Histrio histrio

Beautiful Thing No. 22

 

Beautiful Thing No. 20

 

Beautiful Thing No. 18

I know almost nothing about his music but this man has a wonderful face.  

Beautiful Thing No. 16

Being an instrument

I was asked the other day about my focus on singing early music and new compositions, a straddling of Western music's chronology that strikes people as strange. I gave an ok answer, but have been meditating on it since. While it seems incongruous, or extreme somehow, the technical demands of the vocal material in each are similar, or at least complementary. There is somehow a vocal palette shared by these two chronologically distant kinds of music. To even approach this question takes some necessary generalising... Some of the effects commonly used in singing music of each of these eras are similar, eg the treatment of vibrato as a vocal colour that can be manipulated, intensified, or taken away altogether for expressive effect, rather than as some kind of essence of the voice. It also seems that part of the similarity lies in the treatment of the voice as an instrument, for textural effect, so that the voice is asked at times to hide within, and then often emerge out of, the collective instrumental sound, rather than resting on top of an accompanying instrumental bed. 

Also, much of the music that occupies the gap in the chronology demands entirely different things, most obviously a kind of volume and might that I don't have, certainly not at the moment. I don't have it, and I've never really mustered much of a desire to have it.

Roar

 

At a concert last night I heard a performance of John Luther Adams's Roar for tam tam, from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies. It was played with lovely control and a measured precision, so that my brain was able to attend to the sounds more than to the player. I was seated next to a renowned improvising or 'free' musician, one who moves in circles of musicians whose work seems to me to be often trapped by the free music ideology I have commented on before, although, from what I know of it, this man's own music is not so afflicted by this problem. Throughout the piece I was desperate to know what he was thinking. I wondered if he thought that the piece sounded just as if it had been improvised. Perhaps it could have been, by one of the rare virtuosi free players, disciplined enough to choose not to make certain sounds, disciplined enough not to test the water of every available pool. But part of its beauty seemed to me to lie in the delicate balance of egos, the composer and player(s) each daring to relinquish some control. 

*Photo stolen from JLA's website.

Scaffolding

'But the problem with readers, the idea we’ve been given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principal is, 'I should sit here and be entertained.' And the more classical model is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and the artist gives you. That’s an incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.' - Zadie Smith

The audience and an author/performer enter into a silent contract, and there are no clear terms that dictate how much effort each party should put into understanding and accommodating the other. I do wonder if both sides are responsible for the communication breakdowns that frequently occur, especially when a new work is being performed/displayed/published etc.  Speaking from the performer's side,  it certainly feels like audiences sometimes need to think more like Smith's reader, perhaps they need to take a bigger, more energetic run-up as they leap into the unknown. In plenty of other cases it looks to me, and to audience members who have enlightened me of their experiences of seeing certain performances of new works, like the performance is more lecture than invitation to reverie, shock, escape, fresh thought, or emotional meandering, and does nothing to encourage any effort on the audience's part.

There seems to me to be an absence of rhetoric in the presentation of contemporary music; some performers seem to be beyond caring whether the audience is interested or not, and not in a sexy way... Many of the people involved in all this - composers and performers alike - are paralysed by their obligations to various conventions of form, or are at least paralysed by their obligation to subvert the conventions of form*.  Form or its subversion seem to drive everything, there seems to be no stimulus outside these. And the resulting fraught audience/performer relationship has performers appearing either apologetic or defiantly uninviting. Sure, sometimes 'defiantly uninviting' may be the flavour of a work, but it can't be the flavour of ALL new works. Zadie Smith says she's expressed a very unfashionable idea of reading. What I'm expressing here is a suicidally unfashionable view of performing.  

I want there to be gentle openings in a performance, in all aspects of it. Performing new music, there should be a kind of aesthetic scaffolding, some scaffolding of meaning onto which the audience an hang throughout the performance. Once there's something to hold onto, people will stop focussing on holding their footing and will, I hope, become more curious, more engaged, more daring, and will come to work with the performer more. 

(*I find this to be a constant problem in the improvised or free music scene, which is so often limited and strangled by its own 'no-limits' ideology. Constantly trying to avoid expected, 'easy', predictable, 'logical' musical gestures and structures seems, from my perspective as a listener, to have been absurdly restrictive for many of these players. More interesting to me is music that is free-ish, that retains a shred of structure or planning, if only so that the endpoints for pieces don't leave telepathically disadvantaged players fluffing about when everyone else has stopped.)