The project · Ensemble Studies · BLY · The Hands. The Double. · Seminars
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Artistic Research Forum 2020, online · Artistic Research Forum 2021, Trondheim, Norway · “What can be music?” Seminar at ULTIMA 2021, Oslo, Norway
Firstly, I will thank Henrik, Tanja, Camilla, Christian and Ellen for a rich presentation of a commendable artistic research project. I will also thank DIKU and project leader Henrik Hellstenius for inviting me to be opponent or perhaps rather a commentator upon this finalizing of the project Extended Composition. Being an artist myself working in between the fields of music and theatre, both as a composer and performer of interdisciplinary works, it is with great interest I read and experience your project.
I will first briefly share a few impressions of the three different compositions we have witnessed and/or heard being presented today.
Ensemble Studies I
Tanja Orning, Helga Myhr, Gry Kipperberg, Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk
As the performance starts four cello players are coming on stage, sitting down with their instruments in individual significant poses, as sculptures of extended bodies. Each filled with a strong energy, creating anticipation and expectations. When the ensemble starts it is in the form of a choreography. Individual movements in a stringent form, maintaining the sense of an choreographed ensemble. A visual and kinesthetic polyphony accompanied by the sounds we as spectators might hear in our own heads and imaginations.
When sounds are emerging from the instruments it is first as soft high-pitched unstable textures. As whispers from the non-human bodies of the cellos to the human bodies of the performers. Being a spectator I experience a merge of bodies, sounding and visual objects. Text deliverance is performed through repetitions and abstractions and opens for a construction of lingual meaning between performers and readers. It reminds me of sound poetry from past times, and slam poetry of today.
The ensemble performs in fluctuating conditions between specialized skills, “familiar skills” or partly specialized skills and non-specialized skills. Sometimes this reads rather obvious, other times vailed. In Ensemble studies the actions of the performers “suggests a location between the general idea of art media and those of life media”, as co-founder of the Fluxus movement Dick Higgins puts it in his explanation of the Fluxus form, events.
Ensemble studies moves between medias, between staged and everyday actions with multiple purposes, as when one of the performer jumps the skipping rope in a steady rhythm over a relatively long period of time, or when another performer, by drawing on paper on a flip over, is both developing visual material, being a sounding partner for the other performers and add to the performative quality the connotations this particular action evokes. This work calls for multiple modes of listening and attention. More on that later.
BLY by Christian Blom and Ellen Ugelvik
Performed by Ellen Ugelvik, Ali Djabbary and Cecilie Lindemann Steen
The performance room/installation BLY is comprised of, is at the same time elegant and unpretentious. I get a sense of being invited into an experiment, or to witness a set of rituals. A projection screen, a sound board, a light bulb, and an old-fashioned overhead projector is equal elements on stage, together with the performers working with the material. The visual elements on the screen created from work being visibly done by Ali Djabbari on the overhead, shifts between nature forms as a feather, and shapes made from pieces of paper put in relation to each other. Shifting between creating abstract shapes and landscape-like images.
The handling of the projector, that in itself is a significant performance act, shows a transformation of small gestures on the glass plate of the overhead into larger objects and gestures, on the screen. I am fascinated by the, at the same time poetic and practical movements of the performers working in the room. A key element is how actions and sounds are being transferred from one action, medium, object or body to another.
When Ellen Ugelvik in the start of the performance whistles long predetermined pitches into the microphones, it creates a confound and confusing experience when the same pitches later on are being played by the performers who do hands drawing on the screen.
It created in me as a listener a temptation to interact, to play the material. This element somehow reminded me of Nam June Paik’s work Random Access from 1963, where stripes of reel were put up crisscross on a wall. With extended soundheads, attached to a reel-player, the audience were invited to play the reels in any order, direction, and fragments.
The trans-medial moves of sounds and actions makes me think of embodiment, disembodiment, and re-embodiments. As if actions you perform, creates disembodied imprints, and later becomes reembodied and transformed. Action becoming light, becoming the act of playing.
The Hands. The Double
Composed and performed by Henrik Hellstenius & Ellen Ugelvik, with Kristin Ryg Helgebostad as adviser on movement in the process of composing.
The three works created within the project are very different, yet dealing with some of the same research questions. The Hands. The double invites the listener to yet another way of experiencing multiple medias and disciplines through music. This work grabs me immediately and holds me as a listener in a firm grip, while I after some time of hypnosis feel like I'm being tossed around in rough seas, by the almost transcended power of the rhythms and an increasing sonic restlessness.
Later the music and the performance lets me end up on a strange shore, trying to communicate with the strangers, the inhabitants.
The performance of Ellen Ugelvik I read as very precise, yet multifaceted. She is performing both the piano and keyboard, choreographed movements and spoken text. The live electronics, played by Henrik Hellstenius never takes over, but rather merges into the sounds of the pianos and imagined sounds of the movement as an organic integration.
The doubleness of the piano comprised of a conventional piano and of imprints, or a transformed echo of a piano manifested by the sampling keyboard, creates a fascinating dialogue. As does the further disembodiment of sound from the instruments being performed with physical movements to the transformations of sounds through live electronics.
The voice of the performer creates a somehow similar effect as it goes in dialogue with another self through the sampling keyboard. The performed movements, I experience as a listener are totally integrated, as if we witness a complex dialog between the self and its multiple others. And just as we construct our own meanings in connection to the sounds and words, we do so by reading physical signs, gestures, and movements. This work goes in dialogue with most of my senses: Hearing, seeing, imagining, and not at least it communicates with my kinesthetic sense.
Comments on the research project Extended Composition
In his presentation, Henrik Hellstenius asserts that the value of this project does not lie in the originality of the theme. However, thorough research within this renewed approach to music composition is not only welcomed, but also important to strengthen the particular field it covers, within the new music scene. The research project Extended Composition elicits deeper experiences, both for performers, composers and the audience, about what music in an expanded field can be, but also how it could be read.
If we were to trace the lines back in music history to find the origins of the desire to bring music together with other art forms, such as text and movement into a holistic work, we would perhaps end up in ancient Greece. According to the music historian Wayne Bowman, Platon did not distinguish music clearly from other art forms like dance, visual arts, speech or rhetoric. Instead, boundaries between these art forms were conceived to be very fluid, or non-existent.
If we instead jump ahead a few thousand years, and go no longer back in history than to John Cage in the 1950s we may consider "the 1952 untitled event" at black mountain college, a predecessor of today’s field of extended composition. A work that according to Erica Fisher Lichte “redefined the relationship between actors and spectators at a performance by letting the audience become co-creatives as well as pioneering the involvement of different art categories in one performance.”
In the research project Extended Composition, I see a clear legacy from these movements in the 50s, and perhaps most notably the Fluxus-movement in the 1960, 70s, and … well, it is still alive on as a sub culture.
One of the key composers in FLUXUS, George Brecht said: “John Cage, was the great liberator for me… But at the same time, he remained a musician, a composer…. I wanted to make music that wouldn’t only be for the ears. Music isn’t just what you hear or what you listen to, but everything that happens..”. Fluxus was a protest to the bourgeois mindset, it wanted to get rid of the legacy of European culture, to forget about the professional artist, and art created for the sake of art.
But here we are, in Europa, not wanting to get rid of the legacy of European culture.
Among the aspects that strikes me and fascinates me about the project Extended Composition, is that it appears to me as an assemblage of historical and contemporary ideas, that points towards theatricality and musicality in music composition. As opposed to in a music theatre composition.
In this project musicians and practitioners from different disciplines becomes equals, as music performers crossing medias of aesthetic expression. Although Henrik, Tanja, Camilla, Christian and Ellen are not at all forgetting about professionalism (as was the goal in Fluxus), their project and compositions raises in different ways interesting questions about the relation between professionalism and amateurism in art, or more precisely about skills-based versus non-skills-based aspects of new music. The implications of this intertwining can be discussed further in the following conversation.
In recent decades we see a flux between genres, disciplines, media and traditions in art. Within post dramatic theatre this diversity of expressions has grown into a solid tradition, we may see the same in visual art, including performance art, and in contemporary dance. In the institutionalized music education, or “the power center of conservatory”, the measurable excellence in specialized modes of musical performance and composition has been what prevails. Perhaps the music institutions have been less willing to loosen up its traditions. In this context the project Extended composition is brave, and a strong and significant contribution towards creating a common knowledge upon an ever growing and complex field.
Even though some of the methods of composing in the expanded field, extended composition, or composed theater have existed in subcultures among performers and composers for quite some time, this project represents something quite new, with bringing the collaboration between artists across disciplines to the forefront of compositional methods.
In October 2021 I visited The Norwegian Academy of Music, giving lectures and leading workshops for MA students in composition on this particular field of composing across medias, materials and disciplines. I learned then that even if it might not yet be a common part of their curriculum, the students already see this field as a natural direction within music composition, rather than marginal field of experimentation. My experience was that they read it as almost mainstream. This hints to how larger research projects like Extended Composition might have a strong impact on new generations of composers.
Towards the end of his presentation Henrik Hellstenius is quoting his friend, the composer Edvin Østergaard, who asks “If the goal of your project is to create “a composition where sound and movements are equal parts of a polyphony”, I ask myself how this multi-layered composition – sound and movements is perceived. It is maybe not so that an «extended» composition process automatically create an extended aesthetic experience?”
I do not possess to have the answer to this; however, it makes me think about modes of listening, and the economy of attention.
In his article “Music in the expanded field” Marko Ciciliani points out that within the music scene and education, structural listening has been the only appropriate mode of musical perception. Described by Rose Rosengard Subotnick as “a listening mode that was intended to describe a process wherein the listener follows and comprehends the unfolding realizations, with all its detailed inner relationships of a generating musical conception.”
Perhaps do we need to acknowledge and train other ways of listening in the meeting with trans-medial, interdisciplinary, and extended compositions?
In her book, Listening Through The Noise, Johanna Demers introduces the term aesthetical listening, as a mode that is primarily aesthetical rather than purely musical. Marko Ciciliani is building upon the same idea of different modes of listening by subdividing aesthetical listening into the terms distracted, casual, environmental, fragmented or intermittent listening.
By acknowledging different modes of listening, and work with it, we may go from the ideas of Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros, consciously shifting between global and focal listening, towards new concepts of listening in connection to new concepts of composition.
Modes of listening may also be connected to the economy of attention. With the increasing amount of information, and distractions I our time, we are getting accustomed to split up our attention, and quickly shift focus between multiple information sources simultaneously.
The coming generation tend to have a totally relaxed relationship to fragmented listening; chatting, reading, sending selfies over snapchat, having a conversation and studying simultaneously. Perhaps this behavior makes the new generation ready for receiving more complex deliverance of information than previous generations.
The jungle of terms within this field may leave me with a certain dose of perplexity. Music in the expanded field, Interdisciplinary composition, Composed theatre, Extended Composition, to name a few. And, when we are discussing extended composition it is natural to mention Jennifer Walshe and her term The New Discipline. Among many other things, she describes this new discipline as follows: “The New Discipline is a way of working, both in terms of composing and preparing pieces for performance. It isn’t a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draws on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy. In the rehearsal room the composer functions as a director or a choreographer, perhaps most completely as an auteur”
The kinship between the project Extended Composition and The New Discipline seems clear, however Walshe in her manifesto emphasizes the singularity of the composer, as opposed to collaborative processes. In this way she holds on to the tradition of the composer deciding the totality of how the composition is outlined, and how it should be performed. In contrast to the project Extended Composition that embrace collaboration as a method for composition.
I will end this commentary text with a few questions:
- How does your methods of collaboration differ from how you usually work as composers, and how you experience it?
- As the different disciplines, new music, dance, theatre, performance art, visual art, and more are all connected to their own discourse. How you as an audience read the artwork will to some extent be dependent on the discourse you belong to. Do we now see a need for a hybrid theoretical and practical discourse? – And how can we go about establishing it?
- Some of the challenges of moving between specialized skills and non-specialized, or even lack of skills is mentioned in your project presentation. I wonder what kinds of added values the non-specialized practitioner may bring to the composition practice and the performance of the material. What is the relationship between amateurism, professionalism, and virtuoso in the projects?
- To what extent do you experience that the expansion of music towards other disciplines affect your own understanding of music. Does the research project Extended Composition lead you, the participants, into a broader artistic understanding, including a different or renewed understanding of music? If so, in what way? Or I could ask; what did you not already know?
Øystein Elle b. 1973 holds a PhD in performing arts with cross-disciplinary composition as his special field. He is a singer and performance artist and associate professor in music and performing arts at Østfold University College. He is also artistic director of Capto Musicae.