his offer when I had hot soba noodles there for the first time. In general, Japanese add some "soba-yu" (the water the soba was boiled in) to the leftover of "tsuyu"(seasoned soy sauce) and drink the mixture, but do not drink the mixture of hot soba soup and "soba-yu". However, it was surprisingly delicious. By adding a hot "soba-yu" into a cooled down leftover of soup, the original rich flavor of the soup stock came back and made me feel like staying at the counter a longer time. When I felt comfortable with being at the counter, the owner/chef started telling me various stories. He told me that he climbs Mount Fuji every year, and that he is a member of a baseball team, his background and how his restaurant has changed over many years... He also taught me how to make soba noodles and soup stock with showing me each ingredient. But it was a small soba restaurant and not a drinking bar, so I always decided to leave the counter when the next customers came in. There were many days when I was able to listen to the owner/chef's stories for a long time since it was not a busy restaurant, but most of the stories were left unfinished. Some stories were completed later by patching several fragments together, and some fragments of episodes stayed as they were. <br /><br />Or better yet, it would be nice if we had a "soba-yu" restaurant. In the restaurant, soba noodles would be boiled just to make "soba-yu" which would be the main dish, and occasionally soba noodles could be served to customers on request. No, upon further reflection, soba noodles should not be served before the main "soba-yu". After making "soba-yu", soba noodles should definitely be discarded, and only the "soba-yu" should be served. Or, how about a public bath named "Soba-Yu"? The huge bathtub would be filled with "soba-yu". Floating petals of bright red roses on the white “soba-yu” bath, I may invite the owner/chef of the Komae soba restaurant to join the bath. There could be only two of us in the large bathtub. I could see the chef's awkward face beyond the steam at first, but the smile that he showed me when he offered the soba-yu by carrying a ladle at the height of his face would soon return. After all, we would now be soaked in the hot tub of “soba-yu”. I would like to listen to his stories with no time restriction then.<br /><br />It was more than ten years ago when I used to go to this soba restaurant. It was when I still lived in Kitami town next to Komae city. Since I moved to another place afterward, I stopped going to the restaurant. Around the time, there was a huge construction going on to raise the Odakyu railway and to build a quadruple track in the area. I thought that the restaurant would not exist any more because of eviction, since the place was right behind the station square. I just thought so with no evidence, and I came to believe so as if it is a fact since I assumed so for a very long time. But I did not confirm that with my eyes. I started caring about the restaurant recently, and feel uneasy. In fact, I cannot stop thinking about the place these days. I am going down to check the restaurant by taking a train in the near future. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm675EAo6y-ojP_TsL-X0CMroGd-G14nTi5p1Kc0wfFNmIjLELe96thzDu-lQ-Ro6RmOG6KyQ_0DB3z5HOM_Vg1V7l6k6NGGZeLYkIuPUrIXKEW-TfoEGWjVbgQyMgC1hhyubUMhBkWSk/s1600-h/Soba_image.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 177px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm675EAo6y-ojP_TsL-X0CMroGd-G14nTi5p1Kc0wfFNmIjLELe96thzDu-lQ-Ro6RmOG6KyQ_0DB3z5HOM_Vg1V7l6k6NGGZeLYkIuPUrIXKEW-TfoEGWjVbgQyMgC1hhyubUMhBkWSk/s200/Soba_image.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5323237433158744306" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(translation by Yuko Zama)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-71581851823011569642009-01-29T23:41:00.000-08:002011-01-23T15:08:02.193-08:00EL007by Keith Rowe<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3152/2909804921_14ec90f045_o.jpg"><br /><br />I guess ErstLive 007 starts with an invitation from Jon Abbey and Yuko Zama for me to participate in their AMPLIFY: light festival in Tokyo September 2008, and that I would be the only non-Japanese performer.<br /><br />The concept for my solo performance was only formed the night previous to the performance itself. Thinking about the forthcoming solo, I felt the need to somehow make clear “who I was”: what my background is, what are my concerns? Something about my interest, the music I love, the sounds that have influenced me, during the performance I came to realise these could be regarded as “Cultural Templates”. Also important was the desire to feel a freedom with regard to the performance’s shape and content, along with the freedom to break rules. For almost half of the solo’s duration, I utilise long sections of pre-recorded classical music unprocessed, unaltered, and presented as it is, I considered this a break from the normal expectations.<br /><br /><img src="http://nga.gov.au/OutAndAbout/Images/LRG/36334.jpg"><br /><br />The overall form of the performance came from Jackson Pollock’s 1952 painting “Blue Poles” although my performance would only reveal “Four Poles” (the four cultural templates which form the focus of the performance. During the three or four months leading up to the Tokyo festival, I had decided to revisit techniques from the past that I had abandoned. For the festival I had decided to resurrect my obsessive use of clear plastic lids from the mid sixties, along with a bow from the same period, and from the early eighties the steel pan scrubber.<br /><br />The solo starts with the pan scrubber, clear plastic lid, and contact mike. I wanted to commence with a playing style that could be interpreted as inept or clumsy even, to have the feeling of a deliberate paucity of means as well as openness, that would both refer to earlier periods of my playing (late 1965-middle 1966) but also retain its asceticism.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.rermegacorp.com/images/products/ReR/ammmusicLarge.jpg"><br /><br />At 2:14 is the first of the cultural templates, Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto for oboe in D minor (c. 1717). This piece, like all the templates, can be regarded as multi-dimensional or multi-layered. These dimensions/layers in the Marcello refer to:<br /><br />the artist in society<br />solo with accompanist<br />point and line<br />point and mass<br />centre line in Treatise<br />my role as basso continuo in AMM (rearmost wheel in the Yellow Truck 1966 AMM image)<br />the soloist melancholia sense of loss (which bookends the Purcell lament at the end of the piece)<br />how the instrument is “touched”, the sensitivity of touch <br />its binary nature <br />translating material between forms (difficult to describe, an art school task is to move the colours of a still life painting one notch around the colour wheel, blue becoming violet, red shifts to orange, yellow becomes green, green becomes blue, etc. A similar exercise would be to hear (translate) Django Reinhardt’s guitar as a soprano saxophone.)<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3149/2910650734_b7de8fd895.jpg"><br /><br />Appreciating the oboe here as Sachiko’s contact microphone, meaning … to listen to this oboe recording but somehow translate it into the sound of the contact mike, or steel pan scrubber, and therefore hearing the orchestral part as silence, or amplified silence, or silence made audible. This was an early AMM technique to make silence audible, which explains how I never thought of continuous sound as drones but as degrees of silence made audible. The rejection of excessive ornamentation and ostentatious display again refers to an early AMM decision to reject gesture, to perform as with little or no bodily movement. Towards the end of this template (around 4:06), I accompany the template with very gentle pan scrubber as if to say “when using our abstract sounds, pan scrubbers, knives, contact mics, etc. we should touch and approach those materials with the same consideration, sensitivity, musicality and sense of occasion as if we were this oboe player."<br /><br />At 5:01 the template ends, the steel scrubber continues and at 5:36 my human fingers touch the string and sound a single note, followed at 5:43 by a physical movement and sound which represents a time line. The time line technique comes from Cardew's Volo Solo, a difficult piece written for John Tilbury. At some point in the piece, John was obliged to produce around one thousand notes in a very short period. Fascinated by this challenge, I set out how to produce a thousand sounds in as short a period as possible. I achieved more or less a thousand sounds in between one and a half to two seconds, using a one metre steel ruler with a thousand millimetre engraved marks, and running a contact microphone attached to a stylus. This technique came for me to signify time, the passage of time, and here the single note at 5:46 is juxtaposed with a timeline of about 250/300 sounds. My intention was to echo the solo/accompaniment relationship found in the earlier template, reinforcing the reference to Wassily Kandinsky’s 'Point and Line to Plane'.<br /><br /><img src="http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14600000/14609544.JPG"><br /><br />6:25 refers to the sound of drawing, in an attempt to link the act of drawing with musical performance. I’ve attached a contact microphone to a piece of charcoal, and literally draw around the objects on the table in front of me, in a sense confirming how I regard my musical performances as acts of painting. This is also the first appearance and foreshadowing of the death motif, which is created by a handheld battery powered face fan with its propeller fan modified. Its long menacing sound is combined with a rubbing sound from a contact microphone, the rubbing sound represents human society, the physical (and other) contact between people, at times the rubbing is affectionate, and at other times there is friction. Again, it’s the juxtaposing of long and short sounds.<br /><br />7:51 is a single note, which leads to a recapitulation of the opening section, the steel scrubber and a clear plastic lid. Perhaps I might say more about the clear plastic lid: it’s a reference to Duchamp’s 'With Hidden Noise' but here I’ve reversed the process, revealing the content, which is the steel scrubber. <br /><br /><img src="http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/hiddennoise.color.jpg"><br /><br />Reading the sleeve notes of AMMMUSIC (June 1966) Electra EUK-256, “Seeing as for the first time this reddy brown object with all the strings going away to the left, a bow going across on the right hand side and interwoven amongst the strings various little things, on top of that a plastic lid, and you just watch the sound happening”. Seeing the sound happening is something which has been with me for a long time.<br /><br />8:29 we enter the world of “affectation”. The detuning here refers to Dante’s Inferno (particularly the Tom Phillips/Peter Greenaway version). The technique here is a live radio broadcast is picked up and transmitted through the earpiece to the guitar pickup, which picks up the broadcast and passes it through to a Boss PS-3, which for me is a way to achieve a form of “affectation” and process. The voices and music of popular culture swirl around, it’s a world without focus, the sound is overprocessed, distorted and overwhelmed by its overprocessing. This is the world I feel we live in.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/dante2.jpg"><br /><br />9:40, hovering above the Inferno is the second template, Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville, Grand Motets, Dominus Regnait, (c. 1735). <br /><br />This template for me poses the question, "What is profundity in the digital age?" If I reflect on other music from the early/mid 1700’s, we find the dominance of the viola da gamba is being challenged by the cello, as described in the writings of Hubert Le Blanc (Défense de la basse de viole contre les enterprises du violon et les prétentions du violoncel, 1740.) Le Blanc’s comments recall the later critiques by John Ruskin of James McNeill Whistler in 1878 where Whistler's paintings reflect a fusion between painting music and Japanese culture, and more recently in our own circle's critiques of amplification, electronics, computers and sampling. <br /><br />Listening to Jean-Baptiste Barrière's 'Sonates pour le violoncelle avec la basse continue' (1733), it seems to me that there are aspects of the violoncello’s sentiment that are not available to the basse de viole. It's not a question of better or worse, good or bad, it's about new sentiments, new relationships. Which leads me to question what are the new sentiments? emotions? Will only the artist and creator of the new recognise its importance? This template is also about how we develop out of the past, how we make the past serve the present. <br /><br />Clearly the template is about significance and profound meaning from the culture I originate from, my feeling is that this profundity is not universal. In my solo performance here in Tokyo I hold this template high and clear, with a minimum of interference. What I do add to the template are remnants of the inferno below, the dirt and grime of everyday reality, but what should people hearing these templates make of them?<br /><br />How I listened to the templates during the performance varied. Mostly I imagined in my mind's eye that the significant points suggested by the templates were on transparent sheets. I would conceive that the sheets were laminated on top of each other, perhaps combine all the significances and concepts as one solid mass. Another possibility is to dart around in rapid succession from point to concept to significance to idea in a blizzard of thoughts, or simply remaining on one solitary notion. <br /><br />12:11 the template ends what follows is a reworking of the plastic lid<br />12:34 nail/fingers<br />13:02 single note<br />13:26 contact mike/serrated edge of knife version of time line through to a steel ruler time line<br />14:00 steel scrubber<br />14:25 knife rattle (early technique), again at 14:35, modified at 14:40 onwards.<br />14:55 return to the infernal, pop radio generally diffused<br />15:20 knife rattle, again 15:27 <br />15:31 buzzing version of death motif, with knife rattle at 15:44<br />15:50 single note<br />15:55 ruler time line<br /> <br /><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Jean-Philippe_Rameau.jpg"><br /><br />16:31 The third template, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Castor and Pollux, "Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux" (1737 and 1754). <br /><br />This template refers to how revolutions become absorbed. For 50 years after his death, Lully ruled the world of opera in France. This did not change until Rameau presented Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 to the public, and we now have absorbed that huge revolutionary change and mention Lully and Rameau in the same breath. Sylvie Bouissou writes “In 'Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux', Rameau gives a remarkable demonstration of the expressive power of the sub-dominant and the sound-colour of the bassoons that, thanks to him, came into their right as respectable instruments”. So, listening today, that innovation has been absorbed, we hear it as beautiful writing, not as revolutionary.<br /><br />This template represents the idea that no matter how different, how revolutionary and new we think our creations are, they will become a part of the mainstream, they will become absorbed. Duchamp’s urinal, no matter what observers thought at the time, 100 years later it will be a part of the history of the plastic arts. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Matisse’s Dance (1909) were both regarded as ugly anti-art and without merit at the time, but are now thought of as possibly the most important and greatest paintings of all time.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.moma.org/images/collection/FullSizes/201_1963_CCCR.jpg"><br /><br />Therefore this template poses questions: <br /><br />Will whatever work we present now, at some point lay alongside all the other works that have ever been produced?<br />Will our abstract scratching rubbings noise metallic scraping electronic interference glitches need to be placed alongside Haydn? <br /><br />During the template, I gently overlay our present world, sounds drawn from the infernal. There comes a point at 19:55 where our present concerns drive Rameau away, and the death motif which drifted in around 19:17 with radio dominates, but at 20:35 we regain our purpose, and the template is restored.<br /><br />21:03 steel scrubber/contact mike <br />21:38 our concerns about death fade <br />22:22 the template ends<br /> <br />22:41 re-emergence of the underworld, detuned distant voices, with plastic lid bringing us back into focus <br />23:04 first muffled collision sound from Boss RC-2 loop station <br />23:12 second RC-2 sound<br />23:21 third RC-2 sound<br />23:43 an attempt to revisit a playing style from pre-AMM (Nov ’65), similar to the deliberate style at the beginning<br />23:46 spring on pickup sound from mid sixties<br />23:50 repeat spring<br />23:54 timeline guitar string version<br />24:00 knife scrub over pickup variation knife/spring/contact mike/lid<br />24:46 spring, again at 24:51<br />25:00 entrance of death motif along with spring, here the fan blades are touching the spring which is in contact with the guitar pickup, also there is a contact mike wedged in the spring, all detuned through a PS-3<br />25:50 all the elements are brought together, spring/fan/scrubber/radio/timelines/rattles, etc.<br />27:07 of constant importance: layers of activity, low buzz of distancing alienation, immediacy of news reports, sharp focus click and scrapes, the cheap guitar “poppish” wobble at 27:28<br />28:01 a line is drawn, dissipating the tension, cutting a new section<br />28:10 revisiting of an old technique (knife rattle), a constant reminder<br />about the importance of the past<br />29:07 a violent re-drawing of the earlier line, re-cutting the section<br />29:30 gradual development of the death motif, this marks the commencement of the final section of the performance<br /><br />31:01 beneath the death motif starts the final template, Dido’s lament “When I am laid in earth” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689).<br /> <br />Fundamentally this template is about why do we make art? Simon Schama's book of essays, 'Hang-Ups', begins as follows:<br /><br />"Art begins with resistance to loss; or so the ancients supposed. In a chapter on sculpture in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder relates the legend of the Corinthian maid Dibutade who, when faced with the departure of her beloved, sat him down in candlelight and traced his profile from the shadow cast against the wall. Her father, the potter Boutades, pressed clay on the outline to make a portrait relief, thereby inaugurating the genre (and wrecking, one imagines, the delicate shadow-play of his daughter's love-souvenir)." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/nov/06/art)<br /><br />Is this the origin of art? Constable arresting the temporal clouds, fixing on canvas what is passing? The venerable Bede’s description of life as a bird passing through a banqueting hall, in one window and out of another? This CD fixes aspects of the performance from Tokyo 20th Sept. 2008, in many ways the presence of absence.<br /> <br />During the lament the death motif appears at 31:50, 32:50, 33:05, 33:44, these mark the recalling of our own vulnerabilities. <br />Dido increasingly screams “Remember Me” “Remember Me” “REMEMBER ME” (6 times).<br />34:50 a deeper more troubled death motif enters as the template ends.<br />The significance of the template is the question: is a performance, a painting, a poem, an attempt at immortality?<br />34:58 the deep throbbing drone is reminiscent of the sound I was exposed to as a child during the blitz of Plymouth 1941, lying in a cage at night, under a table waiting for explosions.<br />36:19 the end.<br />As I write these notes (Jan 2009) I am horrified, imagining children in Gaza hearing this sound and then silence.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-13159921380967029922008-11-20T21:27:00.000-08:002008-11-26T23:03:13.801-08:00AMPLIFY 2008: lightby Yoshiyuki Kitazato <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3176/2909773395_32d9114131.jpg "><br /><br />Over three days in which a typhoon struck Tokyo, the U.S. label Erstwhile which Jon Abbey runs with his wife Yuko Zama held a festival: AMPLIFY 2008: light, consisting of solo and duo performances of Japanese musicians and Keith Rowe. Rowe, known as a British avant-garde guitarist who invented a unique method of playing tabletop guitar and bowing guitar strings, was the main performer of the festival. The subtitle of the festival "light", which hints at a light seen in the future music, was Yuko Zama's idea, to dedicate the event to the late music critic and her mentor Toshihiko Shimizu who passed away in May 2007. This event can be noted as a unique experimental music festival, which reflected the label owner's personal vision directly into the selection of the performers, similarly to the recent IMJ's "ftarri" festival which Yoshiyuki Suzuki curated. I think that both of these events should be more appreciated by listeners, considering the fact that the label owners take a risk of bearing all of the expenses personally to realize the festivals. <br /><br />There were several interesting aspects in the AMPLIFY 2008 festival: to be able to listen to Keith Rowe's 3-day live performance, who had come to Japan only three times previously, with AMM and other projects; as a pure practice of global interaction of improvisers that is meant to be always open beyond national boundaries; to witness what can be seen when the Japanese improv scene, which can be defined as "post-Off Site" movement after Onkyo in Japan, is set in a frame of experimental music from a different perspective. There was also an interesting aspect to interpret the label owner's vision as a criticism against the current improv scene through the festival. <br /><br />Although Rowe played on all three nights, all of the possible combinations of musicians were not presented in the festival. Taku Unami, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura were the only musicians that played with Rowe, all in duos. Katsura Yamauchi played solo saxophone (the only traditional instrument seen in the festival) to open the festival, as well as a later duo with Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. The howling voice performer Ami Yoshida played only once, in a duo with Toshimaru Nakamura on the first night. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, besides the aforementioned duo with his frequent recent collaborator Yamauchi, also did a solo performance, which for me evoked Sachiko M's early experimental sine wave work. <br /><br />Since the program was formed only with solos and duos as mentioned above, the festival did not have so much possible variation that could be easily expected from this rather big event with 7 performers for 3 days. This simplicity must reflect the curator Jon Abbey's aesthetics. Except Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura who seemed to play the role of mediators of the whole festival, the other musicians tended to use minimal styles to segment one tone into details. This unique nature of AMPLIFY allowed an open space for the sounds to reach listeners' perception directly, Onkyo sounds dancing in our heads, without taking on a nature of festivity (of a village party, if I dare to say) which is common to most music festivals. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3047/2883006923_a146e29281_o.jpg"><br /><br />The "Onkyo sound" in this context can be likened to a tightrope act, walking on a wire in the air. A circus high tightrope walker forces the audience to fix their eyes on the single point on the wire where he is stepping, and the tension increasingly rises. In order to make the most of each moment, he dares to risk his life by choosing the uncomfortable, dangerous situation. If a tightrope walker falls off the wire, he cannot try it again. It is a one-shot deal, and the moment of bliss will never come back. Among the musicians who were "walking on a tightrope" of the festival, the most extreme example was perhaps Ami Yoshida's voice.<br /><br />Howling voice requires difficult control to attain fragile tones from a vocal cord that is unstable itself, since vocal cords are affected by the performer's physical condition each day. It is almost beyond human control and perhaps even sometimes more difficult than what the performer themself might expect. Since Yoshida does not use any electronics devices to alter her howling voice, it is even harder to control. Also, listeners naturally tend to hear the howling voice as a human being's "voice" rather than "acoustic sounds", even though the performer insists that they are simply considered to be acoustic sounds. This is perhaps because our brain’s networks are not formed to listen to human voices in that way. In fact, our ears cannot listen to a voice as simple acoustic sounds separate from the person whose voice it is. A voice performer cannot play her voice just like playing an instrument, since the voice more directly represents the performer – in this case Ami Yoshida herself. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3249/2883844082_f2d01ae181.jpg"><br /><br />The vibration of Ami Yoshida's vocal cords that stems from the deep place where her body and mind connect can also be described as peering into the darkness at the edge of her spiritual cliff. Toshimaru Nakamura's performance wrapped around her performance with a structure of figure and ground appropriately. For Ami Yoshida's voice that has no landing site without any supporting context, Nakamura offered a stable chair on which Yoshida could stay in the air safely. If we use another metaphor from the circus, Nakamura put up safety nets like a spider's nest in the air. Nakamura chose his sounds to let Yoshida’s performance have all the space she needed without disturbing her voice at all. Compared with Ami Yoshida and Gozo Yoshimasu's first duo performance that I saw several months ago, which assumed a crisis-like character, I could see that Yoshida and Nakamura had already established their own methodology despite this being their first duo set ever. Nakamura's skill as a mediator should be more highly regarded.<br /> <br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3258/2910706918_f508a94b7e.jpg"><br /><br />In a way, the 6th AMPLIFY festival which was held in Tokyo was already structured in advance by the qualities of the seven musicians performing. In general, musicians who played with the limited/alternative method sometimes referred to as ‘reductionism’ were Katsura Yamauchi, Taku Unami, Mitsuhiro Yoshimura and Sachiko M. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura also played their instruments to make sounds within this reductionist aesthetic, but that does not mean that they used the same sounds in every set. They changed their sounds in each set to deal with the different environments, which means that they did not restrain their performances to one limited style of improvisation. Rowe and Nakamura did not play like tightrope walkers who walk on a wire. They appeared as performers who conveyed various layers of music behind each separate performance. They had always prepared several ideas for which direction to go or what to choose. This quality of these two musicians must have led them to be mediators of the festival. I understand why the festival was concluded with their duo set.<br /><br />Perhaps we can draw a borderline here. Some people may criticize some of the paths that Rowe and Nakamura chose as a retreat to the old-style improvisation, which might also mean a defeat of the Onkyo movement against the established nature of free improvisation. However, I do not think that it is creative to be reductionist simply for the sake of reductionism, and ignoring the various circumstances of each occasion. That would be just dogmatism. In the end, the only thing a musician can do is to be true to their own quality that they are destined to deal with for their entire life.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2231/2883832398_23c2e60f99.jpg"><br /><br />Among the musicians who worked in the reductionist style at AMPLIFY, the ones whose sounds stemmed from their own flesh and blood with no electronics use were Katsura Yamauchi and Ami Yoshida. Apart from the content (see footnote #1 for explanation of this term) of the music, they seemed to try to reach somewhere beyond the modernism of improvisation, and yet this also resulted in appealing to the layers of history of human memories. This happened because they presented voice and instrument on stage in a traditional way. <br /><br />While there are sounds that are generated from electronics devices with no direct connection to human memories, there are other sounds which dig into the core of the human body and reach the depths of history just like finding a new layer of ore. In the junction of the tabula rasa state of neo-futuristic electronics music and the ancient memories of human beings, we experience a confused sense of time when we hear the sounds. Possibly our modernist method of dealing with time collapses when forced to deal with this kind of approach. In any case, whether the performer's body is actively involved with the performance or not (the fact that it is related to the oral airway like vocal cords or breathing is very important here) is a point, and we can draw another borderline here. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3075/2883007245_34b1c3be7e.jpg"><br /><br />Here, Sachiko M showed up to destabilize the borderline. We may call the performances of Keith Rowe, Taku Unami, Toshimaru Nakamura and Mitsuhiro Yoshimura with an old term live electronics. But Sachiko M's contact mike performance, in which she seemed to play closely with her sense of touch and not just actively involving her fingers with the performance, was different. Just like she picked up sine wave from a sampler, her contact mike performance is based on her intentional misuse of dealing with it like a scrap, not using it as acoustic equipment. She played this recording device, which is supposed to keep silent for the sounds to be recorded, like an amplification device. The contact mike is played to make sounds based on reality, totally free from any memory, while being closely related to her physical being - especially to her sense of touch that can be called cognition of fingers. <br /><br />Our sense of touch is closely related to our own memories. But it has nothing to do with music in general and is related to different sensations from sounds, such as a pleasurable feeling to touch a lover's skin or a finger to touch a fruit in the kitchen to check how ripe it is. Using contact mikes, Sachiko M established her performance to interact with listeners through a coupling of sense of touch and memories, not by means of a coupling of acoustic sense and memories. She focused the spotlight on the entanglement of subject and object that arises at the birth of sounds, by entwining her fingers on and off the contact mikes, not only with focusing the texture of objective sounds, but also with the cognition of fingers.<br /><br />On the other hand, the physical senses that sustained Katsura Yamauchi and Ami Yoshida's performances involved the layers of history of human memories, which could sound romantic to some listeners. But the physical sense of Sachiko M is always sliding within a highly aware realm, sticking to complete realism. Her self-definition of "I am not a musician" should be regarded as a key phrase in this context, deeply related to this specific performance. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3229/2883843914_0633b77314.jpg"><br /><br />Just like Derek Bailey used to do, the festival's key musician Keith Rowe seems to fold the layers of several generations of improvised music history into his performances with his background as a long-term musician. He may appear to be a tightrope walker on the surface, but what he played was a live electronics improvisation that could be regarded as a translation act of putting his memories into electronics sounds. It was impressive that he was willing to move towards his co-performers such as Taku Unami, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura to open a space for dialogues, setting aside his own firm aesthetics that he has built with AMM over many years. It was not like he was donating his time and energy for co-performers from younger generations as a master of free improvisation, but instead, he was genuinely trying to communicate with them with an open mind by paying careful attentions to the environments, always starting fresh with a clean slate in each set. I can tell that this open heart of welcome style of approach made it possible to organize radical improvisation orchestras like MIMEO.<br /><br />In his solo set, Rowe added some samples of old classical music to realistic electronic sounds that were close to the original style of noise music, occasionally using a portable fan which evoked a propeller noise. The old-world feeling of the sampling and noises that Rowe brought in the performance seemed to be overlapped with his own old memories. In fact, he mentioned that a propeller noise evokes the noise of air raids to him, as he spent his childhood in the midst of wartime. As seen in this fact, Rowe's improvisation is defined with his multilayered experiences and consciousness beyond simply the typical boundaries of 20th century experimental music. This is why his music is performed with infinite disparity every time he plays, even without co-performers and even in this time of the “avant-garde” concept losing its value.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3073/2909804781_12eb505c54.jpg"><br /><br />If Ami Yoshida and Katsura Yamauchi are trying to pull something from the old layers of history of human memories that are beyond their own individual consciousness by lowering down their resonant sonde deep into the core of the body - or the central information center of the body. (Of course, it does not mean that they can always reach the old layers of history by exploring their subconscious area every time they play.) On the other hand, Rowe's way of presenting the memories is quite bibliographical. Here is another explanation: Rowe's work table where his guitar rests is just like his study room where his books for reference are piled up high, and his improvisation is performed just like writing a text on brand new paper. However, his performance is not directly descriptive, like expressing his wartime experience with actual sounds of strafing. Instead, he uses indirect sounds such as a propeller noise as an implication, like writing a poem. Perhaps Rowe began the process of performing music on his worktable during the time of AMM. If so, perhaps Rowe is putting elements of his performance on his table one by one, whatever it is Onkyo or reductionism, just like reading a new book. He may not understand some parts instantly, but after reading it repeatedly, he may get it just like filling additional writings between lines. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3261/2910651682_6edede5998.jpg"><br /><br />Needless to say, none of his co-performers, who were walking in a straight, focused line using reductionism-style improvisation, spent their time cultivating their own workspace to collect miscellaneous elements during their sets. Compared with Rowe who was playing like a writer, every co-performer seemed to play much more simply without walking too far from themselves in a text-independent environment. Of course, this was why listeners were able to concentrate on their sounds and be free from the excessive information overflowing in this post-modern time, and could experience the total picture of being, via this self-limited improvisation performance style.<br /> <br />Accordingly, the limited/alternative style of improvisation represented by reductionism seems to be the approach that remains most in actual practice, in spite of various recent attempts to deconstruct the established conventional improvisation performances. For those simple styles of performances, it does not matter if the music is considered a paradigm shift in the history of improvised music or not from a macro viewpoint. Improvisers from the older generations have built their own specific identities by polishing their skills playing free music, to eventually stand on stage as experts of instrumental performance. However, to reach the state of reductionism, they have to abandon their established identities. There were musicians like Derek Bailey who had tried to expose the origin of performance by returning to simple styles of music without abandoning their own expertise.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3131/2883007453_2c00f712a8.jpg "><br /><br />A reductionism musician tries to make the audience observe the moment when his new identity is constructed each time, instead of reconstructing his identity that was already established at some point in the past. It should remind the audience of the pure methodology of improvisation with which the musician convinces the listeners that the performance is born in this moment, without originating in the past. Perhaps only someone like Keith Rowe – who not only has an open mind of hospitality, but also who can reset himself every time he plays while having a history of being a constructive improviser - is able to show empathy for this new style of Onkyo reductionists. In Rowe's flexible behavior during AMPLIFY 2008, I saw a rare nature that is difficult to find in the U.S. and European improvisation scenes where pushing one’s own identity to the forefront is usually believed to be a virtue. Perhaps Rowe is trying to practice nomadism in the free improv scene, which the late German musician Peter Kowald had been pursuing, too. I understand well why Jon Abbey of Erstwhile values Rowe highly.<br /><br />Like John Zorn did in the past, Jon Abbey considers the Japanese improv scene to be crucial, and held his label festival in Tokyo for the second time. He considered Keith Rowe as the main performer, included the remarkable mediator Toshimaru Nakamura as an advisor, included avant-garde idols Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida (not every listener may be able to enjoy their performances, but their presence is important to remind of the fact that experimental/improvised music does not belong to only men) to document their current activities, and included Taku Unami, Katsura Yamauchi and Mitsuhiro Yoshimura as new voices in the scene.<br /><br />The festival covered a broad range of performances. Katsura Yamauchi presented his European approach using limited/alternative improvisation style by using breathy tones often. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura kept letting out continuous sound like sine wave on and on by using feedback noise of headphone/microphone in a darkened room - it was impossible for the audience to see how he played. Keith Rowe and Taku Unami's duo presented unique installation-style electronics music using a contrast of the speakers' location, with an indistinct combination of their sounds making it hard to distinguish who played which. Ami Yoshida inclined the audience's mind to her howling voice, which created a charged atmosphere in every moment. Sachiko M adhered to her own acoustic realism with an unparalleled contact mike solo performance. Keith Rowe and Sachiko M's duo sounded like solo plus solo rather than a duo performance. There was a duo of Yamauchi and Yoshimura. Then at the end, Rowe and Nakamura presented aggressive duo music like a rock in which Rowe returned to his drone performance. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3133/2910706588_3dfb19a170.jpg"><br /><br />The curators said that one of the most important purposes of having this festival in Tokyo was to realize the duo of Keith Rowe and Sachiko M. Rowe admires Sachiko M's performance, in which she looks into her self and simply digs deep into the core of her being, as one of the most influential musicians for him. It sounds like the most accurate understanding of Sachiko M's music. In the field of the Onkyo music or limited/alternative improvisation, it seemed that only general theories dominated without considering discrete theories enough for each case so far. That was why Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura have often been mentioned synonymously with Onkyo music. What we need to try is to reconstruct the diversity of music with a fresh approach each time by setting the origin of sound in the 'here and now’ (especially for improvised music) in the field of music criticism, too.<br /><br />*1: I call it "content" here for convenience, but it might be almost impossible to interpret Ami Yoshida's voice which sounds like a murmur of an unborn baby who is about to become a human being, or Katsura Yamauchi's breath which changes a horn into somewhere like a cave exposed to the wind. These sounds can barely be explained by anomalies of conventional saxophone or voice performances. These sounds seemed to be born without being related to any conventional way. How to describe these sounds is a big issue for us.<br /><br />(translation by Yuko Zama)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-945280568203933389.post-87466355597834566702008-11-20T19:34:00.000-08:002014-08-24T16:52:03.373-07:00welcomeinspired by a recent thread on IHM ("Critics") and following somewhat in the specific journalistic tradition of IMJ magazine, I decided to start a site which will be run by myself (Jon Abbey), featuring texts related to EAI and the tangential areas (I hope to at least slightly broaden the scope over time). many of these will be musicians writing on other musicians, some of the unheard or underheard (in print form) voices in this music. the pieces will also possibly be in flux after being initially published, so the writers can add, elaborate, delete, whatever, if and when they want, and the idea is to eventually hit enough of a critical mass of quality content so that we have a book. <br />
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so, I've been gradually asking people to do specific pieces, and hopefully those will start to come in before too long. in the meantime, respected Tokyo critic Yoshiyuki Kitazato published a lengthy report on the AMPLIFY 2008: light festival this week on a Japanese social networking site and has happily given his permission for Yuko to translate it and for us to use it here to get the ball rolling. hope you enjoy it!<br />
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please note that all text on this site is property of the author and the site, and cannot be used elsewhere without permission. also, all photos on this site are by Yuko Zama unless otherwise noted, and also cannot be used elsewhere without her permission.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5