Project presentation

As explained in the introduction, this project has researched from an artistic perspective the two musical dimensions texture and harmony – surface and colour, metaphorically speaking – through systematic creative investigations. Simultaneously, the project has aimed at dealing with how our understanding of these dimensions is embodied and metaphorical, when we listen to, contemplate on and communicate about music. The project has aimed at transcending from dichotomy to complementarity on topics such as categories versus metaphorical perception, structure versus experience, and historicity versus intuition.

Why?

During my education, 20 years ago, with my background in post-jazz and improvised music, I used to consider myself a contemporary jazz musician, whatever that meant. At some point around that time, I started to feel that so called Jazz Theory’s approach to harmony was, for my taste, to paraphrase Irit Rogoff, “too much inherited knowledge and too little working from condition”[1]. Sensing that this imbalance would soon lead me to a dead end, I made, paraphrasing Adrian Leverkühn[2], a pact with the Devil and promised to find my way as a pianist in this music without dealing with chords. Not because I did not like chords or did not understand chords, but rather because I liked chords too much and understood the inherited knowledge too well. I felt a need to meet the music in a field not defined by categories, preconceived structural expectations and generalizable theory. That  decision served me well for the next 15+ years or so. After my large scale Artistic Research Project Habitable Exomusic[3], in which I systematically investigated the dimensions linearity and rhythm, I felt a need to return to the dimensions of harmony and texture, and to revisit my view on these in a systematized format. This project is thus my attempt at paying back my debt to the Devil, returning to dimensions of music that I knowingly chose to generally ignore for more than a decade.

At the same time, something about the musical dimensions of harmony and texture seemed to continuously elude the kind of systematized or hierarchical theory constructions that have shaped how concepts such as e.g. meter or tonality are taught in educations around the world. I wanted to try to work on building a more rhizomatic yet systematic “grand unification approach to harmony and texture”, and to see where that would lead me, artistically as well as in terms of new perspectives.

The main Research Questions at the beginning of the project were:

* How can I as a composer and improvisator via systematic methodical investigations, in artistically informed ways, develop new music with a particular focus on the harmonical, textural and timbral dimensions of the music?

* To what extent can an articulation of a metaphorical perspective qualify this process?

* To what extend will a mapping of my already existing music clarify my work in terms of texture and sound, structurally as well as metaphorically?

* How can I communicate central insights and perspectives to peers and to the outside world, in a manner adequate for the purpose of the project?

A detour through theories on metaphor, cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition has given the project an additional focus on possible cognition approaches through which we might perceive the topic, as well as a multiplicity of mapping strategies within the project.

Among the areas of investigation in the project has been: improvisation, composing for small and large groups of improvisers as well as for classically trained musicians, radical reinterpretations of canonized European “new music”, recordings, record releases, commisioned compositions, mapping of an idiosyncratic harmonic theory, mapping an idiosyncratic theory of texture, mapping of own artistic material as a creative method, mappings of own mental representation as a creative method, context as background, context as investigation, context as material ripe for reinterpretation, metaphor theory, congnitive linguistics, mental representation and embodied cognition, swarm theory – etc.

Metaphor

Historically, linguistic patterns depicting e.g. colour, taste, physicality and emotion have shaped how we have understood harmony and texture in music. Otherwise, why would so many examples from music literature seem to speak of sonorities as dark, harmonies as spicy, rhythms as jagged or dominant chords as being released into tonics? Today, more than a full generation after the writings of Lakoff + Johnson & Ricoeur, we might ask if we would ever be able to convey in meaningful ways such dimensions of art and existence in objective or categorical terms.

If any of us still believe that our thinking is grounded in distinct categories, Ricoeur might argue that we would then be quite far from what actually happens: every observation of a newly encountered phenomenon starts with an embodied, often pre-linguistic comparison to similar experiences from other fields. This drinking cup looks like my folded hands, that sculpture looks like it affords sitting, those clarinets seem to behave like a swarm of insects, that piano sound is watery, and reading this sentence feels as if … (go ahead and finish the sentence by yourself). Lakoff & Johnson, especially in Metaphors we live by argue convincingly “that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined”. We find this tendency in much writing about music: the form of the music as a vehicle for taking the listener on a journey, or the music as a container for communicating (transporting) a specific emotion (an object) to the listener.

Early in this project, I imagined the above perspectives to be central to the artistic investigations of the project. However, I realized while reading and experimenting with applying these theories in my work, that as much as I find the topic of metaphorical-linguistic structures in the conversation on art and music in need of seriously being researched, it would not become the main focus in this project, and if done later, it will not be by me. Researching that topic from the above starting point would become research on the structure of the language surrounding art. As such, it would have to become a theoretical study, and not necessarily to be even undertaken by an artist. This project’s main ambition, on the contrary, was to apply relevant perspectives to an artistic, creative process with the aim of researching through an artistic practice the musical phenomenon of klang (harmony, texture and timbre) – with the aim of making interesting new music along the way.

Nonetheless, my reading on especially the theories of the inescapable embodiment of metaphorical cognition ended up influencing the project greatly, which will be explained in this exposition’s section on texture. I read or re-read texts that touch on the subject by a.o. Paul Ricoeur, George Lakoff, Rafael Núñez, Ursula le Guinn, Marilyn Nonken, Anthony Braxton, Helmuth Lachenmann, Gerard Grisey, Karlheinz Stockhausen & Pauline Oliveros. However, the resulting findings in the project ended up being not mainly about understanding texture and harmony through metaphor. As I will deal with in the Reflections on Cognition and Methods text, the project gradually pointed me towards another model for the relations between metaphor, embodiment, cognition and mental representation than a more strict metaphor theory would have led to.

Before turning down the volume of the metaphor perspective (…), I had build a pedagogical tool kit for using metaphorical thinking as an empowering tool for collective music creation. Instructing a group of young (pre-conservatory level) students for a seven-day project in 2019, I created the Metaphor Card Deck that called for the students’ individual creative reactions to a number of metaphors being presented to them. Freely based on Gardner’s (empirically unsupported, though sympathetic) theory of the multiple intelligences, coupled with a chain of thinking from Lakoff & Johnson, the card deck contained words representing multiple kinds of metaphors: spatial metaphors, visual metaphors, narrative, logical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, orientational, existential, moral and ecological metaphors. Any link to music vocabulary was absent on the cards, therefore being left open to the creative interpretation of the musician.

As a pedagogical tool in that setting, the Metaphor Card Deck worked very well. Later on, discussing with colleagues whether to bring this metaphor-based tool into use in professional contexts, I realized that the problem of doing so lay not in the obvious potential of the concept, but in the pride, vanity and self esteem of most improvising musicians that I know of. There seems to be an expectation among many professional musicians that metaphorical thinking is for amateurs. That is peculiar, if not tragi-comical, given that most musicians I know of speak in metaphors all the time, if analysed through a Lakoff- or Ricoeur- lens.

Let me finish this short discussion about the Metaphor Card Deck by mentioning that if pride and vanity were not a problem, I believe there would be a huge creative potential in coupling parameters and metaphors, which could be quasi-linguistically hinted at as “musical parameter A is to be imagined as depicting metaphor X”. The method is yours to grab. I realized I did not need to force any musician to deal with this against their will, since I found other ways of translating metaphor to parameter in my writing for ensembles of improvisers. I will get back to that in the Texture part of this exposition.

Introduction

Through the Sonic Complexion project I have, from an artistic perspective, investigated the musical dimension(s) of klang[1], with the aim of creating new music and new perspectives. The outcomes of the project are a number of new albums, coming from quite different starting points in terms of how to systematically-artistically investigate texture and harmony.

To explain the outcome of the project very briefly: In the project Sonic Complexion, through a mix of artistic practice and considerations of the relations between music, metaphor and cognition, I arrived at approaching the question of harmony and texture from three quite different angles:

* An idiosyncratic mapping of texture as a multidimensional landscape of perceptively recognizable parameters, functioning as a tool for creatively restructuring the textural possibilities in my music – and offering a model for how to unite the abstract concept of parameter/dimension with an embodied intuitive approach to elements/gestalts and changes, expanding my textural vocabulary.

Main released artwork: “Spirit of the Hive”. Album out June, 2021. 

Link to Spirit of the Hive album audio on Spotify

* A systematic mapping of harmonic possibilities as structural combination, resulting in an extended series of compositions, "covering all possible pitch combinations of 4-5 voices”.

Main artworks: “Fosterchild” (album released October 2019), “Emerald” (composed and recorded, not yet released), et.al.

LINK to Fosterchild album audio on Spotify

* An on-going practice of researching musical colour through contextual reinterpretations, and of expanding my textural and harmonic vocabulary through contextual investigations. Playing my way through a European 20^th century composed New Music context, recording my way around it, and improvising my way out of it.

Main art work: “Anterior Current”, album released June 2020. 

LINK to Anterior Current album audio on Spotify

Album title anagrams

Randolf Moment

Anton Webern

Akutschönes 

Fremont Almond

Arc en ciel

Alfa Ruin

Prelude - la Colombe

Lou's buzzed too, Antoine 

Pärt: fur Alina

Noten Warben (No tan, Webern)

Chaoskünste

Morton Feldman

Ecrie “Clan” 

Prude lamb - cool Eel

Boulez: douze notations

Unfair Prälat

Stockhausen