Transcript

Joel:

Hello, my name is Joel Diegert, and I'm a saxophonist interested in performing contemporary music. I'm here with my colleague, Adrián Artacho, a composer. We've been working together for the last several years to develop collaborative working methods that question the boundaries between performer and composer. 

Adrián:

Today, we're going to present to you some of the insights made along the way, and the output of our latest case study: aubiome, a piece for saxophone and live electronics.

Joel:

I'd like to begin with a little thought experiment that I think does a good job of identifying the issue of communication between composer and performer, which I have been interested in during my own research. Imagine for a moment that an author was writing a text, and it's a relatively sophisticated philosophical text with a lot of nuance to it, deeply based in the language. And that text is to be recited by a speaker, but the problem is that the speaker doesn't actually speak the language of the text. So his best recourse is to go phonetically and try to get through the text word by word. So the performance goes on, and the audience hears the text mediated by the speaker, and afterwards when asked the audience members are generally happy, and [say] ‘yeah it went well’, but they haven't really grasped the idea of the sophisticated ideas behind the text. The author goes home, feeling like he needs to rethink his entire philosophy and build it again up from scratch or maybe write in a more nuanced text. And meanwhile, we just had a communication problem leading from the author through the speaker to the audience. Now in the contemporary music world, we deal with nonlinguistic communication and musical expression. But I think that there's a similar parallel there when it comes to the communication of musical ideas from a composer through a performer and eventually to an audience. And that's the main topic of today's talk.

Composer and Performer Roles

Adrián:

There is perhaps no quicker way to be cast out from the new music community than being considered a composer of derivative work. Composers are therefore encouraged to find their own voice, which for some might involve developing innovative compositional methods, or an entirely new musical language. It might have to do with the creative way they approach notation, or how they integrate technology in the live performance. These are all strong incentives for composers to hone in and specialize in their own respective, individual niche. 

Joel:

As a performer of contemporary music, this increasingly fragmented landscape can be a real challenge. Composers are going deeper and deeper into their respective niches, and oftentimes are interested in aspects of contemporary music that have nothing to do with one another. Therefore, as a performer, we're encountered with scores of all different types, and a wide variety, in a way that makes it very, very difficult to be able to master any one or any group of them. In fact, I like to think of this situation as like a person who claims to speak 20 or 30 different languages, but then it turns out that they only speak a few of them and they're faking the rest. And this is what we must do as performers. We don't have the opportunity to go as deep into any one niche as the composers themselves have, who've maybe dedicated their entire career to a particular method. And therefore, we find ourselves often decoding scores like a reciter who doesn't speak the language. This highly fragmented landscape, plus the specialization required for performers, is what I called the ‘hyperspecialized’ situation.

Overlapping Competencies

Adrián:

Over the years, Joel and I have developed an alternative approach based on the principle of overlapping competencies. What do we mean by competency? Well, beyond the obvious technical skill on the saxophone, or the compositional background that we might bring to the table, I like to think of these competencies in an expansive way, including also the individual mindsets we bring along. For example, when working on a new piece, I can become obsessed with matters of structure and material. Joel, meanwhile, will be preoccupied with the realization of such an abstract idea in front of an audience. It is ultimately the combination of skill, the mindset, and the expectations that define our respective domains as a composer and a performer.

Joel:

During my doctoral studies, I was interested in exploring the possibilities of extending the saxophone with live electronics. I began to collaborate with Adrián who was also interested in electronics. And we found that the shared interest in live electronics became a kind of a catalyst that brought my domain as performer and his domain as composer into conflict with one another. This caused us to kind of rethink the boundaries of what it means to be a performer, composer or those roles, and what began as an invasion of domains eventually became a full-on overlap.

The Encode-Decode Problem

Adrián:

Our approach addresses a problem we identified early on in our collaboration: that of effectively communicating a musical idea from its inception to the performer, and ultimately to an audience. This is hardly specific to our collaboration, but a well-known limitation of Western musical notation. As an example, I remember my first ever collaboration with Joel in 2012. I wrote this rather intricate piece called Mobius Variations, inspired by the idea of a mobius strip being the score. So I created this giant, transparent mobius strip that allowed me to explore the multiple variations of a motive, the inverse, and the retrograde, as the performance moved around in multiple directions. Joel’s quartet took on the challenge and did actually a really good job at realizing the piece. Yet, however, it felt to me that the original idea wasn't carried through all the way to the audience. This strikes me as the norm and not the exception in the contemporary music world. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I wonder how different would the piece have become, had I had the chance to work with the performers in the development of the material and the structure of the piece?

Joel:

I think that our experience working with Adrián on his Mobius Variations demonstrates an important point about the communication between composer and performer, and that's to say that there can easily be a disconnect between the original creative idea and the realization of the piece in front of an audience. This disconnect normally is dealt with using notation or other methods of communicating musical ideas from the composer to the performer. But I would argue that these methods generally lose something in detail and the intent of the piece. Instead, Adrián and I are interested in maintaining continuity from the original creative idea through all the way to the audience. And we found that it's important in working to have a collaborative method that emphasizes a shared presence when those creative ideas come up.

Adrián:

When working on the piece aubiome, this interest in continuity impacted the way we thought about music, as we would find ourselves oftentimes speaking of an interaction of the electronics being ‘organic’ in respect to the saxophone. It even made it to the title of the piece, which is a contraction of the words ‘audio’ and ‘biome’.

Creative Collaboration

Joel:

It can be difficult to collaborate on creative work because the underlying musical ideas are by their very nature abstract and difficult to communicate. It may be convenient for composers to work alone at home when they're able to work and develop abstract ideas for a long period of time before the need comes to communicate them to anyone else. However, Adrian and I are interested in collaborating from an earlier point, and therefore, we need to find methods of addressing these communication issues. And in fact, we found that a shared presence at creative events is only the beginning, and we need to find other strategies to be able to put them into words and communicate with them as we develop those ideas throughout the process.

Finding a Shared Language

Adrián:

When working together with Joel, a musical idea might pop up anywhere, anytime. These ideas are elusive in nature, so over time, we had to develop strategies that will allow us to capture them for later recall. One strategy that proved to be very useful to us was making a conscious effort early on to name these ideas, even before they're fully formed. The terms we would use can then encapsulate a musical gesture, but also the interaction of the saxophone with the live electronics, or even the sound we are looking after. Take a look at my performance notes for a movement of aubiome. Alongside preset information and controller instructions, you might see some of those terms we coined early on in our collaboration, such as ‘rumble’, ‘respite’, and ‘manifold’. 

Joel:

For an outsider looking at Adrián’s performance notes, terms like ‘respite’ or ‘rumble’ may seem one dimensional or  unelaborated. You see the word ‘rumble’ and you hear a rumble for example. However, here I want to emphasize that we're not talking about a one-to-one mapping of term to sound or effect. Rather, these terms point to more abstract, complicated ideas that lay beneath the surface, and we rehearse and work through [them] over a period to gain a more and more sophisticated and fine-grained understanding of them. Take for example manifold, a piece that we worked on over a period of time, and in fact recorded 21 different versions of it before we came up with a final version. Those recordings, we can look back at as different iterations of the material. And it's almost like looking at an object from different points of view, manifold 3, manifold 6, manifold 21, and thereby gaining more and more sophisticated and fine-grained understanding of the abstract ideas beneath the surface. And this understanding can refer to the music, the type of music and the possibilities that it affords us, and it can also refer to embodied knowledge about how it feels to play with the saxophone or how it feels for Adrián to interact with the computer. 

Assigning terms to musical material or abstract ideas that we don't yet fully understand can be counterintuitive to do. Oftentimes we prefer to work through material and elaborate it and come up with some kind of a final product before we're really willing to commit a title to it. However, during our working process, Adrián would often insist on stopping to assign musical terms very early in the process, intentionally before they become elaborated in our minds. This had the effect of creating an ‘empty container’ that we could then fill up with meaning during our rehearsals. In fact, we could fill it with meeting together in a way that cultivates shared understanding and eases communication.

Documenting Musical Exploration

Joel:

As we look over some of these videos of manifold, it becomes clear how important documentation can be in this whole process. Each of these 21 different videos refers back to a different iteration of the piece and a slightly different variant of how we dealt with the material. Imagine how difficult it would be for us to understand the difference between each of those and recall them without having these concrete handles to refer back to. And in this way, documentation has a lot to do with terminology, in the sense that both give us concrete ways of referring back to abstract ideas that otherwise can be easily lost to time.

Adrián:

Documentation goes actually farther beyond just archiving our work for later recall. It is also a very valuable tool that allows us to communicate effectively about musical ideas. We would typically make a concerted effort to record each session and review it straightaway. It is through this watching and commenting it together that we were able to reconcile our individual experiences and ultimately create a shared understanding.

Collaboration

Joel:

As Adrián and I worked on aubiome, we became increasingly interested in finding ways of collaboration that would emphasize our individual skill sets. For example, I wanted to take advantage of the hands-on ability for me as a saxophonist to experiment with the electronics, and at the same time leverage Adrián's experience as a composer. Therefore, we had to think of a new way of working, and we came up with the idea of scheduling rehearsal time for open-ended exploration, without any goal in mind in advance. This openness allowed us to receive new ideas when they came up, and then we could apply our methods of capture and recall to them. As an example of this open-ended workflow, take a look at this video of the rehearsal where we develop the material which would eventually become manifold.

This exploratory rehearsal demonstrates the principle of overlapping competencies and how we might apply that in a particular musical situation.

Performative Composing

Adrián:

Collaboration based on the principle of overlapping competencies has the advantage of bringing the performer into the creative process. The other way around, it can also take the composer up to the stage. In the case of aubiome, since the interface and the musical material was developed fully, entirely collaboratively, it was kind of a natural step for me to join Joel on stage. Not only that, since performative aspects of the live electronics were entangled with the musical material, for me to be able to perform it became critical in preserving the continuity of the original idea up to the audience.

Joel:

As Adrián and I look forward to the future, and consider other possible situations where our overlapping competencies approach may be interesting, we're beginning to work with dancers and other media, as well as a cellist [Jörg Ulrich Krah] in our trio called Brainchild. We're also really interested in hearing about your experiences with overlapping competencies and how it might apply in other fields. To close, have a listen to our most recent performance with Brainchild.