After watching a presentation of my work at a conference, a musician I greatly admire asked very politely: "But how do you document when all of this becomes art?" One could be forgiven for finding the preceding process chapters tedious and boring, venturing too far into what Jeff Pressing, in psychological terms, called "a repertoire of pattern reference and analysis routines". But for me as an artist, it is exactly this kind of repetitive, patient work that eventually, bit by bit, can help me create on the spot, with a distinct musical accent saturating as much of my playing as possible: Repeating this material enough times makes you hear it, in Inderberg's terms.
In the following excerpt, the elements developed in this exposition were combined with others I've worked with earlier, and I'll leave it to the listener to assess whether or not I'm on to something here. I tried to use polyrhythmic and bitonal elements to establish an abstract way of invoking folk motifs. The rhythm section that's underpinned most of the examples in this exposition is now gone, leaving it up to me to either supply an indication of rhythm with my foot (as in the pols footstomp from 00:36 through 01:58), or rhythm and drone (as the halling-like groove from 02:00 and onwards). I chose to reintroduce some imitations of double-stops from Norwegian fiddling, since the mandola register lends itself very well to this typical feature of Nordic folk music. I recorded the passage with no stops, punch-ins or edits, and structured it loosely along a string of ideas that I had defined, but that I deviated from on a few occasions.
One thing that misfired here is that I would have preferred for the little semi-composed theme at 03:03 to enter with an upbeat of two 8th notes, landing on the first beat of a 4/4 period, but I seem to have placed it on the fourth beat instead. Halling rhythm is often just indicative of a pulse rather than a time signature, so I could have gotten away with this, but it was my intention to land on the "one".
There are several ideas I'd like to explore in the future, based on my findings:
I would like to re-introduce playing over chord changes, in order to have two levels of harmonic movement: One level is from one chord to another, the other level is in the expansion of tonality that for example mediant-based phrases may provide.
In reference to the "muted" first beat in the Røros tradition, as shown in Process 1: I would like to consciously experiment with muting out other notes, in order to slur and hide the phrases a bit more.
It would obviously be necessary to place the results of this investigation in an actual band, where musicians react to melodic and rhythmic expansions, aided by their inner ear.
The rhythmic manipulations here stop after a few bars, but could go on for a lot longer. I'll try to practice, say, groups of seven that go on for a lot longer than these experiments do, and I can maybe envision weaving different rhythmic groups in and out of each other, maybe in dialogue with other musicians.
Dynamics haven't been much in use here, and they could aid in the expressive potential of the language I'm trying to build.
It would be interesting to reverse the rhythmic process, and play material in 2/4, 4/4 and 3/4 over uneven time signatures such as 7/8, 5/8 and 9/8.
Going back to Paco de Lúcia and how flamenco interacts with dance, I sometimes reflect on the fallacy of not playing for (or with) dancers; the lack of social events other than concerts take on an almost non-ritual character. This flaw touches upon the whole debate on whether the transition from social music to art music is beneficial to development - which is too extensive to go into here.
