Share our Breath
Share our Breath is a side project I made in 2021, for the premiere of Volume 1 of Graphème: a Berlin-based magazine presenting alternative and previously unpublished unpublished works. I decided to make a score based on a selection of the MODES. Compared to Sculpting Air and the work with Sub Habitat, Share our Breath has an extra layer of abstraction in the creation, as it is for open instrumentation and ensemble size (which were my own decisions). Making a score out in the unknown in terms of sound palette can feel empty to me though. It's the active imagining of particular sounds that energizes and inspires the process of making the score. Because of the work with MODES in Sub Habitat, it became a creative process that also felt grounded.
The scene/context
The realm of improvisation/structured improvisation and alternative/experimental score composition is a vast territory with a rather long history in Western musical genres and crossgenres: from freejazz, new music, (‘free’) improvisation to gradually including electronics, noise, experimental rock, folk music, non-Western genres, experiments with AI etc. Still developing in a myriad of directions and with a multitude of approaches contemporary improvisation (including experimental score composition) has spread beyond the Western music scene and is far more diverse with regards to practitioner representation (ethnicity, gender, geography, culture etc.) than 20-30 years ago. Seeing composition and improvisation as dichotomies is long gone (except maybe in certain classical/new music departments). In my practice as improviser/composer, improvisation and composition are two different ways of making music, yet deeply entangled.
Past and present composers working explicitly with improvisers and large ensembles include Barry Guy (New Orchestra), John Zorn (Cobra), Butch Morris (Conduction), Anthony Braxton and various ensembles/collectives/organizations dedicated to improvisation/composition: AAM, London/England, AACM, Chicago, Splitter Orchestra, Berlin, Wandelweiser, London Improvisers Orchestra, Prague Improvisation Orchestra (plus several other location-linked improvisers orchestras/associations) and many, many others established and ad hoc ensembles/collaborations. In general, myriad composers/performers create unconventional scores: graphic/text-based/electronics and with many different approaches to conveying their musical ideas/vision.
Likewise a multitude of practice-based artistic research projects, as well as academic theory/philosophy projects, examining improvisation/composition issues from a variety of different angles have been carried out.
Recent artistic research projects (which I have been involved in as a guest musician), focusing on improvisation/composition area are for example: from a composer/performer perspective Per Zanussi: Natural Patterns - Music Making with an ensemble of improvisers and Klas Nevrin: Music in Disorder: Counterplay, Complexity and Collective Improvisation. The latter has particular focus on the interplay in an improvising group.
Sub Habitat (the individual musicians) have been active in this diverse, global scene for decades and the Sculpting Air project is thus a contribution from my/our zooming-in perspective- to the artistic research environment and discourse, the music/art educational institutions as well as the improvising scene.
Afterthoughts
Although Sculpting Air became a rather fragmented and very lengthy project due to lock- down obstacles, it brought really valuable answers (albeit of course not simple or unambiguous ones) to my research questions and what I was looking for. Through my own work, the work with the ensemble, including all the discussions and especially, and of course, the music. Naturally the research has also opened up many new questions and future perspectives.
Creating the MODES in a dynamic process of playing, listening, aural imagination, conceptualizing, formulating MODES instructions, and writing personal notes, has made this work very inspiring. It has expanded and deepened my awareness of micro-details and complexities in timbral colour, rhythm/durations, not getting in the way of the music etc., and of silence as an active compositional tool with multiple qualities. Keeping a notebook and verbalizing sonic phenomena and experiences has been truly gratifying - even perceptually beyond the sonic realm. All this has contributed to the feeling of grounding and connectedness with the material, ideas and MODE concepts.
The collective work during the sessions with Sub Habitat has also been highly inspiring and has brought a multitude of perspectives and insights to the project. Both in terms of our joint exploration of the potentials inside the MODE concepts, form and interaction issues, sound issues and music in general. I believe that my planned method of first collectively internalizing and exploring MODES in depth and then later reducing (the amount of MODES/non-MODES) while opening up the individual MODE worked. The latter: reducing, while opening up, became a necessary artistic choice and a turning point (Session 3), which further revealed and expanded some of my original glimpses and fragments. Moreover, these glimpses and fragments (as well as other new elements) were connected in ways that created more coherence and inner logic in the music.
In retrospect, the processes with the ensemble reflect my own processes in the creation of MODE material albeit in an expanded space of possibilities. Both have been transforming and self-transforming learning processes.
From a more general perspective:
What is/became a composition in this project - how can I understand it?
· it is the creation of material, textural environments and form
structures, which make the transformations of this material and
the structures (MODES + Score map) possible, allowing for
interventions, disruptions and destabilizations, emergence and
emergent forms within the large form structure
· it is the interactive dynamic relations and processes between the
composer/score (MODES and Score map), the individual
performers, the ensemble (and sometimes the space) as a whole.
The MODES and Score maps can generate aesthetic coherence in the music as well as intriguing tensions between stability and instability leaving room for surprises.
Composition as dynamic relations between composer/score, the individuals and ensemble as a whole can bring about a particular and idiosyncratic ensemble sound and identity, which becomes an immanent quality of the composition.
The LIBRARY is a process: I envisage the library being continually expanded and revised. MODES may be combined with conventional notation, other types of notations, MODES may be combined among themselves in new ways, new MODES will be created etc. A singular MODE concept may be investigated further and developed into a stand-alone piece and so on. Much more to be explored.
There is, of course, a myriad of ways, in which this can be done. The way I/we have approached, explored and unfolded MODES and Score maps in Sculpting Air is inextricably linked to the musicians (besides myself) in Sub Habitat. They are also co-creators of the musical outcome.
In other ensemble constellations, the MODES material and the approach to the MODES and Score maps must naturally adapt to the musicians, orchestration, ensemble size and situation, resulting in a different music.
About - Sub Habitat - Modes --- Sessions - Listening - Context and Afterthoughts
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