This essay is based on material written in the spring of 2022 and presented at the Performing Precarity research seminar at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo in June 2022. A short section of the first version of the essay was presented at the Performance Studies Network Conference at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK in July 2022. Additional material was added between May 2023 and March 2024. Audio musical examples are embedded in the text. As an alternative to reading the text, it’s also possible to listen to a recording of the complete essay, recorded in April 2024. Headphones are recommended for listening to all the available audio. I am grateful to Benjamin Rimmer for doing the sound editing. Here is the audio version:
I.
Derridas is a work that I composed for solo piano in the mid 1980s. It is a collection of four pieces, all of which can also be performed individually. They were written between November 1985 and April 1986 as part of a collection of 10 movements which comprised the complete score of a performance piece titled Deriva. Four of the other six movements were composed for magnetic tape and the remaining two for chamber organ; the tape pieces were co-composed with the writer and curator Andrew Renton, with whom I co-devised the whole work in the summer of 1986.
Deriva used texts by Renton, Michael Bracewell and Jacques Derrida and existed as a 50-minute collage of words and music performed by three speakers, or readers, with myself on piano, organ and tapes. After it was first performed, I extracted the four solo piano pieces to play in concerts, giving them slightly absurd titles:
Jacques Derrida goes to a nightclub
Jacques Derrida goes to a massage parlour
Jacques Derrida goes to the supermarket
Jacques Derrida goes to the beach
This became my preferred order for the individual movements when played as a set. I performed the pieces myself quite regularly during the late 1980s and the 1990s, eventually giving the set its overall title, and other pianists started to play them too. In 2008, Michael Finnissy recorded Derridas as part of his CD that is devoted to my solo piano music.
In 1986 I certainly did not forsee that these pieces would still be regularly performed nearly 40 years after their composition, and over these years I have enjoyed receiving recordings of performances from around the world. One such performance was given in Helsinki on 26 March 2023 by the Finnish pianist Mirka Viitala. On receiving Mirka’s recording, I was impressed by her really beautiful playing. But there was also something unusual about the performance; the individual movements were played in the exact reverse of my preferred order. In the score of Derridas, and in collections of my piano music that have included the set of pieces, there is a performance note that states the preferred order and I wondered why Mirka had not followed this. But while listening to her performance, I realised that I really liked the alternative sequence that she had created, it worked extremely well.
Several months later, the Finnish cellist Juho Laitinen, who had organised the Helsinki concert, was visiting London and we met up for a drink. We discussed Mirka’s performance and I asked Juho why Mirka had made the decision to play the pieces in reverse order. The fact that there was a prescribed order was a surprise to Juho, and it was then that I realised that the copy of the music that Juho had given to Mirka did not have any reference to a preferred order. I remembered that a long time ago I would give out loose leaf copies of the pieces, and I suspect that it was this way that Juho had originally acquired the music.
Juho and I continued to discuss this. He told me that Mirka had thought hard about the order of movements and there were many considerations, which included an invented humorous scenario about how Jacques Derrida might spend his day. Juho and I agreed that it would really not be right if I were now to tell Mirka that she should change the sequence to be the same as the one that I had prescribed. It would mean that her careful thinking about the order of pieces, which she had made in good faith in the absence of any available instructions or information, would count for nothing.
When relevant information is missing from a score, or if the given information is in some way ambiguous or unclear, the performer can make their own decision about something. This might give different results from what the composer had imagined or intended. In this sense, some precarity is created by the score, the main communication link between composer and performer. Whether deliberate or accidental, information is missing and thereby weakens that point of communication, increasing the possibility that in the absence of direct contact with the composer, their intentions might not be fully realised.
But the performer’s decision can also be a revelation for the composer, shedding light on some aspect of the piece and presenting the composer with an alternative point of view for consideration. Mirka Viitala’s choice about the order of movements in Derridas has given me an alternative view of this work, and I am grateful to her for that.
II.
When a visual artist creates a piece of work, it immediately exists in its final form. The painting, the drawing, the sculpture, the video or installation; whatever it might be, it is an object that is complete and finished. For a novelist or a poet, a writer of books, it’s a similar situation in that the finished text is the means by which the work is fully presented to the world.
As a composer of notated music that is written primarily for the concert hall, my work is not completely realised at the moment that I complete my score. It requires collaboration with performers to bring it to life and to enable it to exist in sonic form. In this respect, my situation is similar to the process undertaken by a playwright or a choreographer, who also need the contributions of others for their work to be fully presented. This situation, for a composer of notated music, is different from that of a composer of fixed media electronic music, who is able to shape every element of the composition in the studio, and is able to have complete control over every detail. Unless they are also heavily involved in the performance of their own work, composers of notated music do not have this level of control when their music is performed. When I refer to ‘notated music’ I am talking about music that is played from any sort of notation; conventional, graphic, text or instructional. I am referring to the fact that however the composer notates the score, the performer is needed to enable it to exist in sound.
Scores that are notated graphically or textually or instructionally give much more licence to the performer than does conventional notation. Conventional notation, for the most part, defines the details of the important parameters of the composition. So, the speed of the music, the pitches and harmonies, the durations and rhythms, articulations, the instrumental and vocal timbres. These aspects, and often some others, are fixed and determined by the composer’s score.
The extent of determination of these parameters varies from score to score and from composer to composer. In addition to these fixed elements in a score, there are sometimes decisions to be made by the performer. When the instructions and notations are more relaxed and ambiguous, there is more room for the performer to make decisions of their own. It is also sometimes the case that the determined elements in the score are amended and not adhered to exactly as the composer has stipulated. All these decisions that are made by the performer are part of what we call ‘interpretation’.
I have never considered the composer-performer relationship to be one where the composer gives instructions to the performer who then merely carries them out. Although I think that certain decisions are the composer’s to be made, and other ones are the performer’s responsibility, I think that the idea of a directive relationship, from composer to performer, is too hierarchical and unrealistic.
By far my best experiences working with performers have been those where rehearsals were collaborative, and where it was clear that we were engaged in joint endeavour. And, as I have already outlined with reference to Mirka Viitala’s performance of Derridas, and hope to demonstrate further in a later section of this essay, interpretative decisions made by the performer can teach me something about a piece that I have written and can enable me to see that piece in a new or different light.
III.
For the most part, my scores are comprised of very basic elements; common chords, drones, scales and scraps of melody, with simple rhythms and durations. I often use long, sustained tones and harmonies and deploy a great deal of repetition, regular and irregular. My scores generally show a reduced surface texture, stripped of extraneous detail. At first glance on the page it might well look straightforward, but my reductive approach actually presents big challenges in performance.
The music is often so exposed that even the slightest error can seem catastrophic. To perform it, players need to be fully immersed in musical material that outwardly seems benign and maybe even irrelevant. Great concentration is needed, and performers taking on the challenge are required to play with a lot of care and control, and with a real focus on the quality of sound. The characteristics of my music, and its challenges for performers, can often lead to performance situations which can be unstable. In the Performing Precarity research group, we reflected on this early on in the project, as the instrumentalists in our group have much experience of performing my work.
Some of the most compelling live performances of my work that I have heard over the years have been those that sometimes appear to be on a knife-edge, and where a palpable tension is created between, on the one hand, the very clear commitment by the musicians to performing the music as perfectly as possible, and, on the other, the reality of the tightrope that they are walking and the constant presence of anxiety about whether or not the performance will stay intact.
A live performance can be completely gripping, and can certainly be deemed high quality, even when not all the aspects of the score can be realised to perfection and where unpredictable elements can also occur. The implication in the notation of, for example, a long held note is that the tone and quality of sound stay as even and as consistent as possible. Or a sequence of basic triads in half notes or minims, with the sequence being required to be repeated several times, suggests that the re-iterations are played as identically as possible. The reality is that the timbre of the held note will contain small fluctuations and tiny variations of tone, and when the chord sequence is repeated there will always be small differences each time that the phrase is played.
But these differences contribute greatly to the feeling that the music is really alive. The performer strives to play something perfectly but is immediately placed in a demanding situation because of the difficulty of completely achieving this. The results are so often very beautiful and intriguing. The commitment of the performer to try and get the music ‘right’ is of crucial importance here. The interesting imperfections arise directly out of the concerted efforts of the performer to play the music perfectly and certainly not from a situation where an unsympathetic performer might lack commitment.
It’s also worth reflecting here on the difference between live performances and studio recordings. There are a number of different views of how studio recordings of 'classical' music should be made, with one school of thought maintaining that the recording should reproduce everything about a live performance as faithfully as possible, and the opposite view being that all the technology that is available in the contemporary studio at the time of recording the music should be deployed if desired.
A live performance and a studio recording of the same piece will offer two distinctly different listening experiences and, as long as the studio is not used to make the resulting recording too clinical, I don’t see a problem in using its full potential to create something that may well sound closer to an idea of perfection. These two views of the same piece - live performance and studio performance - are just different things created under different conditions.
IV.
The score is the principal means by which the transfer of information from composer to performer is made. Where there is a weakness in this point of communication, it is sometimes the case that a degree of disjunction is evident; between the intention of the composer, as expressed by the notation on the page, and the understanding of the performer, as expressed by the particular details of their performance and by the interpretative decisions that they have made.
I have already alluded to the fact that my scores are frequently devoid of extraneous and unnecessary detail. In this respect, they can be seen as following a notational practice deployed by an important influence on my early work, the British composer Howard Skempton. In an interview with Skempton, published in a UK journal of contemporary music Contact in spring 1987, he is asked about the absence in his scores of specific indications of tempo, dynamics and other details. The interviewer, Michael Parsons, suggests that this absence of detail might be dangerous, in that it may appear to offer licence for types of performance that differ wildly from the composer’s intentions. Skempton replies that he feels it’s a risk that the composer has to take, and that the composer has to trust the performer to be sympathetic. The interviewer goes on to say that the absence of instructions is itself a positive indication and describes the resulting scores as ‘clean’. Skempton responds:
The ‘clean’ score is crucial. It clarifies structure and emphasises what is purely musical. As in constructive art, form and content are identified. The score exemplifies the underlying principle on which different performances are based, and provides a model for any and every realisation.
Parsons then goes on to ask Skempton if it is the intention of the composer that the absence of qualifying instructions means that it is up to the performer to deduce from the notation how a particular piece is to be played. Skempton confirms that for him, that is the case.
There’s much that I like about Skempton’s idea of making the score as ‘clean’ as possible. But I have different reasons to him for pursuing this. I would disagree with his view, as expressed in the aforementioned published interview, that the ‘clean’ score necessarily gives licence to the performer on decisions as to how the piece should be played. The intention in a great deal of my work is that performers approach the spareness of my scores with an understanding that the bare and uncluttered notation is an indication of ‘flatness’; an even and consistent quality of sound, without any unnecessary expressive force. In my opinion, the expressive content that is inherent in the material will come through all the more effectively if presented with restraint and detachment and left to speak for itself.
An article, titled The music of Laurence Crane and a post-experimental performance practice, was published in the periodical Tempo in January 2016. It was written by the pianist and writer Philip Thomas, a regular performer of my work, who makes the following observation:
Over the years I have come to recognise [Crane’s music] as difficult music to play, for the simple reason that I have witnessed performances in which performers have felt the need, in the absence of other directions, to add excessive shaping and expressive gestures to the way they play, as if afraid to simply leave it alone.
And Philip Thomas goes on to say:
The performer’s role is not to deny the music expression, but instead to locate the expressivity in the sound rather than in the way sounds are shaped through narrative.
In general, I would affirm that one of the intentions of my use of spare and uncluttered notation is to communicate an aesthetic that benefits from minimal expressive intervention in performance. At the same time, I am aware that this type of ‘clean’ score does not automatically communicate this approach and that there are other ways of engaging with notation that avoids stipulating expressive detail. There is definitely an ambiguity here, and what I have come to realise is that while I am keen that the principle of minimal intervention is adhered to, I can also learn things about my music from performances that take a different approach to certain aspects of my scores.
V.
In June 2022, at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, the core members of the Performing Precarity project group presented a 3-day seminar on our research. Day 3 included my contribution, which was the presentation of an early version of this essay, and the event included a number of live performances of Bobby J, a composition of mine for solo electric guitar. After my presentation and the performances, there was a group discussion on the issues raised. I chose to focus on this particular piece because the sparse notation is very characteristic of my work but also because that notation is, in some places, a little ambiguous or perhaps lacks some necessary information. All this allows a space for difference between separate interpretations. I am now going to look closely at this piece and at some of the similarities and differences between recordings and performances that have been made since its composition.
I composed Bobby J in 1999. The commercially available recordings of the piece and a number of recordings that I have acquired of different guitarists playing it in live concerts, and in live studio settings, show a range of approaches taken to performing the work. Over the period of nearly 25 years since I composed it, I have assembled a collection of 25 recordings, acquired from 20 guitarists. This collection came about initially in the usual way, in that musicians would perform the piece and, if they made a recording of the performance, they would send me that recording. And then, after a few years, a number of guitarists started making recordings for CD release. There are now five commercially available recordings of Bobby J in existence, with the first appearing in 2006, made by Canadian guitarist Tim Brady, and the most recent by Sean McFarland from Baltimore, USA. Sean’s recording was released in 2021.
A quick word on the origins of the piece and its title. I met the American guitarist Alan Thomas in the late 1990s, shortly after he moved to the UK, and in 1999 he asked me to write a new piece for him to play. 'Bobby J’ was the nickname for the American racing cyclist Bobby Julich, who raced professionally in the 1990s and 2000s and finished third in the 1998 edition of the Tour de France. I was thinking about how Alan Thomas looked a bit like Bobby Julich when I was trying to decide on a title for the piece, so I decided to use Julich’s nickname.
During 2020, Sean McFarland approached me to let me know that he wanted to record Bobby J for his new CD, having played it live in a concert in Baltimore in 2019. He asked me some questions about the score, and as a result of thinking about these questions, I ended up listening to some of the performances in my collection of recordings. This is when I first started to think about looking closely at the differences between the various performances of the piece and I also approached other guitarists who I knew, to ask them to record themselves playing the piece. In these instances, I was careful not to have any conversations with them about decisions of interpretation and I also discouraged them from listening to any previously recorded versions. These strategies were to maximise the amount of individual decision-making made by the recently engaged guitarist.
In the collection of recordings that I have assembled, how much are these differences of interpretation a result of the ambiguities or uncertainties in the score? And how much distance has been put between the composer’s intention and the performer’s realisation; both by an absence of detailed information in the score, and by individual decisions taken by certain performers?
At a first glance, the score of Bobby J looks simple and straightforward. But on further investigation the performer is confronted with practical difficulties, problems to be solved and interpretative decisions to be made. The score gives a certain amount of definitive information but leaves a lot of things unclarified. There are a variety of approaches taken across my archive of performances. This variety can partly be ascribed to the nature of the instrument, partly to the nature of my score and also to the way that the score came about. Thinking firstly about the instrument; the timbral range of the electric guitar is large, due in part to the number of different types of instruments available to the musician, but also due to the accessories that can be used in conjunction with the actual instrument, to alter and modify the sound. If you write music for electric guitar and do not specify much in the way of technical information, you cannot be 100% sure as to what sort of sound will emerge when the guitarist performs the music. In this respect, it is completely unlike the flute, the violin, the trumpet, the vibraphone and all other acoustic instruments where you can be pretty sure as to what the general sound of the instrument will be when it is blown or bowed or struck. The electric guitar is like other electric instruments - for example, the electric organ or synthesiser - that have a wide range of source possibilities, a variety of external modifiers and a technology that continues to be developed.
Although the piece is written for electric guitar, the score contains very little technical information relating to the guitar itself and is particularly evasive about timbre. This score shows elements of what I defined earlier as a ‘clean score’; very bare and with a general absence of detail. It might be interesting to mention at this point that the sequence of chords that I use in Bobby J was not originally conceived for the electric guitar; I used it first in a piano piece titled T B Wroblewski that I composed in 1990 and which is no longer in my catalogue. I also used it in the fourth piece of my chamber work Four Pieces for Alto and Bass Flutes, completed in 1996. This practice of recycling, reusing and recontextualising materials across a number of compositions is something that is integral to the way I work. I am interested in the way that ones perspective on the materials can change when those materials are repurposed. This reuse can be on the level of simple arrangement or transcription; it can also be where materials are lifted directly from one work to another and thereby presented in a different context; it can also be where a fragment of an existing piece is taken as a starting point for the composition of a completely new piece of music. As an interesting footnote to all this; in 2023 the Italian flautist Manuel Zurria released a new recording of Bobby J performed on 14 wine bottles.
The score of Bobby J is written on two pages. The essence of the piece is a sequence of chords in whole notes or semibreves, barred in 4/4, one chord per bar. The notes of the first chord (a dyad of C4 and E4) have l.v. or ‘resonance’ ties, indicating that the chord should be allowed to let ring and not be damped. A ‘sim.’ indication in bar 2 is an instruction that all the chords in the piece should be played in this way. The chords occupy bars 1 - 64, with the first 16 bars being repeated. The very last bar of the piece (bar 65) is a whole bar rest with a fermata. Aside from the notated chords, the only other indications in the score are as follows; a metronome marking (quarter note or crotchet = 40), a detuning or scordatura indication (the lowest string is tuned down from E to C), a dynamic indication on the first bar (crescendo from niente, over the duration of half the bar), with a marking of ‘sim.’ in bar 2, indicating that this dynamic profile should be replicated in each bar of the piece, and finally a fermata on the barline between bars 16 and 17, indicating a slight pause between these two bars. This sparse notation is supported by a short paragraph in the score prelims, which re-iterates the nature of the dynamic profile of each chord and requests that the articulation throughout should be as uniform as possible. It also states that the overall volume is on the soft side and that the piece is ‘very still and calm’. This note was added a few years after the piece was first performed, exactly when I cannot properly recall.
The score of Bobby J almost certainly originated in this form because I worked closely with the guitarist Alan Thomas in the late summer and early autumn of 1999. Therefore, some things were dealt with verbally and did not go directly into my score. This is why the performance note in the prelims did not originally appear with the score. At a later date I found the need to write the note, to make sure that some important things were properly articulated and communicated to whoever wanted to perform the piece. However, this does not necessarily mean that I regard anything that Alan Thomas does to be definitive, with respect to performances of this piece. I have two recordings of Alan playing Bobby J (one studio recording, one live recording) and they take slightly different approaches.
I have sometimes wondered whether there should be more information in the score, particularly about timbre and about technical specifications. But each time that I have considered this possibility, I have in the end rejected it. I have also wondered whether it would be better for the note in the prelims to be somehow distributed over the score itself. So, the instruction that the piece is ‘very still and calm’ would then become a character marking at the head of the score. I wondered if this would mean that the performer sees these instructions more clearly and directly.
Again, I have rejected the idea of rewriting the score with the instructions from the prelims redistributed throughout the notation. It would of course involve intervening in the existing score, and avoiding doing this was probably the reason that I added performance information as a note in the prelims a few years after composition. I am not sure that it is a good idea to go about rewriting the notation of scores years after composition. I feel that the notation should generally show how the intentions of the piece were communicated at the time of composition, however flawed those notation decisions may have been.
VI.
I’m going to take a look at three parameters in the music of Bobby J where differences in interpretative approach can be heard across my archive of recordings. These parameters are timbre, tempo, and what I will call ‘the swell’. What I am not going to do here is to write about any of the technical processes that the guitarists have deployed in their performances, as this essay is not about discussing the actual technical detail of the realisations.
Timbre
As I have already remarked, the score does not specify anything particular about what sort of sound should be used. The only clues are contained within the performance note in the prelims, part of which reads as follows:
The piece is very still and calm and the overall dynamic level should never be too loud.
In a general sense this does of course give an indication that the sound should be mellow and gentle and that the aggressive side of the electric guitar should be avoided. And this is what all the guitarists who have played the piece have done. But with many subtle differences.
My collection of 25 recordings include five which have been released on CD. These are by Tim Brady, Michael Nicolella, Alan Thomas, Håkon Stene and Sean McFarland. Let’s listen to some of the performers playing the opening bars of the piece to hear some of the guitar sounds that have been used. First, here is Alan Thomas’s studio recording, released by the CD label Another Timbre in 2014 as part of a double album of my chamber music recorded by the ensemble Apartment House:
ex.1 Bobby J bars 1 - 8, Alan Thomas:
The recordings in my archive could be grouped according to the degree of richness utilised in the chosen sound. It’s interesting to note that four of the five guitarists who have released commercially available recordings on CD have generally used a rich palette, with Håkon Stene’s recording placed at the more spare end of this spectrum. The exception here is Sean McFarland, who has opted for a fairly austere sound, as we have already heard. Certainly, there is a contrast between on the one hand the richer, more saturated sounds generally chosen by the artists on the five released CDs and, on the other hand, the recordings that I have collected from various live performances, where the sounds are sometimes more spartan, delicate and unstable. My assumption is that the general richness in the studio collection is a result of the fact that the musician has more resources available - and more time to use and refine them - when in a studio situation. The guitarist can utilise these in an environment which is not affected by external factors and by the pressure of live performance.
With this in mind, it’s interesting to compare the guitar sound of Alan Thomas’s studio recording with the sound that he makes in a live recording, from a concert in London in 2001. Here’s another excerpt from Alan’s studio recording, followed by the same passage in his earlier live performance:
ex.10 Bobby J bars 6 - 20, Alan Thomas (studio):
Here are five more excerpts from different recordings, featuring the section later in the piece where the detuned lowest string is used. First, Norwegian musician Håkon Stene, a studio recording from his album Lush Laments for Lazy Mammal which appeared on the Hubro label in 2014. Håkon’s sound is highly distinctive:
ex.12 Bobby J bars 28 - 44, Håkon Stene:
Inga Stenøien was one of four guitarists who played Bobby J in the Performing Precarity project seminar in June 2022. Inga keeps her articulation of the chords very consistent and regular, and like Jonathan Barriault and Sam Cave her sound is sparse but glowing:
ex.14 Bobby J bars 28 - 44, Inga Stenøien:
Finally, James Creed, a composer and guitarist based in London, from a live performance in 2021. James uses a fuller sound than some of the other musicians that are documented in live concerts. There’s a crescendo of hiss from the amplifier, an additional sound that I really enjoy in his recording:
ex.16 Bobby J bars 28 - 44, James Creed:
The recordings of Bobby J by Tim Brady and Michael Nicolella are particularly rich and full, and also show much variability of timbre. This is more to the fore with Tim’s recording, where the technical set up that he uses leads to a situation where the exact constituent elements of the sound seem to vary from chord to chord. Here’s Tim first, followed by Michael:
ex.17 Bobby J bars 8 - 16, Tim Brady:
For me, this raises a question as to whether there is something that I have not properly articulated in the score. My preference, and my original idea for the piece, was that the sound of the guitar should be consistent throughout. Part of the added performance note in the prelims reads:
All chords should be articulated as identically as possible…
Does this performance note unambiguously declare that the timbre should be uniform throughout the piece, or does it just hint at it? In listening to the diversity of sound and articulation in the recordings by Tim and Michael, I am tempted to conclude that my note has not emphasised this essence and to have properly enforced it I should have made it more explicit.
Or maybe not? Tim Brady’s version does sound highly varied in articulation and is certainly saturated with detail, and in these respects it is not exactly what I had in mind when I composed Bobby J, but I do think that it brings something to the piece that I had not previously thought about. This is to do with the degree of richness of the actual sound. I think that my original conception of the piece for a solo electric guitar tended towards a more austere sound and that was very much aligned to my usual aesthetic preferences. I regarded the general ‘emptiness’ of the score as a way of communicating this. But of course, the emptiness of the score - the ‘clean score’ - can also be a canvas for the musician to add something of their own.
There’s a vast contrast that can be observed between the approach taken by Tim Brady and that taken by the American composer and performer Michael Pisaro. Michael’s recording, a performance that he gave at the Los Angeles experimental music venue The Wulf in 2009, is in many ways the most extreme reading that has been committed to tape so far. The sound of his instrument is quite strangulated. Here is the start of the passage that includes the detuned lowest string, from midway through the piece, played by Tim:
ex.19 Bobby J bars 32 - 41, Tim Brady:
Comparing the different sounds of the guitars on these two recordings, one could take the view that neither of them particularly meet the stipulation for the piece to be ‘still’ and ‘calm’. Tim Brady’s recording fizzes and twitches with all sorts of surface detail. Despite the stillness of the harmony of the piece, he makes the surface busy with his timbral choices and technical decisions. And Michael Pisaro utilises silence in a way that no one else does, with his tiny surges of sound into the room at The Wulf creating a somewhat sinister atmosphere, which is quite unnerving.
If any of my words here sound critical, they are actually not meant to be. Earlier I hinted that when interpretative decisions made by performers seem quite distant from my original intention it has often given me something to consider. I start to think about how I might accept that misalignment and embrace the difference, giving cause for me to re-evaluate some aspect of the piece. Tim Brady’s recording is an interesting case in point. There’s a thing he does which was not part of my original conception, and that occurs during the section that we have just heard. He seems not to treat the low C as part of each individual chord, as I conceived it, but instead, by using reverb, he makes it drone-like and continuous, gaining power through accumulation. He’s not the only one to do this; other recordings show tendencies this way, particularly some of the ones made in a studio, but Tim’s use of it is the most emphatic.
Actually, what Tim and others have done here is to highlight an anomaly in my notation. The resonance ties in bar 1 specify that the dyad should be allowed to let ring. The ‘simile’ instruction in bar 2 gives an indication that this resonance should happen to every chord in the piece. At the start of each bar, however, my notation also instructs the player to take the volume pedal right down to zero. How can the previous chord be allowed to resonate if the volume pedal is closed down? It’s a contradiction, and it’s one which was highlighted by Norwegian composer Eivind Buene in the group discussion that occurred at the Performing Precarity seminar.
Tempo
By now it will be apparent that the tempi chosen by my collection of guitarists vary quite widely. The crotchet or quarter note pulse given in the score is 40 bpm. A performance which is more or less in line with this tempo should come in at around 8 minutes. In the archive of 25 recordings that I have, 15 of them have a duration somewhere between 7’30” and 8’30”. Some of the other 10 recordings show the wider extremes; the quickest is Michael Nicolella’s at 5’18” and the slowest is Jorge Boehringer’s third version at 13’10”. Boehringer’s recording is therefore something like two and a half times slower than Nicolella’s. It is one of three recordings which are in excess of 10 minutes; the other two being Tom Pauwels, at 10’32”, and Anders Førisdal, at 12’22”.
In the next four excerpts, we hear different guitarists playing the piece at more or less the tempo that is designated in the score. I’ve based my choice of these excerpts on the passage from bar 17, immediately after the pause fermata. The first of these, from Sean McFarland’s recording, is a longer excerpt, the other three are shorter. Here is Sean's recording:
ex.21 Bobby J bars 17 - 32, Sean McFarland:
The tempi across these four recordings are consistent; they are all roughly at the speed as marked in the score. Håkon Stene’s quarter note pulse is faster, around 50 bpm, and so his tempo is almost exactly double the pace of that taken by Jorge Boehringer. We’ll now hear these two - one after the other - to observe the contrast. First Håkon, then Jorge:
ex.25 Bobby J bars 17 - 24, Håkon Stene:
Jorge Boehringer is one of the guitarists who I invited to make a home studio recording for my research and his 13-minute performance is actually the last of three versions that he recorded, with the other two both coming in at around 8’00”. In a conversation about my project with Jorge, I had talked about the version by Anders Førisdal and I think Jorge wanted to set himself some sort of challenge, to see if he could effectively do a similarly extreme slow version. This was a very rare example of me mentioning some aspect of someone else’s performance to a guitarist about to make a recording. What Jorge appears to do in his recording is to elongate the silence in each bar, so there is a much larger gap between chords. The durations of the chords themselves are not that dissimilar from those in some of the other recordings.
I am definitely open to players taking different approaches to the tempo in this music, but would say that where the extremes are concerned I prefer the slower to the quicker. This is because I think that the chord sequence needs time and space to unfold, to settle, to breathe. I do find Michael Nicolella’s recording a little too fast, but having said that I do not feel that the recordings that last around six and a half minutes are too rushed. These include live concert recordings by Alan Thomas and Sean McFarland and the CD recording by Håkon Stene.
When considering the subject of tempo for this essay, I remembered that when Michael Nicolella was recording the piece for release back in 2010 he sent me a first edit for comment. I have no recollection of saying to him at the time that I found his performance to be a little fast, which leads me to wonder whether my opinion about the tempo of the piece might have changed since 2010, and maybe I have actually been influenced by some of the slower versions that have been made in more recent years. With no proper documentation of my thoughts about this in 2010, I have to rely on my memory, which could well be unreliable. Here is Michael, in an excerpt which demonstrates the faster tempo that he takes in his recording:
ex.27 Bobby J bars 17 - 24, Michael Nicolella:
Anders Førisdal recorded his version in January 2020 at the Norwegian Academy of Music in a Performing Precarity workshop, and I was unprepared for the slow speed that he adopted for his performance. I am curious to know what his decision-making process was before deciding to take it at this glacial pace. Perhaps he made no firm decisions about it and the speed just occurred naturally. Whatever his thinking was, the result is certainly mesmerising. His 12’22” means that he is playing at around 26 bpm over the course of the entire performance. It led me to wonder if it is necessarily the right thing to give a metronome mark in the score. Maybe I should have written ‘Slow’ or ‘Very Slow’ and left out the metronome mark? But then again, I would not necessarily want to deter the quicker performance; it also does bring something different to the piece, despite my stated misgivings about Michael Nicolella’s quicker tempo. Here is an excerpt of the performance by Anders:
ex.28 Bobby J bars 17 - 24, Anders Førisdal:
Other than the metronome marking, the vitally important thing about the tempo is its regularity and consistency. The periodicity of the chords should be as consistent as it is possible to be. Here again, I wonder if I have been explicit enough in my performance note in the prelims. This is the relevant sentence from those prelims:
All chords should be articulated as identically as possible…
In my mind, this sentence refers to everything about the presence and articulation of the chords, and therefore means identical periodicity as well as identical attack and timbre. But I can see how this sentence might well be interpreted as referring only to the constituent elements of the actual sound of the chords, as opposed to the rate of chord change.
In thinking about tempo, it’s interesting to consider the fermata between bars 16 and 17 and note how different players treat it. Quite a few guitarists ignore the fermata while others observe it in varying degrees, some taking the briefest of pauses while others allow the sound to clear completely. In his studio recording, Sean McFarland actually adds another pause at the end of bar 32, just before the low C is added to the chord sequence. When the fermata is observed it does, of course, break up the regularity of the tempo. Here are four examples of the treatment of the fermata. First, Sam Cave, who goes straight on at the end of bar 16:
ex.29 Bobby J bars 13 - 20, Sam Cave:
The Swell
This is not technically a parameter in the traditional sense of the word. ‘The swell’ is my rather untechnical term for the crescendo at the start of each bar. In the score, the prescribed mode of articulation for each chord is to start at 'niente' and make a crescendo swell over the duration of half the bar. This is done by using a volume pedal, which is set at zero at the start of each swell. So according to the notation, each bar should be a moment of silence followed by the chord making a swell to its loudest dynamic and sustaining until the end of the bar. And naturally, each bar should be articulated as identically as possible. At last, I think I may have adequately covered this requirement with that note in the prelims:
All chords should be articulated as identically as possible…
There is an interesting situation regarding the attack of each chord, which takes place when the volume pedal is at zero. In a live performance, the guitarist picking out the notes of the chord will be easily heard by the audience - as an acoustic phenomenon, not as an amplified sound - in the moment of silence before the swell happens. This can be heard on several live recordings that I have. In a studio environment, the guitarist has more control over the situation and can do a number of things to eliminate the sound of the strings being picked. This gives a result in which the chord is more clearly emerging from nothing.
In quite a few of the recordings of Bobby J, the starting silence is not so present. This is certainly the case in the studio recordings by Alan Thomas, Michael Nicolella and Tim Brady; in these performances I cannot really hear the volume pedal in action. In an earlier section of this essay, I documented a contradiction in my notation that had been remarked upon during the Performing Precarity project seminar. This was to do with the resonance ties, which are placed on each chord and imply that the notes of the chord should be left to ring. There is no sign to damp the strings but there is the indication that the volume pedal should be immediately reset to zero at the start of the next bar. Perhaps the reset of the volume pedal should be interpreted as an alternative way of notating a damping indication?
When confronted with this notation, some guitarists, either by accident or design, have come up with a solution or alternative. Using reverb and delay, chords are allowed to merge and overlap and the dynamic profile becomes flatter. This leads to the situation where the detuned lowest string is sustained as a drone rather than as individual attacks as notated. This use of reverb and delay to merge and overlap chords is mainly found in some of the recordings made in a studio. But not exclusively; Seth Josel’s recording is from a live concert in 2003 and it can be clearly heard that he picks the next chord while the previous one is still sounding. I wonder if this is how he read the ‘damp / non damp’ ambiguity in the notation. Other guitarists take a different approach, keeping each chord in a separate sonic space, and some of these will have been clearly evident in some of the examples previously presented in this essay.
It’s interesting to observe the solutions that are adopted by the various players to the potential problems posed by the notation of the dynamic swell. In some ways, the decisions made about this by the performers are on a very fine line between interpretation and practical problem solving. In a wider context, it’s also interesting to see the ways that different performing traditions can influence an interpretation. This was highlighted during the project seminar, where it was observed that both Vegard Lund and Jan Martin Smørdal brought elements from their past or existing performing activities to their performances of my piece in Oslo. From Jan Martin - the fourth musician to play the piece in the seminar - the use of vibrato or tremolo, from his background as a rock musician. And from Vegard, the articulation of the harmonies as broken chords, clearly derived from his practice as a lute player.
Here is my final set of recorded excerpts, which show approaches to the various issues created by the notation of this 'swell' articulation. The initial excerpts are all from the opening bars of the piece. First, a live performance by composer and guitarist Ben Jamieson, where the attack on the strings can be clearly heard:
ex.33 Bobby J bars 1 - 9, Ben Jamieson:
And here is London-based composer and performer Omri Kochavi, who is the only guitarist in my collection of recordings who uses a hollow-bodied instrument. This gives rise to a very different sound, with the two constituent elements of the timbre of each chord seeming to sound more distinctly separate than in other recordings; a prominent and relatively hard attack, followed by a resonance:
ex.35 Bobby J bars 1 - 9, Omri Kochavi:
VII.
A number of factors combine to make Bobby J a piece that allows space for difference in interpretation. The very bare notation in the score, and also its ambiguities and anomalies. The nature of the instrument that it is written for, with the particular technology of the electric guitar bringing practical problems into play, and also the influence of some of the different performing traditions that individual guitarists might have originated from. Finally, some of the aesthetic preferences of the performer.
Input from different musicians, decision-making and problem-solving; all these contribute to the formation of a varied set of approaches to performing Bobby J. As the composer of the piece, I am keen to learn more about my own music from the performer’s response to my score.
References
Apartment House (2014): Laurence Crane: Chamber Works 1992 - 2009 (Another Timbre, at74x2)
Tim Brady (2006): GO [Guitar Obsession] (Ambiances Magnétiques, AM 156)
Laurence Crane (1985-86): Derridas
Laurence Crane and Andrew Renton (1986): Deriva
Laurence Crane (1999): Bobby J
Laurence Crane (1990): T B Wroblewski
Laurence Crane (1995-96): Four Pieces for Alto and Bass Flutes
Michael Finnissy (2008): Laurence Crane: 20th Century Music (solo piano pieces 1985 - 1999) (METIER, msv28506)
Sean McFarland (2021): 1006 and Resonance (Bandcamp)
Michael Nicolella (2010): Ten Years Passed (Gale Recordings, gale 10-005)
Michael Parsons (1987): Howard Skempton: Chorales, Landscapes and Melodies (Contact, issue 30, p.19)
Håkon Stene (2014): Lush Laments for Lazy Mammal (Hubro, HUBROCD2544)
Philip Thomas (2016): The music of Laurence Crane and a post-experimental performance practice (Tempo, volume 70, issue 275 p.13)
Manuel Zurria (2023): Fame di Vento (ANTS, AG27)