Creating and accepting instability; the composition and performance of 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales

by Laurence Crane

This essay was mainly written between May and December 2023, although it draws upon writings completed between October 2019 and June 2022.

I.

2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales is a piece of music in one movement, scored for three performers and with a duration of around 10 minutes. I composed it between June and August 2020.

The opportunity to compose the piece came about early on in the life of the Performing Precarity project, and was a direct result of the start of the Covid-19 crisis in March 2020. As an immediate response to the pandemic, Arts Council Norway set up a fund to finance arts projects to be created within Covid-related restrictions. The percussion trio Pinquins secured financial support from this fund to commission six composers, including myself. In my case it became a co-commission, with the origins of my full commission fee split between Arts Council Norway’s funds for Pinquins, and finance from The Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH) for Performing Precarity (PP).

This programme of new works was given the overall title ‘Drive-In’, and consisted of two sets of three pieces each. These sets were alternated over two days in performances at an outdoor location; a patch of grass by the walls of the Akershus Fortress in Oslo, as part of the 2020 Ultima festival. The six pieces in ‘Drive-In’ therefore received multiple performances over the dates 18-19 September 2020. Other than myself, the composers were Lise Herland, Martin Torvik Langerød, Marcela Lucatelli, Ingar Zach and Yiran Zhao.

Because of the co-commission, I composed the piece with a further performance in mind, scheduled be given by Anders Førisdal, Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik in November 2020 at NMH. In fact, between 2020 and 2023 there were a number of performances of the piece undertaken by members of the PP research group, and also by musicians with connections to the project, and my composition became an integral part of the fabric of the PP project.

Photo: Laurence Crane

II.

The members of Pinquins are Sigrun Rogstad Gomnæs, Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen and Jennifer Torrence. On 13 April 2020 I received an email from Jennifer, inviting me to submit a proposal for a piece for the group as part of the application to Arts Council Norway. Here is part of that email:

The idea is a live event with several works for one audience member at a time, possibly for a small group of audience members. The works are performed at a good distance between performers and [the] audience. In some cases through a window or door (for example, at the audience member’s home), in other cases outdoors in a park, a backyard, etc. There are many possibilities. This project will result in compositions which can be performed in a variety of locations and situations. The hope is that this project will result in a collection of works that can be performed in these unprecedented times, but that can also be incorporated in future Pinquins projects far beyond the time of Covid.

Jennifer went on to list some of the criteria for the commissions that had been identified by the members of Pinquins:

• max 5 min duration

• for portable, handheld objects / percussion instruments, voice and body only

• solo, duo, trio (any combination is welcome)

• for 1 audience or small group

• live performance

• no touching / close contact

• preferably outdoors

• analogue and acoustic

• ideally suitable for outreach/diverse audience as well as exclusive concerts

I started to think about what I might do for this and wrote this text as my contribution to the funding application:

In common with all the elements of the larger project, my piece will be composed observing the rules and restrictions imposed because of the threat of Covid-19. I will write a piece for all three members of Pinquins, who will be spatially separated in performance, both from each other and from whoever comprises the audience.

In my piece, all three members of Pinquins will use hand-held, battery-driven megaphones, held in one hand. The score will deploy a restricted number of sound sources, including the voices of the performers. All the sound sources are played directly through the mouthpieces of the megaphones, the non-vocal ones are activated solely by the performer’s other hand, and will all be small and compact enough to be kept in the performer’s back pocket, to ensure maximum mobility [portability] during the performance.

The exact choice of non-vocal sound sources is yet to be made, but at the moment I am thinking about small plastic bags, small dictaphones and guitar tuning pipes. The sounds made will be quite fragile and unstable. In an outdoor performance situation, the conditions are likely to make these sounds even more unstable. The megaphones act as both an amplification system to project the sounds, but also as a sonic microscope, zooming in on the fragility of the sounds. The rough and ready nature of the megaphone’s ‘sound system’ will accentuate this fragility.

There is scope to be able to make a version of the piece that would be performable in a more ‘normal’ situation in the future.

In my proposal statement, I was attempting to describe how I intended to use the external factors in the creation of my piece. On the one hand, the Covid situation, on the other, an exploration of precarity; in the music, as a result of my choice of sound sources, and in the performance, as a result of the conditions. Jennifer’s original email was written at the height of the first Covid lockdown and the situation was constantly evolving. So, for example, the strict idea that the audience in any performance might just be one or two people was gradually relaxed as the situation in Norway improved over that summer.

In June we received confirmation of funding and, after a Zoom meeting with Pinquins, I set to work. During the early stages of work on the composition, I realised that the megaphones were not going to function as I had imagined. They did not process the sound in the way that I had envisaged. With this fundamental aspect of my proposal abandoned, I had to try and re-think some things.

I was stuck for a while. My inability to define the piece stemmed from thinking too much about the external influences. I only found a way out of my impasse when I determined that I should be thinking more directly about the nuts and bolts of the piece and would then hope to make connections with the external factors, as part of the process of discovering and working with the materials. As a result of this decision, there was a shift in my focus and I moved away from the idea of working with materials that were inherently fragile to the possibility of discovering fragility in the conditions of performance.

III.

In 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales, all three performers sing, and play harmonicas and pitch pipes. They also use their smartphones to play back sound files consisting of electronic drones made from sine tones. In the first performances, and in all subsequent performances that occurred outdoors, these drones were played back using bluetooth speakers.

Photo: Laurence Crane

The choice of instruments was partly determined by some of the practical limitations stipulated by the original request from Pinquins. Portability was essential, therefore all the handheld instruments that the performers use must be small enough to be carried and stored in their pockets, or placed on the music stand. Another factor influencing my choice of instruments was derived from one of the initial themes of the PP project; this being the increasing occurrence of trained musicians being required to do things that are outside the remit of their original training. Neither Jennifer, Ane Marthe, Sigrun, Ellen or Anders have been specifically trained to play any of the sound-producing means that I selected for the composition.

As a composer, I have generally written for the instruments that the performers usually play, and have been trained to play, and I have used ‘auxiliary instruments’ (a term for any sort of sound-producing object) on just a few occasions before this. Most notably, in my work for solo cello and ensemble Come back to the old specimen cabinet John Vigani, John Vigani part 3, where the ensemble are required to sing and play objects such as stones, baked bean tins, kazoos, newspapers and plastic bags. A situation of equality exists in the ensemble, where players who cannot play anything at all that well are afforded equal status with immensely talented musicians.

The score for 2-Metre Harmony is handwritten, as is usual for me. It was written on A3 landscape paper and consists of four pages. The first page is a single system, while the other three pages all have two systems. The three players all play from the score and have two staves each; the top one notates what they sing or play, while the lower stave indicates the pre-recorded material that they play back on smartphones.

The piece falls into seven sections which are defined in the score by the placing of rehearsal letters. The notation moves between conventionally notated bars, with metronome markings, and what one might call ‘clock time’ (without bars). My main reason for notating the score using landscape format was because it is better suited to music that uses any sort of ‘clock time’ notation. I also wanted to make sure that the score did not consist of too many pages, as an endeavour to keep all the performance materials - instruments and sheet music - as streamlined and as compact as possible. In fact, in the filmed performances that took place in 2020-2021, Ellen, Jennifer and Anders performed from memory.

IV.

The work opens with the three performers singing five iterations of an E major triad in second inversion. Immediately after this opening, the music proceeds as a series of three-part chord sequences played either by a trio of harmonicas or by a trio of identical pitch pipes. For the pitch pipes, I specify a chromatic instrument made by the Japanese company, Tombo. This instrument is called a Tombo P13e Pitch Pipe (Chromatic), and its use in my piece was decided on after some research and testing of various pitch pipes. For the harmonicas, I request six instruments in different keys, with each performer using two harmonicas.

One of the sections that occurs early on in the work sets up a relationship between the parts which is subsequently abandoned. At rehearsal letter A in the score, the three players work through their individual parts in separate, independent tempi. They do not co-ordinate with the other members of the ensemble. During this section, a pre-recorded sine tone drone - a chord of E minor - is activated by two of the three players on their smartphones. This initiates a drone texture which is then continuous to the end of the piece.

After this section, the independent tempi do not persist, and the articulation of the chord sequences from letter B to the end is always in strict rhythmic unison. The harmonic progression of the drones operates independently from the structures articulated by the live instrumental chorales, and the overall harmonic landscape of the piece could be described as polytonal.

At this point, it might be worth clarifying my appropriation of the word ‘chorale’. Maybe it’s not only my appropriation, as the word generally has moved beyond its original definition of a harmonisation of a hymn, or a piece of music sung as part of a church service. It’s now the case that the word ‘chorale’ is often used to describe a piece or passage consisting of a sequence of block harmonies and it’s in this context that I am using it. I regard the word ‘chorale’ and the term ‘chord sequence’ to be synonymous here.

The chorale on harmonicas that starts at letter D in the score is the central one of the piece and its four-chord structure (C major - G major - E major - B major) also traces a breathing cycle, with the first and third chords of the sequence being articulated on the harmonicas by exhaling and the second and fourth by inhaling.

During the chorales, there are always two musicians playing back the sine tone drone. The live instrumental chorales are punctuated by moments where the pre-recorded drones shift from one chord to the next. The process is always the same; the player who is not currently playing a drone activates a new track where the old chord slides into the new chord; one of the players already playing a drone stops their track and starts another, which plays the new chord; the other player already playing a drone stops their track. These functions rotate between players; there is a different configuration of players at each of these transition points. If these sections go well in performance, there should be a gradual and smooth shift between electronic chords.

The ending of the piece is inconclusive. A chord sequence merely stops before it has got going and the drones fade out. The implication is that the process could continue or just start up all over again.

V.

In composing this piece, I attempt an exploration of potential situations of precarity and instability in performance created by the following factors:

1. The use of non-standard or auxiliary instruments that the musicians may not have played before.

2. The nature of some of these instruments, particularly the harmonicas. I specify 10-hole diatonic harmonicas, each musician has two harmonicas in different keys. When a harmonica is played, each hole has two pitch possibilities, depending on whether the performer is exhaling (blowing) or inhaling (drawing). My notation specifies the pitch required and adds an indication of the hole number and whether or not the player is required to blow or draw. So, for example, at letter C I ask player 3 to produce the note C4 by blowing on hole 1 of an instrument in C major. I write the note in staff notation and annotate above the stave ‘1b’ (which indicates hole 1, blow). This seems as if it should be reasonably straightforward, but for someone not specifically trained to play this instrument, it’s not necessarily the case. The embouchure has to be precise, otherwise you will risk creating a different pitch altogether.

3. The distance between the players. Physical distancing regulations made because of Covid stipulated a minimum 2-metre gap between people, to try to reduce the risk of infection. My score contains an instruction stipulating this distance, and performances of all the pieces written for ‘Drive-In’ went ahead with this minimum distance in place. The gap between the players might increase the likelihood that exact vertical alignment of the notes of a chord is difficult to achieve consistently throughout the piece.

4. The performance environment and conditions. All the early performances took place outdoors, all in locations around Oslo. They were documented on film as part of the PP project. In the two outdoor performances in Oslo by the members of the PP research group, weather conditions were challenging; cold, rain and wind in the first one, in December 2020, and snow, ice, wind and sub-zero temperatures in the second, in December 2021.

5. The use of bluetooth speakers. Their connection cannot always be completely relied upon, particularly in an outdoors environment. This is, of course, a kind of instability which has often existed in performances using any sort of electronic set up.

VI.

The musical materials that I use in 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales consist entirely of triads, presented in both root position and inversion, particularly in second inversion. The three players always sing, or play the same live instrument, at the same time. When player 1 is playing harmonica then players 2 and 3 are doing the same; when player 2 is singing, then so are players 1 and 3; when player 3 is playing a pitch pipe then players 1 and 2 are doing the same. There is no moment in the piece where one of them is playing and the other two are not. Although there is strictly no mixing of colours in the live sounds, there is the simultaneous layering of the pre-recorded sine tones and the live material. For the most part, the musicians proceed in exact rhythmic unison, apart from the one section already mentioned where simultaneous independent tempi are deployed.

It’s not unusual for me to use a single timbre instrumentation, to use unadorned major and minor triads, or to require a group of players to play completely together in rhythmic unison. These behavioural aspects are familiar to anyone who knows my work in general. In the case of 2-Metre Harmony I wanted to explore what might happen when the ensemble was working completely as a single organism, throughout the piece. Ensemble unity is, of course, a vitally important part of all chamber music practice. But I wondered if I could explore it in an even more extreme fashion, by requiring the performers to work with these materials in unusual performance conditions, the constituent factors of which had already been determined by the particular stipulations of the commission.

My quest had been partly initiated by activity and discussion at our very first PP research group workshop, which took place at Ugla Lyd studio in Nesodden, Oslo over two days in October 2019. This workshop began with a discussion session led by Anders, which explored the concept of ‘the network’. In his doctoral thesis, Anders examined radically idiomatic instrumental practice in selected solo guitar music and as part of his research he considered the act of playing the guitar as being constructed of a network of performative and mechanical relationships. Subsequent to his PhD, he happened upon a reference to Grundlagen des natürlichen Systems der Musikinstrumente, a little-known book by the German musicologist Herbert Heyde, in which Heyde details the construction of musical instruments as a network. In a musical instrument there is a signal coming in and a signal coming out, and between these two signals there are a number of links in the network which are structurally and functionally interdependent. Although Heyde was writing about conventional musical instruments, it seemed clear that this notion could be extended and applied to non-conventional instruments or unusual inter-connectivities in performance. The discovery of this book by Anders was a chance event but it was crucial for our project. Using Heyde’s concept as a model, we discussed the ways in which certain compositions can be conceived and organised by thinking of an ensemble of performers as a network, where the individual members function completely as a single unit, and where co-existence, interdependency and sharing are important concepts when formulating both the way that the music behaves and also the approach that the performing musicians might take. Through workshop performances - by Jennifer, Ellen and Anders - and through discussion, we attempted to pinpoint the ways in which two particular pieces exhibited aspects of network-based thinking.

In Simon Løffler’s work b, the three musicians are collectively playing one instrument, a single sound source. The ‘instrument’ in question is invented specifically for this piece; an amplified, daisy-chained linking of guitar effects pedals and a loose jack cable. The players also have fluorescent lights, which they turn on and off with switches on the floor. The network is a mechanical one, dependent entirely on electricity to enable a sonic result, but it is also a human network, with the actions of three separate musicians constantly impacting upon each other and upon the whole.

The network in Christian Blom’s Star Spangled Banner is of a different nature. This piece is for classical guitar and played in the conventional way by one person (Anders), but also with the assistance of two extra players (Jennifer and Ellen), who each take charge of three tuning pegs. There is no amplification involved. The guitarist plays a transcription of the American national anthem, which is subjected to various melodic, harmonic and rhythmic distortions as a result of the activities of the two auxiliary players. In October 2019, the composition was not yet in its final form, with the score consisting of the basic transcription, with some pencil indications as to the relevant tuning pegs to manipulate. Various possibilities for the score were discussed and trialled in the workshop session.

Photo: Laurence Crane

Perhaps relevant to this is something mentioned in our opening discussion session at that first workshop, that the individual pedals are also a network in themselves, constructed from numerous different components. The probability of something failing is increased by the involvement of more and more elements, and by the proliferation of the number of connections that exist in the network. This unease about the stability of the instrument could well feed a performance anxiety. b is a thrilling piece to watch and listen to, particularly in a concert, but it is also an unsettling experience. The lights spluttering on and off and the sometimes rough and harsh sounds made by the feedback can give rise to a feeling in ones own imagination that the whole system is close to collapse. How much of this feeling is also experienced by the players?

Observing the session on Christian Blom’s Star Spangled Banner, which took place on the second day of our initial workshop with the composer in attendance, I found myself thinking about the differences in the ways that the human networks operate when these two particular pieces are performed. In Simon Løffler’s work, it seems clear that there is no hierarchy in the ensemble, all the players are equal and are pursuing the same goal, all being part of a shared effort to play the piece on this single sound apparatus. There is a linking of the constituent mechanical parts of the instrument, as a result of the daisy-chaining of the pedals and the cable, but there is also an analogous linking of the three human beings that participate in the performance. This is partly related to the fact that all the mechanical components that go to construct the network that is the ‘instrument’ are linked, and the players are linked to these; the actions of one player will affect the results of the actions of another player, and so on. No constituent part of the instrument is superior to any other part and, as a result, all parts are equal and this is reflected by the human relationships in the ensemble unit.

There is also a psychological equality, the result of a sense of shared endeavour, which I think is also partly brought about by the situation of precarity that this particular set up gives rise to. About two thirds of the way through the piece, a series of visual moments start up, where the players periodically place their right hand on the left arm of the player on their right hand side. It looks like a gesture of reassurance, it seems to be saying “We can get though this”. But it is also a physical linking gesture, which seems to mirror the way that the instrument itself is constructed, from links in a chain. Interestingly, the composer states in the score prelims that the gesture is not intended as a theatrical one. While writing this essay, and after showing him what I had written about the performance practice of his piece, I had a conversation by email with Simon, in which he wrote the following:

I like very much that we have different conceptions of the part where the players begin to touch one another. For me, they do so in order to transmit the static electricity of the lights via their bodies through the loose jack cable into sound. It’s a function in other words. Your description is more psychological, and I like that too; that aspect is certainly there, in spite of whether I ‘composed’ it or not.

The internal relationships in the network created by Christian Blom’s piece are much more difficult to define. Star Spangled Banner also involves a single instrument - a classical guitar - and it also involves three players. But unlike the instrument in b, this guitar has not been invented specially for the piece and is instantly recognisable as a conventional instrument. Before the music starts, the listener or observer might well make an assumption about the hierarchy, based on the fact that there is one player out of the three who looks like he is going to do something that is inherently more skilful than what the other two players are about to do. A natural conclusion of this might be that the network is a hierarchical one and that the guitarist is the most important part of that network. This notion is dismantled as soon as the auxiliary performers start to manipulate the tuning pegs on the guitar.

Anders remarked after the workshop on a certain amount of unease that he experienced while performing Star Spangled Banner. One of the things that he had to work hard at while playing the piece was maintaining his usual posture and playing position, as it was constantly under threat from the pressure applied by Jennifer and Ellen when they manipulated the pegs.

I think that it’s possible to read the relationship between the constituent parts of the performance network in Star Spangled Banner in two completely different ways and therefore I think that the way that the network functions in this piece is inherently ambiguous. On the one hand, a conclusion could be drawn that the two players manipulating the tuning pegs are disrupters. The guitarist is trying to do his job but the other players are preventing him from doing it properly. This view is reinforced by what the listener actually hears in the performance. It’s an instantly recognisable melody being twisted and turned in different directions so that it sounds ‘wrong’ because the musical material is being severely disrupted. The associations of this melody, and its well-known usual function, also could give rise to the view that its disruption is a political statement.

But another reading of the network relationship in Christian’s piece is that the three players are all in it together, and that what might have been seen as disruptive behaviour by the players on the tuning pegs is actually collaborative. And therefore, because of the collaboration, there is no hierarchy as such, even though the guitarist is doing something that he has been trained to do and the other players are not. In this reading of the function of the network, all the players have the shared aim of realising the manipulation of the melody, and although the guitarist appears to be fighting the process by trying to remain as ‘normal’ as possible, he is actually complicit.

VIII.

I’ve spent a bit of time discussing the pieces by Simon Løffler and Christian Blom that we looked at early on in the project in 2019 because at some temporal distance from that period - writing this during 2023 - I am able to see that the discussions that we had then, as a research group, and the subsequent reflection texts that we all produced, about the network model and how it can be applied to the pieces by Simon, Christian and others, undoubtedly influenced me when I came to compose 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales in the summer of 2020.

I do see my piece as sharing some central behavourial aspects with b, even though the two works are, in so many ways, far apart in character and intent, with radically different sounding surfaces. Similar to Simon’s piece, 2-Metre Harmony treats the ensemble as a single homogenous unit, in which all three players exist as component parts in a larger network; all are equal and all are equally important. In both compositions, the trio is completely unified in function and purpose. There is no hierarchy of players, no foregrounding of musical lines, no separation of any particular player, even for a short passage or two.

In my piece, the material choices that I have made are crucial to this; the use of triads which are always presented in single timbres. In b, a defining factor is that all three players are involved in operating a single apparatus; the musicians are physically close to each other and are greatly interdependent, a situation that is emphasised by the visual gestures of contact that they perform towards the end of the piece.

Photo: Lea Ye Gyoung

In 2-Metre Harmony the players are far apart, a situation that originates from the influence of Covid and which adds to the precarity of performing my composition. There is an inherent difficulty in trying to maintain the ‘single instrument’ status of the ensemble while being spatially separated. In reflecting on his experience of performing my piece, Tomas Laukvik Nannestad, guitarist and lutenist, states that a big part of performing it is a feeling of being dependent on the other two performers, and the need to trust that the right notes come out at the right time. He felt a strong awareness that he was “only one part of the chorale”.

In the narration to his film Being Together, made as the PP project’s contribution to a symposium on my work that took place in London in October 2021, Anders talks about both mine and Simon’s pieces, describing b as requiring “an interdependency that goes beyond what one finds in a typical chamber music situation” and later going on to discuss how this sentence might well apply to my composition, talking about how my piece “highlights the collaborative and shared aspect of musical performance”.

He expands upon this further, in the final passage of his narration:

2-Metre Harmony, like Simon Løffler’s b, is a material network, the establishing of relations between the three performers in the act of performing, in the act of maintaining the shared space. It is vital to recognise the extent to which the particular space of performance only exists as long as it is shared – if the spell of the event which is the musical performance is broken, if the communality of space for some exterior or interior reason collapses, if the nodes of the network come unhinged, in short, if the sense of care and sharing is lost, this is also the case for the work. This sense comes about through a collaborative practice that is permeated by – and indeed feeds on – risk, interdependency and contingency.

IX.

Earlier, I listed a number of factors that were ‘written in’ to my piece, to potentially cause instability in performance and to explore the implications of these instabilities. Some of these were imposed by the stipulations of the commission contract, determined by Covid-related restrictions on the conditions of music performance. Some details were deliberately imposed by myself, as a way of exploring how precarity might occur in performances of the composition. And other characteristics of the piece are common to my work in general.

I now wish to assess the results of my research and to reflect on what I have learnt from my various experiences of the piece being performed, while also bringing in more of the reflections of musicians - my PP research group colleagues and others - who have experience of performing the work. I’m mainly interested in how the aforementioned factors have affected the performers and the way that the piece is performed, but also on how it is received and listened to.

The first performances of 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales were presented by the trio Pinquins at an outdoor location in Oslo in September 2020. Conditions were mild, with pleasant early autumn sunshine. Subsequent outdoor performances were in much more challenging weather conditions. There have also been a number of indoor performances; at the Artistic Research Forum in Trondheim (20 October 2021), at the ECLAT festival in Stuttgart (3 February 2022) and at NMH in Oslo (19 May 2023, and other dates).

Following the premiere performances by Pinquins at Ultima, the first planned performance by members of the PP research group was scheduled for 25 November 2020 at NMH, indoors, as part of a seminar for the project. But this fell victim to the pandemic and was cancelled as a result of new restrictions that were introduced, following rising Covid infection levels at that time. So, an outdoor performance with no audience was arranged and took place in Oslo at Karpedammen, Akershus Fortress, on 8 December 2020. This was documented by the project’s filmmaker, Lea Ye Gyoung. A year later this was repeated, with Anders, Jennifer and Ellen again performing the piece, also outdoors, this time in the Ekebergparken in Oslo, again just for Lea and her cameras. The subsequent film of this performance was shown online at the Eclat festival.

For the two filmed performances in Oslo in 2020 and 2021, the three members of the PP group memorised their parts. I think that this results in a situation where the connection in performance between the players is heightened, and is more intense. Rather than burying oneself in the score, particularly at moments of uncertainty, the player relies to a large extent on connectivity with fellow players in the moment. Visually, these performances from memory look good too, as there is nothing extraneous on stage. The streamlined portability requested by the original commission brief has been fulfilled. But with no audience, and with the performance being filmed, this could also be seen as one step removed from a realistic scenario. A complete breakdown in this sort of performance situation is not the same as if it were to happen in a formal concert with an audience, where there is arguably more at stake.

Photo: Lea Ye Gyoung

Aside from all that, my impression is that the outdoor conditions were the largest factor, of all those that I have previously listed, in creating instability in performance. In the conventional concert hall, the environment is to a large extent protected and controlled. There are a set of behavioural rules, the venue operates with accepted conventions, and there is usually a team of people ensuring that everything is under control and runs smoothly, without interruption from errant forces. There is no such control in the outdoors, and external conditions of all kinds cannot be kept at bay.

As mentioned already, Pinquins performed in calm weather and conditions in September 2020. But for the PP research group, with both filmed performances taking place in winter, the weather had more of an influence on proceedings. In December 2020 they performed under plastic sheeting; the rain was persistent, and therefore noisy, and there was a reasonable amount of wind too. On the audio of the different takes that were done for this film, the sound of the water is so incessant that it almost gives the impression that the musicians are performing next to a stream or a river.

All three players spoke afterwards of the difficulty of not being able to hear the others properly, not being able to hear the endings of the chords, sometimes only being able to hear a faint buzz of the other harmonicas. In her reflective text on this, Jennifer provided a beautiful metaphor when describing the entry of the slightly louder pitch pipes after a passage devoted to the harmonicas. “They were almost like light beacons at sea”, she wrote.

In Ekebergparken, a year later, conditions were even more extreme. The temperature was well under freezing, there was snow and ice and also cold wind. All this led to a struggle for the players to concentrate on the music, as they found their feet and fingers going numb with cold or, as the harmonicas filled up with moisture because of the cold, found that the possibility of clean and accurate attacks on the notes became near impossible. In Lea’s film made at the Ekebergparken, a short text reflecting on these performance issues, which was written by Anders after the event, is presented as an onscreen narration.

In a written text by Ellen after the Karpedammen event, she reflected on some of the difficulties:

The precarity of the nature of the small instruments being played outdoors immediately became very present and occupied a lot of tension in my performance. Unlike working on the piece in my rehearsal space, the harmonicas quite fast were filled with moisture and produced a sound that was almost not audible and for sure not pretty. The listening conditions were also challenging of course, with wind blowing some dry leaves over the stage in combination with city sounds. While playing it was hard, sometimes impossible, to hear what Anders and Jen were playing.

And Jennifer, writing directly to me, said this:

It was raining the entire time and I am afraid the recording is almost only the sound of rain hitting the plastic roof. (Not the sound image what you had wished for in the slightest…). Because of this it was also incredibly difficult to hear each other (much harder than in September), even at the distance of 2 meters. I could basically only hear the buzz of the other harmonicas playing (especially in the low pitches), but any sense of the harmonic structure was nearly lost.

What you lose in control, you gain in atmosphere. There’s something poetic and magical about the sound of the rain or the wind intervening in the music that I have composed, as that music itself struggles to maintain a presence. Lea’s beautiful films of the outdoor performances really emphasise this, as they are shot in a particularly poetic style.

There were also other types of interventions in the outdoors. In the recording that I have of a Pinquins performance, a church bell chimes early on in the piece and, a little later, a ships horn sounds (the location was near Oslo harbour). In a glorious coincidence, the ships horn is in the same key as the music at that point. These were beautiful, unintended moments. Interventions from the outside world which, in the circumstances, we should think of as welcome rather than unwelcome.

As far as I know, the bluetooth speakers have not failed at any performance so far. Of course, the use of any electronics adds an extra layer of risk to a performance (this is not a reason why they should not be deployed) but there’s something about using bluetooth technology outdoors that seems especially uncertain. I myself participated in one of the indoor performances, part of the PP concert at the ECLAT festival in Stuttgart. In this performance, bluetooth speakers were replaced with a direct input into the PA system in the hall. Also, both Ellen and myself used laptops to play the sine tone drones. All three of us had overhead microphones for amplification in the hall, which seated a couple of hundred people. As a result, and also because Ellen and myself read from scores in this performance, the whole thing has a look which contrasts with that of the other performances.

Documentary footage from the festival shows Ellen, Jennifer and myself on a bare stage with a spatial set up; it looks like we are probably as much as six or eight metres apart from each other. Ellen and I both have two pieces of stage furniture (a chair and a small table) on which we place our various instruments and electronics. Jennifer has less, having opted to play from memory and use her smartphone. The overall picture is of three musicians at ‘work stations’ which seem to have quite a lot of paraphernalia. It’s a very different image from those preserved from the outdoor performances by Jennifer, Ellen and Anders, where an imagined scenario might be that the performers have found themselves in the location and have spontaneously decided to play the piece, with the bare minimum of equipment that they are carrying.

Despite the potential difficulties generated by spatial separation, some of the musicians who have performed the piece seemed keen to embrace even more complex spatialisation than merely being at least two metres apart. Jennifer documented the different spatial configurations tried out in the December 2020 filming:

We did 3 versions. One in a triangle formation facing each other, one in a triangle formation facing away from each other, and one in a line at about 4 meters distance from each other. I couldn’t hear much in any of these cases, but when facing each other we could at least be sure we were playing the same instrument at the same time. When our backs were turned away from each other there was (as would be expected) a heightened sense of searching for the other people. But I couldn’t hear Anders at all and could only hear a faint buzz from Ellen. The result of this performance is probably only slightly more accurate than our Zoom rehearsals. A sort of natural latency.

The challenge that some of this spatialisation created was, paradoxically, sometimes enjoyable, and perhaps liberating, as Ellen recounts:

I enjoyed the ‘crazyness’ of being placed really far apart from each other (take 3), it felt absurd in a wonderful way barely hearing anything from the others at all…really just experimenting and see if something came out of it.

And here is Tomas Laukvik Nannestad, writing about the placements in the indoor performances at NMH:

We performed the piece quite a few times, and wound up doing slightly different things with our placements each time. I think there was only one time where we played it ‘on stage’ so to say, usually opting to stand around the audience or behind in some way instead. This is how we did it in the final recital, where we also dimmed the lights, not to give a sleepy atmosphere, but to rather make the performance situation less ‘classical’ - less ‘performer on stage performing to the audience’ kind of vibe.

I wasn’t at this particular performance and have not seen any documentation of it but I imagine that if the three players were surrounding the audience then the spatial distances will have been relatively large, which would probably make synchronicity even harder to achieve. I also wonder if this idea of taking up performance positions in the hall that are the absolute opposite of the ‘performer on stage performing to the audience’ scenario might actually alter the way that the piece is presented and received, in the sense that the music becomes in some way more private and, as a consequence, the listener’s reception of it is more casual, less formal.

This idea of a private, less formal performance does seem to suit the piece quite well in some respects. All the films of the outdoor performances give an impression of a musical experience being shared among the three performers, with the general lack of an audience at these performances giving rise to the idea that we, the viewers, have somehow been allowed to eavesdrop on a private event. In the case of Pinquins, who did have a small audience, this lack of formality was accentuated by the casual way in which the audience had assembled outdoors, on the grass. This sense of the piece was reinforced in Stuttgart in February 2022 by an occurrence on our first day at the ECLAT festival. On meeting up with Ellen and Jennifer to have our initial rehearsal, we found no available rooms and therefore decided to work on the floor in a corridor, outside one of the performance spaces in the main venue. Sitting on our haunches, and crouched over scores and phones placed on the floor, we rehearsed the piece while theatre technicians, preparing the hall for the opening concert of the festival, kept walking past us carrying various items of kit, large and small. The nature of this rehearsal was made more significant by the fact that it was the first time I had seen Ellen and Jennifer in person since January 2020.

Looking back, I think I am unconvinced that spatial separation in itself does much to destabilise. Just being a little apart from your ensemble colleagues certainly makes exact simultaneity of attack, and ensemble precision, a little more difficult than if you were placed closely together, side by side. But professional musicians would see this as something to be overcome after a little practice. I do think that when environmental conditions are added to the mix, then any slight problems with spatialisation become magnified and accentuated and therefore more influential on both performance and reception.

How much is the use of non-standard instruments, which the players have not been trained to play, a contributing factor to states of precarity in performance? I don’t really know, but I do think that this will depend on exactly who is involved. Percussionists, such as the members of Pinquins, will be well used to playing all sorts of things, as ‘percussion’ is now not restricted to the battery of conventional instruments that one sees in an orchestral percussion section. And any list of instruments that an experienced contemporary percussionist has played in their career to date may well include small ‘wind’ instruments, such as the harmonicas and pitch pipes that I use in 2-Metre Harmony.

Shortly after the December 2020 outdoor performance, Ellen wrote the following words about playing the unfamiliar instruments:

I enjoyed that these instruments are not ‘mine’ – that gave a certain humorous and caring approach to the score, not really with more distance than usual or a feeling of not ‘fixing it’, but a strengthened focus on what we are good at: the listening and the artistic ability and flexibility to sense and act together with our colleagues in the moment. The piece became not about the instruments, but about the three of us in a way, how we are as artists and the physicality of our performance.

Elsewhere, Tomas described the experience of playing an unusual instrument. He wrote of “an uncertainty of what sounds will actually come out”, then adding that this was the case when initially learning the piece, the implication being that this uncertainty lessened as rehearsals progressed. Accordionist Maren Sofie Nyland Johansen, who took part in a number of performances at NMH with Tomas, and also with Elias Nurmi, wrote this about her experience of performing 2-Metre Harmony :

I find the piece to be very fragile and see-through, especially the part for only the voice. I am not a singer and therefore easily feel a bit out of control when I get nervous because of my breath.

And she goes on to say:

When performing the piece I’ve never felt truly at ease (which maybe you shouldn’t?), I think it´s about both the instrumentation, and the see-through textures.

Perhaps the most destabilising factor in the actual instrumentation of 2-Metre Harmony is the unpredictability of the harmonicas. If you have very little experience of playing a harmonica, it’s possible to fail to get the pitch that you are aiming for if your embouchure is not quite perfect. Here’s Maren Sofie again:

For my part, one of my harmonicas also often wouldn’t produce every note, and it was never predictable when something could happen. The control over the breath also applies to the instruments, I feel it is very quickly noticeable if one is out of breath or a bit nervous, because the breath gets a little shaky.

It’s easier to see the invented instrument used in Simon Løffler’s b as being more difficult to adapt to than those in my instrumentation, although perhaps this assessment is influenced by the more overt difficulty of Simon’s piece. There’s a general feeling that the particular instruments that I have used in 2-Metre Harmony are not too troublesome in themselves, but their mere unfamiliarity induces certain states of anxiety and nervousness, which then affect execution. Also a factor is the transparent and exposed nature of the surface of the piece - what Maren Sofie calls “the see-through textures” - which is very much a characteristic of my music in general.

X.

We strive for perfection in performance but when we fall short, how do we feel when the score is not perfectly realised? Can we embrace the things that are imperfect in the performance?

One of the initial aims of the Performing Precarity project was to explore the possibility of a performance practice that attempts an acceptance of unstable performance situations and which places less emphasis on absolute mastery and total control of events. In a reflective text written after the session in December 2020, when 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales was performed and filmed, Ellen wrote the following:

A goal or perhaps rather a strong wish of the project is to be able to embrace precarious and unstable situations from the stage, whilst playing. We want to emphasize that precarious situations have a certain quality embedded in them, a special tension, moments of ‘verity’. In the project I seek to get away from my embodied habit of judging and wanting to secure performances. I want to move somewhere else, to a performance sphere and performance practice where the listening, playing and way of being is flexible, transparent and fluid, and somewhat more ‘honest’…whatever that means…

She went on to document the range of experiences that occurred during this performance of 2-Metre Harmony ; having to accept that it was not possible to make a beautiful sound with the harmonicas, which had filled up with water due to the weather conditions; having to give up on the aim of being completely together with the other two players because she could not properly hear them; sometimes having to ‘let go’ of the pulse, the timing; having to be flexible and accept the unexpected results. She described the way that her listening became “super intense because of the fact that we could barely hear each other” and she acknowledged that she enjoyed the focus and feeling of alertness that resulted from this situation. Ellen also described the intensity of trying to read the body language of the other players, as she was the player designated to visually lead the performance. She talked about “…a strange sensation of leading someone / something I barely could hear.”

Earlier, I described that one of the aims of writing 2-Metre Harmony was to make a piece that was weighted towards generating some instabilities when it was performed. I wanted to see what transpired when these unstable and sometimes uncontrollable factors were allowed to play their part. I now want to try and summarise my thoughts about the precise levels of instability in performances of my own work. As one of the composers in the PP research group, the question I want to ask is how much instability is acceptable to the composer?

In live performances of my work, I often enjoy the imperfections and the slight differences that occur each time a supposedly identical phrase is repeated. I like the feeling that sometimes everything is on a knife edge, and that there is a delicate balance that is constantly shifting. The excitement of this sort of live performance creates good listening conditions, it draws the listener in. An ideal situation sees the performers taking the audience with them, and in those instances there is a strong feeling of community in the room. Some of the most compelling performances of my music that I have heard in live concerts have had at least some of these qualities.

There is no real difference in the type of musical material that I use in 2-Metre Harmony from that used in many other works of mine. The criteria that I utilise to bring about situations of instability in the piece are all related to the circumstances and conditions of the performance, and some decisions about the instrumentation, rather than the actual material. When writing about performances of 2-Metre Harmony, I have already documented my fascination with the interventions of the outdoor conditions. A certain amount of instability regarding the articulation of the harmonica chords, their sound competing with the sound of the rain and the wind, and affected greatly by the cold conditions, can give interesting, unusual and often beautiful results. As Ellen has observed, these moments have a special quality to them.

In the filmed performance at the Ekebergparken, there’s a moment where the transition from one sine tone drone to the next is not effected smoothly and there is an abrupt jolt in the electronic texture. Almost certainly created by one of the performers understandably losing concentration because of the cold conditions, or maybe because of a malfunction in the technology, it has therefore been generated by one of the performance conditions that is partly there to explore instability. But for some reason, I find it far more difficult to be reconciled to this blemish than I can accept the imperfections in the harmonicas, or other performance vulnerabilities caused by the interventions of the weather. In my mind at least, this disruption of the drone is perhaps one instability too far.

What is an acceptable level of instability? At the heart of all this is a conflict in my own mind, which I feel I cannot adequately resolve. From my perspective as the composer, it is certainly interesting to explore these states of fragility and to observe and reflect on what happens when performers lose a certain amount of control over the situation, and then have to learn to accept that. Despite all their best efforts and experience, they cannot cover every unforeseen eventuality and cannot master every situation. But although I am not always interested in the idea of a completely perfect performance, I think I am fundamentally unwilling to embrace all types of instability. In other words, I want an imperfect performance on my own terms.

All this leads me to think about the possibility of 2-Metre Harmony failing in performance. The piece is emphatically not set up to fail and at no point in its conception did I intend for it to completely collapse during a performance. I did not set out to write a piece which accepts any outcome at all. And in fact, none of the performances fail, in the sense that none of them completely fall apart. They hang together but with, at times, very precarious and uncertain moments.

Composers who write notated music are well used to the fact that at a point in the process - when they hand over their score to the performer - they will lose an amount of personal control over the performance of their piece. I have written elsewhere in this project’s outputs about how the PP project has taught me to be more accepting of this loss of control, and I have found this development to be a very beneficial experience.

A performance that tips over from a state of being on the brink to somewhere near a state of collapse - or indeed an actual collapse - raises many questions and conflicts. I come back to the fact that if I set up situations where precarity in the music and in the performance conditions might play a part in destabilising the performance, I still feel uneasy about how much licence to give this approach. How much is too much? When does a precarious performance become what we might think of as a ‘bad’ performance? Does a bad performance then lead to a perception by the listener that it is a bad composition?

XI.

My own relationship with performance is an uneasy one. The pianist and writer Philip Thomas, in an article published in the music periodical Tempo in 2016 titled The music of Laurence Crane and a post-experimental performance practice, wrote this about my music:

Despite its visual simplicity, anyone with an uncertain technique should be warned against performing this music, in which the minutiae of technical variability are exposed and very apparent.

Philip’s explicit warning arrived over 30 years too late for me. As someone with an extremely uncertain technique and rudimentary performing skills on piano - and on everything else for that matter - I am, according to him, the wrong person to be performing my own music. He’s almost certainly correct.

But perform it I did, and sometimes still do, despite a tendency to suffer from performance nerves in concerts. Original involvement as a performer of my own work came about through necessity. On leaving full time education in 1983, and attempting to figure out how I might function as a composer in the UK, where the new music world at that time showed a strong antipathy towards the sort of music that I and several others were writing, I took my cue from the activities of composers that I had already been aesthetically influenced by; Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons and John White, among others, who had all been involved in the 1960s / 1970s British experimental music scene in London. For these composers, despite any shortcomings that they might have had as performers, the fusing of the roles of composer and performer was vital, and active involvement in the performance of their own music was part of a practical solution to the challenge of how to get that music heard.

Since the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was active in organising and performing in concerts of music by myself and other like-minded composers, a number of excellent performers and ensembles have become interested and involved in performing my music and this has resulted in me being able to relinquish any role I had as a performer of my own work. I have been fortunate enough to have worked with many superb musicians, and numerous excellent performances and recordings have been the result of these fruitful collaborations.

But I have not yet given up entirely on performing and I still appear from time to time, generally in my own work, even though performance nerves have become increasingly problematic. At the 2022 ECLAT festival, I had intended to make the trip merely as composer and member of the PP project research group. But just before the festival, Anders caught Covid and could not travel, so I was drafted in to play 2-Metre Harmony with Ellen and Jennifer. I was initially excited about this, as I thought it would be a natural development for the performance history of the piece. And so it seemed to be.

Rehearsals went smoothly but in the concert I encountered a problem. This was not completely unforeseen, but certainly unwelcome. I was hit by the sort of performance nerves not experienced at all before the concert but which immediately strike as soon as you start doing anything on stage. Shaky, trembling and sweaty hands, thumping heartbeat and racing heart rate, wobbly voice. It’s a truly horrible feeling, which forces you to dissipate all your energy trying to suppress it. Inevitably, errors start to occur, as your resources of concentration are diverted in the wrong direction.

My memory of that performance troubles me. I hated the feeling of weird disconnection on stage and I fought hard to try to regain control of the situation. I felt that I was the weak link in the trio and that my nerves had induced all sorts of unnecessary errors which tarnished the performance. As part of my preparation for writing this essay, I was braced to review the film footage from Stuttgart, to see just how much went wrong with my performance and to try and reconcile myself to it. But when I received the footage, there was film but no sound. Or rather, there was sound, but because the concert was presented as a Covid-era ‘hybrid’ production, with Lea’s film of the Ekebergparken performance being shown online as we did our performance in the hall, the sound on the footage was the soundtrack of Lea’s film, not the audio recording of our live performance. Therefore, I could not hear our actual performance to review it, and the camera shot is too long for me to be able to ascertain how much my nerves affected me physically. The soundtrack is not at all aligned with where we were in the piece in the hall on the night and because of this, in the concert film we end up taking our bow with the music from Lea’s film still playing, all rather eerie and ghostly.

Photo: Reiner Pfisterer/ECLAT

So, I suppose my contribution to this performance in Stuttgart now resides only in the memory. Perhaps it was a lot better than I remember. Or maybe it was a lot worse.

XII.

At the start of the PP project in 2019, the members of the research group met up for a walk and a discussion in Nesodden, just prior to our first workshop. Ellen asked us all to articulate our thoughts about the direction and the approach that our research should take. What did we all want to get out of the project?

As we all know, six months later a major world event took over and shaped our lives for much of the following couple of years, in ways in which we had not imagined. The project had several performances, meetings and seminars cancelled as Covid infection rates rose in waves and restrictions were periodically brought in to try to curb them. We did whatever we could to keep working on our project. In common with all sectors, the music world was greatly affected by the pandemic and we became acutely aware of what we had taken for granted for many years. Writing now, in 2023, sometime after the end of the pandemic, it seems strange to recall the things that we had to do while it was happening.

Assessing the work that we did over the research period, the impact of Covid is, not surprisingly, profound. Perhaps the image from our project that encapsulates this the most is of Jennifer and Ellen performing Mieko Shiomi’s Music for Two Players I at an outdoor location in Oslo on 5 December 2020. When watching the film of this performance, the first thing that I noticed was a large plastic screen, placed at a point between the two performers. It is there because Shiomi’s score requires the performers to be at five different distances from each other during the course of the piece, and three of these were under the recommended minimum distance between two human beings to avoid potential transmission of the Covid virus.

2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales would not have existed without the intervention of the pandemic and in some ways the piece now seems a bit like a time capsule. For this reason, I have retained the sentence in the prelims to the score which stipulates:

Once the individual instruments are allocated to the performers, they should only be used by those performers. In the event of instruments having to be transferred between performers, the instruments should be quarantined for a period of 72 hours.

I go back to an email that Jennifer wrote in April 2020 as a member of Pinquins, where she envisaged a time where the ‘Drive-In’ programmes might be performed far beyond the time of Covid. I am wondering how one might view my piece if approaches to performing it change in the post-Covid era. Of course, performance practice is a constantly evolving thing, and no-one would expect a piece to be performed in the same way for ever. But where the existence of a composition is so wedded to the circumstances and conditions of performance, and where the piece had such a specific brief and intent, I wonder how one should consider the notion of ‘authenticity’ when evaluating future performances which take place in different circumstances.

The work was originally composed to be presented outdoors, but latterly it has had performances in indoor locations. The indoor performance at ECLAT in Stuttgart took a very different approach to equipment usage, as I have already documented. After the outdoor performance in December 2020, Jennifer wrote the following words to me, detailing her thoughts about bringing the piece indoors:

Now that I have recorded the piece in two different weather conditions (sunny and windy, and cold and rainy), I feel ready to perform the piece in a controlled setting - you’ll be happy to know! It would be great to try to actually play and end the chords together, to actually try to balance the chords, to really HEAR when someone is blowing over more than one hole… I think in a concert hall this piece will start to approach something of what we have experienced in [your] pieces like John White in Berlin – the delicacy of the synchronicity, balance, the slight changes in tempi and durations, and timbre. Let’s see.

If Covid had subsided more quickly than it actually did, would we have continued with outdoor performances? In the post-Covid era, is it necessary to keep performing the piece outdoors and with spatial separation? Once you have removed these two factors, does that affect the authenticity of the piece and its performance? And what happens if the piece is recorded, with the facility to edit things very accurately? It would be possible to record a version where one player is multi-tracked; would this way of doing things completely invalidate the piece?

Photo: Laurence Crane

The initial purpose of composing 2-Metre Harmony was to provide a work for a specific situation at a specific point in time, and consequently to test how elements of that situation might influence and determine some qualities of the performance of the work. But now, things have changed and my way of evaluating the piece is evolving. Although it clearly has its origins in particular historical circumstances, then so have many other pieces of music and I do believe that there is always scope for reconsidering the way that compositions are presented and received. I think I am saying here that authenticity - whatever that is in this context - is not really a problem and I would certainly like to try presenting the piece in different ways in the future, including the possibility of making a studio recording.

With the disappearance of the extreme circumstances that gave rise to the particular details of the commission brief for the piece, perhaps it is now time to give 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales a new context, while always remembering its origins.

References

Christian Blom (2019): Star Spangled Banner

Laurence Crane (2020): 2-Metre Harmony: Uncertain Chorales

Laurence Crane (2007): Come back to the old specimen cabinet John Vigani, John Vigani part 3

Anders Førisdal and Lea Ye Gyoung (2021): Being Together

Herbert Heyde (1975): Grundlagen des natürlichen Systems der Musikinstrumente. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik Deutschland

Simon Løffler (2012): b

Mieko Shiomi (1963): Music for two players I

Philip Thomas (2016): The music of Laurence Crane and a post-experimental performance practice (Tempo, volume 70, issue 275, p.13)