About The Archive
In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.1
My Mapping process
This is the first chapter of my archive with contemporary techniques for the double bass. It is based on techniques that became discoveries for me thanks to my consistently hard and conscious process based work during my APD-studies at RMC. Most of them are probably already out there in one way or another in the bass or/and string collective. Both Bertrand Turetsky2 and Jean-Pierre Robert3 have written double bass dictionaries that have become milestones for contemporary bass players, and as a part of her PhD, Cello Map4, Ellen Fallowfield created a web page with an archive consisting of videos with contemporary techniques and technical explanations.
I thought about how I could contribute to the community and my conclusion was that it has to be based around technical layers and visuality rather than traditional notations. I wanted to show examples of how you can personalize a technique by changing one of the layers or perhaps add one or take away another.
So with this in mind I have created an archive where I first have the description of the technique and then different headings. One example of a description could be “Both Sides Off The Bridge” and the headings are divided in 1: Bow/Pizz/Other, 2: Bowing technique, 3: Bow placement, 4: Bow pressure, 5: Bow speed, 6: Left hand position, 7: Left hand movement, 8: Tone/Harmonics/Air/Noise/Percussive. The variations between these headings are infinite5, and it reminds me about the thoughts of Derek Bailey
Derek Bailey once said that he was searching for material that was infinitely flexible and, in a way, that’s what he did. The changes are all small changes, but a lot of small developments and small changes add up to continual change.6
That's the main reason why I am presenting the archive with two types of videos, a “sterile” version that I call the technical and a “musical” version that is from a live-context. The version that became the live performance and then later is just one of a infinitive ways to perform these techniques.
My hope is that other bassists will get inspired by these videos and that they will, just as I did in this process, develop the techniques, change them and make them into their own.
Objective Enough
When I do workshops in improvisation with children I mostly use metaphors, such as wind, rain etc, to describe contemporary techniques, but in this archive I do not want to push an image into the imagination of the reader. Instead I want to describe them as objectively as possible. In this process, I got inspired by Kristof Agota8´s great novel Le Grand Cahier9 and how the the two twin brothers in the novel in order to survive in the harsh climate that prevailed did the following:
To decide if something is “good” or “not good” we have a simple thumb rule: the paper must be true. We shall describe how things are, what we see, hear and do. We need to write “we eat a lot of walnuts” instead of “ we love walnuts” because the word “love” is not a trustworthy word, it is fuzzy and not objective enough10
Limitations of the analysis
Even though this first chapter of the archive consists of 163 different techniques, it is still just a scratch of what I have been working on. Due to the fact that I only had two years for this research project, I had to limit the documentation process. That is why I chose to record only parts of my bowing and harmonic repertoire and also only analyze video recordings from the autumn of 2021 and base my archive on them. I also recorded several techniques in many different versions with small changes, such as different bowing techniques.
I have hours and hours of audio recordings and mobile videos that for sure contain interesting material. But for this project I see them as a part of the process, a part of the maturity. I am convinced that because I have so notoriously recorded myself in various ways, the end result, i.e. the documented concerts of the fall 2021 and the analyzes of these videos improved.
1: Orlean, S (2018) The Library Book. Simon & Schuster
2: Turetzky, B. (1974) The contemporary contrabass. University of California press
3: Robert, P. (1995) Les modes de jeu de la contrabasse. Musica Guild
4: Fallowfield, E,https://cellomap.com/actions-index/
5: More about that in this reflection
6: Denzler & Guionnet (2020), The practice of musical improvisation. Bloomsbury, p.125
7: Mainly solo concerts from the fall of 2021
8: Born in 1935 in Csikvánd, Györ megye, Hungary – Died in 2011 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland
9: Kristof, A (1985) Le Grand Cahier. Editions de Seuil
10: Idlib, p.29-30
