Semester 2. Get back to work!

The first half of semester 2 has been a big change from the first half of the year. Different teachers with different teaching styles. It has been a hard adjustment, but I feel so invigorated from the experience. Byron Scullin in Audio Tech is like the audio guru Chuck Palahniuk would write, part Bill Hicks, part Robert McKee, all ninja. It's a great class. Having Darrin take us for the bells, and for the first half of I&P (formerly known as T&P) was a really intense and different experience to James' teaching. Darrin's focus is definitely on concepts of neurology and perception, and quite separate from "musical" techniques. I liked exploring the sound/compositional process from outside the confines of music, because as this course goes on, I am starting to see music as a dead weight that holds my work back. That said, the compositional techniques we explore with James are really helpful, but I prefer talking about these things that impact more on the "what" and "why" of the process rather than just on the "how". This first week back with James was a densely packed mix of hows and whys, and a challenging task of listening indeed.

First up was this concept of "Material" vs "Materia". What really interested me about this brief discussion was that nobody brought up the parallel to generative music (which Bryon had spent a whole class on the week prior). The idea that the material is the formed music, the themes, the musical clay, so to speak, with which you are forming the piece with. The Materia, is I guess, that clay before it's dug up. It's the idea of the clay, and the possibilities it presents. I find when I create a work, I know I have to realise it with sounds, and notes, and rhythms, and certain other materials that pertain to the eventual outcome that is my personality, manifest through song. However, I spend ages working these concepts through in my mind before I even have a note, or a riff, or a field recording. I think at times I'm dealing with this "materia". I like to let this stew for ages sometimes, and then one day, the material evolves from it so quickly, and I have a brand new piece. I'm not sure if I've fully understood this concept yet, but that's what I got from it. The reason I mentioned generative music is that I see that as a direct way of working with the materia. By allowing the music to create itself with minimal direct input. Perhaps though, the tools in this case (the note generators, randomisers, delay chains) become the materials. I'm not sure which way this works and look forward to unpacking it further.

Phill Niblock's The Movement Of People Working, a film that juxtaposes imagery of manual labor with sounds of long layered drones. we watched it for a short time, comparatively, considering the work goes for 6 hours, but long enough to get the gist of the film. To begin with it feels uncomfortable. That the pace of the imagery is too fast for the drones that we hear. but over time, the music takes over, and the visual pacing becomes textural, and unimportant. The people in the film are from developing nations, and we never see their faces. This sparked an almost political idea, but I think it was a way of avoiding any emotional narrative being read into. The human face draws attention to it, and would distract from the movement of the work. This intense droning of sound was at first quite brash and harsh, and I was waiting for something to resolve. There were times when others in the class felt that it resolved. I never found that. Even when the drones became a major triad or a unison, the tension was always held in the drone through the juxtaposed imagery. After a while I felt my mind clear, and being so influenced by zen as I am, I found this parallel to meditation. The meditation through practice, through labor. The way a zen monk would tend the garden, using a mundane action to clear his mind. I don't think the point of the film was to comment in anyway on the political or philosophical situations of the workers. I feel like it was just a process of juxtaposing movement and long drones in a way that constantly makes the audience readjust their eyes and ears, constantly readjusting their perception. Unlike the Qatsi films that have a progression of ideas, and something closer to narrative, this film explores one relationship extensively, and was much more intense, a much more draining experience.

Raymond Queneau's Exercises In Style. OMG. I loved this. Such wit. It reminded me of something Monty Python would do. I got home and showed Alice right away, I'm looking for the whole book now. The writing style reminded me a bit of John Bath's short stories. How this relates to sound/music is obvious. I use some techniques all the time. I think because I begin everything so conceptually, and I boil everything down musically to it's bare essentials, and then i get stuck developing, and building it back up. So I employ some pretty standard compositional techniques that I learned in high school of all places. Things like reversing a melodic or rhythmic idea, inverting or transposing a phrase, doubling or halving, quite simple techniques that I guess I don't even think about anymore. This book has 99 examples of compositional methods and I think I want to try them all. I thought I'd start with a simple loop based idea, and take it through each step in order. Some of them seem ridiculous and unmusical, but I'm sure it'll work. Queneau is an interesting fellow. I'd really like to find and read some of his novels. I wiki'd him, and found he spent a short time with the surrealists (whom I adore) but fell out with Breton eventually (as they all did, since he was a jerk). The Oulipo movement is also an interesting bunch. I'm big into mathematics (although I suck at actual number problems, I just love the purity of it) and I really admire the way these writers and mathematicians teamed up to explore the beauty and potential of permutation and theory through expressive art. I'll need to spend some time in Collected Works, or the library, looking for some books this week, but it'll be worth it.
Critically, I guess the understanding of Exercises In Style that I gathered was this: that the materials don't have to dictate the form or the genre. These are things that can be applied to materials, and there are many forms to consider. I obviously haven't tried half of them (an exaggeration, I've probably only worked with about 3).

To explore the last paragraph further, we ca talk about Laura, and the idea of the cover version. A song, reworked by different artists, and applying different genre characteristics and formalities to an existing composition can lead to a completely different sounding piece, but where does one draw the line and say, well, that's not the same tune anymore. Jazz has set the precedent that nothing is sacred, and as long as the artist can show/justify any link to the original work then the version is "valid" (footnote, Darrin laughed at me for using this term "valid" and ever since, I feel stupid when I say it. The "validity" of the idea is irrelevant, it exists, therefore it doesn't need validity). I've questioned some artists interpretations. Marc Hannaford for example has released some records where he claims that the piece is a Thelonious Monk tune, but the resulting piece is so esoteric, you'd have a hard time hearing the original materials at play. I'm not saying that he hasn't worked with the material, and I'm sure he has developed the music from that, but to me it sounds so removed, I couldn't care less where the music came from. I guess the rest of the class' reaction to Derek Bailey was a similar response to my responses to Hannaford. I've known Bailey's work, and have been into his approach for nearly 15 years. I think his guitar playing is incredibly sophisticated. I hate hearing people say that "it sounds like someone who can't play the guitar". His rendition of Laura had the entire head, and he follows the harmony beautifully. The way he approaches these materials is unique and does take some getting used to. I can understand that the first time hearing it might be hard to follow, but most people hear a guitar being tuned, and then turn their ears off to what is actually being played (ooh, stopping there before I get too ranty). There are a few other tunes that I thought of while we were listening to the versions of Laura. Black Coffee is one. The first version of that I heard was by Tricky off the album Nearly God. I loved that track. Then I heard the original and it had all these chords and changes and I thought, what? That's so jazz and lame. My friend Adam hates the Tricky version because essentially it's just the lyrics sung over a one chord loop, that has nothing to do with the original changes. But I never hear anyone else bag that track. Maybe if Derek Bailey's version had have had a singer, and the lyrics were intact the response would have been different. Lyrics can play a big part in a cover. Personally, I love hearing people mess with a tune. I love to do it too. Nothing bugs me more than hearing someone cover a song exactly as it was originally made. A great album I own somewhere (hmmm, lets see if it's on the shelf... yep, phew) is Hal Wilner's tribute to Charles Mingus called Weird Nightmare. The title track is sung by Elvis Costello, and musically performed entirely on Harry Partch cloud chamber bowls. In fact, there is all the tunes covered on this record have deviated drastically from the original version, and use strange (mostly Partch built) instruments. This is a very different approach to say, Joni Mitchel's Mingus tribute, where she not only sticks to the harmony and melody of the works, but has transcribed and set lyrics to the improvised solos from the original recordings. Again, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, all of these approaches are valid, personal taste is going to decide whether one likes it or not, and maybe even over time and exposure a guitarist like Ash may grow to like Derek Bailey, or not, it doesn't matter. I think what's really interesting, beside the surface of "genre" or the eventuating sound of the version, is to comprehend the process that has created the version. Even if one hates Bailey's playing, he is pretty transparent about how he has approached the material. And his deconstruction of the jazz language creates a universe of possibilities to draw from and apply to any guitarists vocabulary.

Thinking on these different techniques explored in Queneau's work, and across the various cover arrangements we've looked at, brings us to the end of class, with the piece by Francis Plagne. A quaint 60's sounding instrumental tune. I'm glad we listened to it so many times. As I said earlier, I've desensitised to these techniques because I take them for granted, and can't really just hear them anymore. I could hear that things were going on. My mind went straight the Queneau reading, and I started trying to figure out what specific techniques were being employed, but I think in such an analysis, I missed the finer points. My ears need focus, need tuning. This was a great exercise though (the listening and the class in general), because I realised that some of things that I've been so blocked on in my own work, is form. I have so much to explore, and I get stuck on such tiny problems and haven't found any new ways to progress. Some of these things I've overlooked are so simple. It's already helped me with my current project.

To close, I'd like to spew out a few words about the projects for this semester in I&P. Firstly the Federation Bells piece. I had a real struggle finding my voice for this instrument. I felt creatively constipated. I'm really happy with where the piece ended up though. My original inspiration was the Higgs Boson discovery. Not that I wanted to make some intellectual, science piece. I'm actually not into that "pure data" composition style, it all ends up sounding the same. Although I thought about it, and looked things up on the CERN website to see if I could find something to play with. In the end, it was more important to respond to the discovery emotionally. I should add that it really freed me from my agnosticism. I delved into understanding particle physics (thanks to Brian Cox, I can grasp it pretty well now), and I feel like I can exist in the universe connected to it all, without any need for a soul or higher spiritual construct. The fact that the numbers in Higgs' standard model add up so elegantly, and that we used that mathematical proof as the template to find the particle, coming full circle to prove the purity and beauty of numbers, and prove the model of the universe as accurate is an amazing achievement for humankind. I've been writing lyrics for my bell piece, that are sort of a secular hymn, a celebration of this freedom from faith and dogma, that shows that the universe, without a creator, without a soul, is still a beautiful and significant thing. I think the bells, on a sonic level, really express that joy, and due to the tuning based around the natural harmonic series, they fit to the universe better than the western equal tempered tuning could express. The dance and drone elements I've added represent the vastness of space and also the connected nature of everything. The movement is energy and joy, the sleigh bells sewn to the costumes are a rhythmic texture, somewhat representative of the particles of nature, perhaps the smaller, quantum particles, with the Federation Bells being more atomic level particles, or the Higgs field itself. Everything is moving around the space. It's a quiet and simple metaphor for the universe, but that's ultimately what I do, create analogies for things that are massive and boil them down to simple, translatable experiences.

For the Organ, I have few ideas. I still want to make the piece with vocals and drums and electronics. I am not sure what it will be about yet, but I have a starting point for note in mind, and a method of performance, that will help guide the way the piece gets constructed. I'm pretty excited that we get to do this.

For our "compose for a classmate" project, I got Ash. I love Ash's guitar playing, and he's a great guy, full of potential. So young and eager to make music. I want to put him through something similar to what I went through as a young player, straight out of high school, discovering new music for the first time. Since we both play guitar, I think it'll be an easy task to communicate. It's the creative side of things I want to challenge. Ash is a way better guitarist than I am. Technically, i have no technique and he has heaps. Musically however, I have more experience and hopefully can give him something to apply his great chops to, whilst challenging his concepts and approach to the instrument. My favourite guitarists are Derek Bailey and Robert Fripp. I know Ash likes to play with delay and ambient sounds, and so do I. My plan is to create something of an evolving ambient guitar piece that explores the guitar as a sound device, and rather than focusing on standard guitar playing techniques and understandings of guitar music, forcing a deconstruction of technique to perform. Musically, the piece will probably develop in a serial nature, and become atonal. But i want the gestures to be sparse and interpretive, and the form to be open and improvisational to a certain degree. I want to use this as an opportunity to create a working template for further ambient guitar compositions that can overlap and be played simultaneously with any number of guitarists. Something I've wanted to do for a long time, creating works that can become intuitive surround sound pieces, by positioning the performers around the space, and giving them different scores that call for listening and interaction as a part of following the directions on the page. Perhaps each piece becomes a stand alone work for soloist, but is also an overlapping part of an ongoing group work. Oh the times and places you'll go...