Recently i was awarded the Salvatore Martirano for my work 102nd & Amsterdam, a string trio which employs some of the open notation we have been talking about here at Bigmouths. This posting is a modified version of a talk i gave for the Composer's for at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne during a visit for the award concert— New Music Box mad-blogger Colin wrote a cute little story about the week.
(photo courtesy of Jorge García Valle Méndez).
102nd & Amsterdam was performed at UI-UC by three talented graduate student performers: Asli Gultekin, viola, Yoon-Kyung, cello, and Hanna Yu, violin. The players dove into the piece with great gusto, and the performance was superb. These are excellent musicians, but without a great deal of experience dealing with advanced notation. Working with them made me think quite a bit about the relationship of time to notation and notation to performance praxis, and the way in which notation and our learned relationship to notation shapes our understanding of the roles of musicians in the poietic process.
As i mentioned at the top, the work moves back and forth between traditional shared pulse music, and open pulsed textures (a term i use to indicate music in which different performers do not share a common pulse). It's tempting to associate these open pulse and shared pulse textures to Deleuze's concept of aion and chronos. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari use Messiaen's music as an exemplar of aion, described as a music which manifests “the indefinite time of the pure event or becoming, which articulates relative speeds and slowness independently of the chronological or chronometric values that time assumes in the other modes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 322). Chronos, in contrast, is a time-concept dominated by measuring and division. For Deleuze and Guattari, the chronometric conception of time is presented as a negation of true rhythm, while the aion is something of a philosopher's stone, through which one may glimpse eternity and becoming-animal. Messiaen's music is presented as an exemplar of the aion's rhizomatic nature. i'm quite slow to place my music in such lofty company, but this tension between the chronometric approaches and alternatives is something in which i do seek to explore in my music. Open pulse textures could be considered a form of aion-oriented music, though for me the interesting spots in the piece are neither the open pulse sections, or the close pulse sections, but rather the transition from one to the other. If we wish to see stay within the Deleuzean lexicon, these interactions could perhaps better be seen as a coding and recoding of various territories of time, with the transition points serving as re-negotiations between participants in the project, but how ever one wishes to talk about the relationship between these two approaches, i found the question of time and rhythm to be both philosophically and practically relevant.
There is a lacunae in Deleuze's approach to the question of time and rhythm and (especially) meter; his approach, almost by admission, is focused nearly exclusively on the role of the 'composer;' as Ronald Bogue has pointed out “whenever Deleuze examines any one of the arts, he invariably does so from the vantage of the artist rather than the audience” (Bogue, 3). Now, this perspective does not negates Deleuze's observations on music by any means, but it does require a a reader/consumer of his work to be some what careful, especially when referring to the specifics of compositional and performance practice, and listening experience. Messiaen does, as Deleuze describes, undermine metrical convention, perhaps even to a degree that listeners have a glimpse of the eternal time indicated by Deleuze's aion, but it does so through an extremely chronometric technique; the performers of those work experience the work as a maze of nonretrogradable rhythms and added values, a furious, intense incidence of the fundamental chronometric act: counting. To my mind, Deleuze's focus on aestheic goals of the composer and the esthesic experience of the audience minimizes and devalues the temporal experience of the performers, and misses the fact that the distinctive features of performing time (as a sub-category of poietic time) might be revelatory. I am arguing for a serious consideration of the technai of music, one which consider the differences (abstract and experiential, cultural and practical) between composers, performers, and listeners, not as negations of one another, but as contributors to and partners in musiking.
In that vein, let us consider the (honestly, rather modest) departures from standard notational and rhythmic praxis in this work from a practical and poietic-oriented vantage point. The transistions from open pulse to shared pulse certainly consumed a certain amount of rehearsal time, but one the practical decisions of cueing and page turns were settled, rehearsals proceeded much as rehearsals do, but with a notable exception. The notation of the score did give the performers an unexpected challenge by expanding the portfolio of the performer to include parameters usually reserved for composers (namely the determination of durations of particular passages and textures). What intrigued me about this is the specificity of the reaction to this transfer of agency. One phenomenon was the development of a 'straw man' composer, an imagined set of requirements and decisions which they must divine from a score carefully designed to avoid such decisions. The score was clear enough that there wasn't an overt resentment (the classic new music “but it's too hard” reaction formation) but the ambiguities in the score forced the performers to accept that the answers to their questions (especially about temporal alignment) did not lay in the score. By report, early in rehearsals a pre-existent recording of the work had taken on a role as arbitor of accuracy. Luckily, the nature of the score (mostly through the cue structure, kept that role from persisting for too long; many sections of the score, without a shared pulse and the density and volatility of the texture, makes the performance inescapably variable - an isochronic reproduction of the recording is effectively impossible. In the end, through conversation on consideration, we loosened up the expectations and got to a point where the performance was both quite affective (for the audience) and quite satisfying and comfortable (for the performers).
To be clear, this was a playful set of interactions between people delighting in the challenges presented and questions posed, but what struck me as we moved through rehearsals that these performers did not have trouble succeeding, they had trouble believing that they were succeeding. The experience made me wonder more and more about the relationship between scores and performance (and between composers and performers) which our music education system fosters. These young ladies were doing quite wonderful things with my work, and yet were so concerned with the possibility of failing that they had trouble accepting praise for their achievements. Perhaps a reconsideration of scores which repositions them as opportunities rather than obligations. These performers are at a high level with opportunities to explore music in supportive environments. What of music students without such opportunities?
More on this last point will follow.
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Works Cited:
Bogue, Roland. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts.New York: Rutledge, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateus.Minneapolis, 1987.