1. Jen Torrence, "Rethinking the Performer: Towards a Devising Performance Practice," VIS—Nordic Journal For Artistic Research, no. 0 (2018), accessed 7 January 2021, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/
391025/391476.
2. Luke Nickel, “OCCAM NOTIONS: COLLABORATION AND THE PERFORMER'S PERSPECTIVE IN ÉLIANE RADIGUE'S OCCAM OCEAN,” Tempo 70, no. 275 (2016): 22, doi:10.1017/S0040298215000601.
6. Jennifer Walshe, “The New Discipline,” MILKER CORPORATION, accessed 7 January 2021, http://milker.org/the-new-discipline.
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- Études for the beginning of an online practice
My return to using the score highlights the significance of the score’s absence in my work up until now. I had been oblivious to the significance of my abandonment of the score until using one became useful again. My musical education from the very beginning was rooted in reading music and creating scores, understanding the conventions. This taught me that music is translated from composer onto score and then onto the musician before the audience. My artistic research project is an investigation into what happens when music creation is collaborative within a musical genre where that isn’t the norm. One of the main sites where I see this unfold is the score. And so departing from the score, which I had understood as an authoritarian flag the composer can wave over the performer and beat them down with, seems natural.
My return isn’t a concession or a failing but simply a realisation of what scores are effective at: passing on information and instructions to people who can interpret them. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to stifle collaboration; instead it can provide a point of departure for compositional process, whereby the performer assumes an adviser role in which they, as Torrence describes, may act as consultants to the composer or suggest edits, but receive little or no credit.1
The point here is not about what the score is made from—it doesn’t have to be a handwritten manuscript. Rather it is about the idea of what the score does and the conception of the composer. Here the lofty and romanticised image of who the composer is repels me and escaping this is an interest of mine.
In terms of time, it is the performer who is in control of the real time of a performance within the traditional paradigm of composer and performer. The composer exists and works in an unreal time in relation to the flow of the piece, almost always taking much longer to create the piece than the work actually lasts, and not necessarily working from beginning to end. Then how about composer-performer time? Through being able to jump between these times the reflexive nature of this way of working rears its head.
Luke Nickel’s article “Occam Notions: Collaboration and the Performer’s Perspective in Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean” sheds some light on her fascinating shift to primarily acoustic instrumental music: “After nearly 40 years of creating recorded electronic music, for the last 10 years Éliane Radigue has created music exclusively in collaboration with performers, using solely oral and aural transmission.” Nickel refers to this as a “‘scoreless’ working method.”2
Nickel details how the work is made between Radigue and her collaborators. They visit Radigue in Paris for a short time and explore their instrument with her, and also how the eventual piece can be transmitted to another musician interested in playing the work. Radigue asks her collaborators to begin the process with a mental image of the sea and to hold onto this throughout. Nickel also proposes the idea of the “living score” to describe, in terms of transmission, how Radigue’s collaborators carry the work with them. Radigue has given permission for the works to be transmitted but not notated or written down. Again, this made me aware of the extent to which I draw on, not only the creativity of my colleagues in Bastard Assignments, but also their memories and capacity to recall the work. Notwithstanding the documentation of our work, it is interesting to think that my work with the group only lives in their minds and disappears with them.
Nickel continues to write about the performance practice that emerges through working with Radigue, describing how she encourages an instrumentalist to focus on finding and playing sounds that are perhaps fragile, extreme, or that are discouraged. Clarinettist Carol Robinson “echoes these ideas of forgetting technique, saying that Radigue is ‘asking an instrument to do things that it can do but doesn’t necessarily [do], and asking a musician to do things that they were often taught not to do.’”3
Radigue pushes the idea of unlearning technique, which is so engrained and to a degree homogenous across western classical music, before developing an almost virtuosic level of control and stamina so that fragile and divergent sounds can be recalled and sustained with ease.
“Intentionally to forget techniques requires one first to know them intimately.”4 Although I would not posit that we from Bastard Assignments are world-class improvisers, for example, we know each other well and have played together quite intensively since 2017. Making work virtually requires a setting aside of the rulebook and unlearning how we used to create together. And after this there is a space for a new practice to emerge, often as a result of repetition and exploration.
What Nickel points out using the performers’ own words is that Radigue lets the performer decide on the initial image (although she insists that it is aqueous in nature) and duration of sections of the pieces. All too often though, musicians fall back on good taste and this is another thing that Radigue asks her collaborators to drop: “Nate Wooley, a trumpet player and improviser, says that the challenge involved in playing Radigue’s music is both physical and mental. He notes that, on a physical level, it is ‘extremely difficult on the trumpet to come from nothing and go back to nothing’, and on a mental level, ‘understanding “OK, now I move to this next thing, this is the perfect time” is really tricky as well. That’s the virtuosity of the piece.’”5
From this I understand that learning an “Occam Ocean” piece means not merely learning the piece, for which there is no score, but developing a performance practice to be able to perform it.
To quote Walshe again: “This is the discipline—the rigour of finding, learning and developing new compositional and performative tools.”6
These two separate ideas support how I view my adaptation in this new situation. It frees both Bastard Assignments and I up to shift, to park some skills and to learn new ones. We are composer-performers and that is our practice, we also have a practice as a group. This lockdown period has required me to zoom-out of the composer-performer practice, dropping it in some way, and lean into what the practice is as and with Bastard Assignments.
As we shift our practice towards how to use and perform on Zoom and create for it, we see how the reflexive nature of the work has mutated. For us, the time spent on an idea on Zoom generates other ideas; as we rehearse we are also creating through what we learn, but the distinction is often blurred.
As we learn new skills and take up new tools like Zoom or new iPhones for better quality video, the practice changes. My practice has expanded and, as we are not made of elastic, once I expand I can never return to normal. This expansion, this adaptation to new media, brings about this slippery new form where periods that once were easily isolated into creation, rehearsal, and performance are now ever more fluid. Even within this, there are glitches and slips and dropped frames.
In the future, will I see it as a continuation from pre-Covid to post-Covid or was it, creatively, where I always wanted to be? As what I am doing at this moment seems unclear—we are devising, playing, improvising, imitating, interpreting and sharing as equals—does the label of Composer still work for me?
Maybe what needs to be forgotten in this era of isolation is the idea of “composing something”—it is an opportunity to find something new, free from traditional conventions and taste. These are things that we often hang onto to ensure that we know the right way and have something to grasp, to keep control. And so I withdraw from being called a Composer in these times, especially in relation to Bastard Assignments. Instead, I will continue to meet and work with my colleagues as equals, as one of the group, so that we can explore together and perform these explorations.
Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “Going Gaga for Glitch: Digital Failure @nd Feminist Spectacle in Twenty-F1rst Century Music Video.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, 127-139. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Ciciliani, Marko. “Music in the Expanded Field—On Recent Approaches to Interdisciplinary Composition.” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, no. 24 (2017): 23-35.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2014.
Kim, Joshua Minsoo. “Incorporating in-game sounds and actions into their compositions, Lil' Jürg Frey find a new way to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons.” The Wire, no. 438 (2020): 84.
Nickel, Luke. “OCCAM NOTIONS: COLLABORATION AND THE PERFORMER'S PERSPECTIVE IN ÉLIANE RADIGUE'S OCCAM OCEAN.” Tempo 70, no. 275 (2016): 22-35. doi:10.1017/S0040298215000601.
Reinholdtsen, Trond. "The Spectacular and Surprising Transformation of the Composer's Role on Stage in my Works 2002-2016." Seismograph, 31 May, 2017. https://seismograf.org/node/9211.
Sawyer, Keith. “Group Flow and Group Genius.” The NAMTA Journal 40, no. 3 (2015): 29-52.
Spero, Josh. “Listen to the sounds of lockdown.” Financial Times, March 31, 2020.
https://www.ft.com/content/3c578d9e-725f-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.
ThingNY. “Subracttttttttt.”Accessed 8 January 2021. http://www.thingny.com/subtracttttttttt.html.
Torrence, Jen. "Rethinking the Performer: Towards a Devising Performance Practice." VIS—Nordic Journal For Artistic Research, no. 0 (2018). Accessed 7 January 2021. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/391025/391476.
Vena, Danny. "Zoom Is Helping Schools Closing Due to Coronavirus—for Free." The Motley Fool, March 14, 2020. https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/03/14/zoom-is-helping-schools-closing-due-coronavirus-fo.aspx.
Walshe, Jennifer. “The New Discipline.” MILKER CORPORATION. Accessed 7 January 2021. http://milker.org/the-new-discipline.