For this chapter I have the intention to write down my reflections of the project and its creative process.
First, I would like to address it from a more technical perspective, and for this purpose I need to talk about the three elements that are part of the piece: Video, text and music.
To be honest, I found the process of filming and editing the images to be the most fulfilling. Since my area of expertise is music, I found it difficult to accept this feeling, but I had a great time using the camera and discovering my –very neutral– room's visual beauty through its lens. I thought of my room's walls as canvases, with ordinary but intriguing images painted by the play of light and shadows.
After reflecting about this situation, I realized that whenever I try to connect with my sensitivity I turn to the visual, or maybe it is better to reformulate this reflection affirming that images activate faster my sensitivity.
This response, in my opinion, was fairly expected given that visual images are known to stimulate many of our strongest emotions as humans. Naturally, aural processing, along with all of our senses, enables us to fully engage in our experiences of reality. However, I think that because of the aesthetic discourse that has been developed around sound and what constitutes music, it is now challenging for us to appreciate any sound that is not included in the canons of art.
But coming back to technical issues, I had some difficulties in creating a visual narrative. This situation was a bit of a struggle with the composer –Juan Montero Palma–. I will explain the problems later, but to sum up, for him it was difficult to compose the music if he was not able to understand the tensions, the flow of the images.
For this reason, we both decided to focus on using the images of my room as the main timeline and reducing the amount of different shots. Also, we both agreed that using longer frames was a better solution for the composition of the music, because in this way, we could have time to develop the musical material better and ensure that everything had an artistic coherence.
I decided to approach the text in a more intimate way, in a middle stage between a journal and an essay. I started from the text of Virgina Woolf, to later include brief individual statements, in which I express my reflections about the mentioned excerpt. However, both the video and the text are created inspired by my personal experience of not having a place to stay.
To differentiate between Woolf's text and mine, I chose a very simple but visual solution, which is basically changing the color of the subtitles in the video. At the same time, I included the text in specific moments on the video, since I didn’t want to divert too much the audience's attention.
Combining a live musical performance with a ton of text to read at once might make using a text-rich video overwhelming. Moreover, I didn’t want to relegate the musical part as a mere background, as Kyriakides exposed very clear in his thesis:
the deliberate avoidance of creating a too dominant visual field, which can monopolise the attention of the audience and push the semantic significance of the sound into the background (Kyriakides 2017, 230)
The inclusion of text in the performance presented another challenge for me. In A room with views, I used my own narration as a voice-off, while I included Woolf's unnarrated excerpt as a preface of the video itself. In this case, I think that was an effective decision, as I didn't want the text to draw too much attention from the audience. I believed that having a narrator would help the viewers to focus more on the visuals, finding their own narration of the diverse images I decided to use, or even facilitate the connection of the text with the images without having to move the gaze to read the subtitles.
However, for The space we are in I had to take into account an important element that was missing for the other project, the performance. Originally, I was going to use the same tool—the voice-off—but after reading Yannis Kyriakides's Imagined Voices: a poetics of Music-Text-Film (2017) thesis, I discovered the intriguing idea of inner voice in multimedia projects, which caused me to reevaluate my choice.
As the title of the thesis suggested, he worked extensively on projects involving the same disciplines as my own, concluding that the audience faces a constant switch between a critical distance to understand the piece on a cognitive level and engagement. Kyriakides believed that an effective way to increase audience engagement with the piece was to awaken each person's inner voice through a projected text that is also supported by music, having as a result engaged listeners that “put themselves in an immersed first-person perspective, embodying the music” (Kyriakides 2017, 30).
I decided then to include the text without a narration, following my intention of letting the audience experience my project in their own way, and even finding some elements to identify with, and in this way, engage with the piece. Without a narrator during the performance, I believe it could encourage the audience to have a personal reflective process; it could also be interpreted as an "invitation to the viewer/listener to find a surrogate voice within the framework of the music" (2017, 34).
For the musical part I tried to collaborate as much as possible with the composer on the composition process. However, I will mention the collaboration with him later in the discussion.
We decided to use the first 5 minutes –the only ones that we already have– as a clear beginning of the piece. We didn’t want to create a quite dense musical part, because we had the intention to create something with the same energy or even with a slower start than the other two elements of this piece.
In regard to this, Juan had the idea, after having a session together experimenting with the viola, to start with just pizzicato, but at the same time exploring this technique. I liked the proposition of starting with the viola on my lap, as if it was a guitar, and even using the strumming similar to this instrument. I believe that this way of starting the piece has some kind of performative element, and it connects pretty well with the intimate energy that inspires the whole piece. Juan pointed to different hand parts to be used for strumming in his search for various sonorities with just pizzicato.
Talking about the musical part helps me to reflect on the collaboration with Juan Montero, the composer. As stated in the record of our meetings, I gave him access to the audio from multiple scenes I filmed, some field recordings, and the results of my experiments, allowing him complete creative control over the materials for the tape. However, he had some difficulty working with this material because I didn't record them with the intention of editing, modifying, and piecing them together to create the piece's tape. Some of them were easier for him to use, but others, especially the ones that centered more on the harmony, were really challenging since he had to spend a lot of time editing the material in order to not be obligated to strictly follow the harmonic progression of my improvisation.
The work method that I proposed –addressed on the record of the meetings– excited both of us, a method that focused on creating the different elements of the piece in chain. In this way, I was trying to propose a dynamic and even justified collaboration, a kind of cadavre exquis, in which we were constantly reacting towards whatever the other has done. Nevertheless, I don't think this method was very successful because of the short time we had together and the distance that made communication even more difficult.
I really enjoyed collaborating with Juan, since we both have a very similar way of understanding music, but I feel conflicted with the idea that I was not involved enough in the composition process. This project was meant to be a personal work, in the sense that it is totally inspired by my surroundings and my experience with it, and including an external collaborator was maybe not the best solution.
Anyway, this piece was a perfect excuse to put into practice the revelation that meant the discovery of conceptual music, performance and soundscape. It was a constant learning experience, because it forced me to experiment my approach to music and of course, the other two disciplines I included.
He decided to transcrib the tape on top of the viola line since we both agreed not to approach the score as something rigid. In this manner, together with the video/tape's seconds and minutes marks, I will be able to respond to what I'm listening to more effectively and with some freedom.
For the last part of these 5 minutes, Juan insisted on emphasizing the bird singing present in Haagse Bosch’s scene. He thought that this soundscape was beautiful enough, so we decided to use harmonics on the viola in order to blend my instrument among the natural sounds of the park.
Continue to 5.Conclusions