[...] the art of composition, as it is “understood” by the institutions which purportedly exist to promote and nurture it, is moribund in comparison with what is being achieved and developed in the context of improvisation.
[...] Every musical score embodies a question, to be answered by its performer(s). (Most composers seem only interested in receiving the answer YES.) What I am trying to do here is put that question in the musical foreground, in the hope that when the performer makes his/her music in response to it, some opening-out of the imagination comes into being which might not have occurred in other circumstances, and in the hope that this process communicates itself to activate the imagination of the listener.
>> Essay
Essay / Blattwerk: composition/improvisation/collaboration
Arne Deforce & Richard Barrett performing Blattwerk at concertgebouw Brugge
Blattwerk is a composition of approximately 25
minutes’ duration for cello and live electronics, which I conceived as
a duo for the cellist Arne Deforce and myself and completed in the
summer of 2002. The electronic part was realised at CRFMW in Liège, in
collaboration with Patrick Delges who wrote the MaxMSP program used in
performance. Blattwerk combines highly-precise musical
specifications (both in the notation of the cello part and in the
inclusion of prefabricated and fixed electronic passages) with free
improvisation for both performers, as well as the aforementioned
computer program which samples and plays back its materials
“automatically” with variable degrees of randomness. The combination
of precise notation with improvisation made previous appearances in my
work in transmission for electric guitar and electronics (written
for Daryl Buckley and completed in 1999) and in the large-scale ensemble
works Opening of the Mouth (with the Elision ensemble, 1997) and DARK
MATTER (for a combination of the Elision and Cikada ensembles,
2001-03). In all of these cases, the expansion of compositional horizons
to include improvisation was a natural and logical development of an
ongoing long-term collaboration, and so it is with Arne Deforce. I have
always considered notation first and foremost as a means of
communication between composer and performer(s), that is to say neither
as a set of instructions or demands, nor as some kind of end in itself
(although I take seriously the fact that any means of communication will
have its ambiguities, imperfections, contradictions and so on, which
constitute what might be called the “poetry” of notation). An
important aspect of improvisation too is that of communication between
participants. Blattwerk is, in a certain way, an attempt to make
structural/dramatic “sense” out of the various modalities of
communication which can exist between musicians, between musical
materials, between musicians, instruments and sounds. It thus embodies a
kind of relationship between composer and performer which has the
potential to break with the “accepted” 20th-century model, which I
think is an important thing to try and do, for reasons I shall return to
at the end of this essay.
Blattwerk also continues a line of development from my first solo
for cello, Ne songe plus à fuir of 1986, through three
intervening cello solos (not to mention those for other instruments) in
which an insistence on the concrete and material aspect of music, free
of metaphysical obfuscation, is simultaneously an attempt to point
somewhere (?) beyond itself.
In Ne songe plus à fuir I made a first attempt to make a
composition purely out of the encounter between an expressive/structural
“vision” and the instrument itself, without mediation by an abstract
concept of musical materials and relationships. Thus it makes less sense
to speak of “pitches” in such music than “locations” on the
instrument - locations which in themselves are special cases of the movements
which excite it and generate its sounds. I find here a point of contact
with various forms of improvised music, and also with musical traditions
of the Far East, especially Japan.
Where Japanese music for the koto or biwa uses a modal
structure as the tabula rasa upon which its intonational, timbral
and articulational complexities are inscribed, Blattwerk evolves
out of an “objective” view of the cello as a box with four strings
stretched across it, which is then minimally “primed” by a system of
glissandi which form its basic (pitch) material. In the electronic
prelude foreshadow, the four strands of this material - one for
each string - were recorded, superimposed and processed as a basis for
its amorphous, “embryonic” sound-texture; in the final electronic
part of fossil, the turning points of these same glissandi - now
“petrified” into stable pitches - are superimposed into a homophonic
canon. Thus the archaeologically “oldest” level of Blattwerk
is to be found in these passages. The notated music for cello, which
dominates less and less as the work continues, extrapolates these same
materials in more sophisticated and indeed multilayered ways; the
“automated” activity of the computer picks up from this stage of the
material, reordering and recombining it. Finally, all of the preceding
proliferations themselves form a germinal environment within which
spontaneous improvisational directions can be taken.
Spontaneity is by no means something that “just happens”. It depends
to a crucial extent on external and internal conditions, which of course
can include a very specific musical framework as in jazz. Improvisation
cannot take place without a sense of situation, of situatedness, even if
(as in the improvisational work I prefer) there is a constant feedback
between the music and its framework, such that the shape of the
framework responds to the music which it is itself shaping, rather than
being fixed by tradition. For this reason I am not generally interested
in a half-baked approach to combining composition and improvisation, by
which I mean the various attempts to create notations which are missing
one or other of their usual characteristics, which one associates with
the avant-garde of the 1960s, not to mention “graphic notation”
which I consider to be largely a refusal to engage with the
communicative function of a score. In Blattwerk some areas of the
music are notated and others are not. There are no “half-notated”
passages or any “directions for improvisation”. I assume that the
musical context of the improvised areas of the work, together with the
musical intelligence of the performers, is all the “direction” that
is required. Thus every performance (and, needless to say, every
performer) should bring forth a different approach.
Nor is the inclusion of improvisation an attempt to create a parameter
of “aleatoricism” within a compositional schema, as if the
“organisation of delirium” mentioned decades ago by Boulez were
actually possible. Delirium is what lies outside whatever boundaries of
“reason” one cares to set up: one must be prepared to exceed these
boundaries rather than try to colonise them. The “open forms” of the
1960s mostly look somewhat coy these days: to switch metaphors, the door
is open a crack but one sees the heavy chain preventing anything
disturbing from happening. Nevertheless, Blattwerk is not some
kind of dialogue between “open” and “closed” form. It is a
composition in which different performative approaches are invoked for
their sound-form-generating potential. It has taken me some years to
realise that this is how simple the situation actually is, but that
realisation is no doubt the result of those years having been spent
intensively cultivating collaborative relationships with musicians such
as Arne, as well as developing a compositional identity through the
evolution of my work which (I hope) gains in poetic strength from such
situations. In any case, on a first hearing it will not always be
possible to tell the difference between the notated and non-notated
music; and there is really no reason why it should always be,
unless the listener’s aim is academic analysis, which I shall assume
it isn’t.
The journey into the instrument begun with Ne songe... of course
leads naturally to a different kind of relationship between composer,
composition and performers. To understand where the music “comes
from” involves a certain interest in or indeed engagement in
improvisation. Many of the most idiomatic performers of my notated work
are also committed to improvisation as an integrated part of their
musical activity. This implies the possibility of collaborating in ways
which do not so much open the door referred to above, but remove the
wall in which it is embedded. The collaboration with Arne in Blattwerk
is one possible “division of labour”. The rôles of composer and
performer are retained, but as an efficient use of the skills involved
rather than as a “chain of command”; neither Arne’s experiences
with the cello nor mine with the passage from imagination to notation
need be compromised.
Ne songe... was written without a precise “image” of a
performer in mind, although it was originally associated with Alan
Brett, who gave its first performances. Subsequently it has entered the
repertoire of a number of further cellists. Some of these have in turn
brought performance of the work to a new level, in the course of which
my other solos have come into being; each collaboration has emerged from
the same source, as it were, and each has produced music which is deeply
conditioned by that experience: Dark ages and praha for
Frances-Marie Uitti, von hinter dem Schmerz for Friedrich
Gauwerky and now the present work. One important difference this time
around is that my collaboration with Arne has encompassed various kinds
of improvisational as well as interpretational work, for example our duo
performance of Stockhausen’s Pole für zwei, live music for
experimental film and participation in other improvising collectives.
Therefore it seems completely natural that this aspect, as well as the
other aspects of my experience of his playing which have been sublimated
into Blattwerk.
Blattwerk also extends the technical vocabulary of the instrument
beyond that of my previous work for solo cello, including such phenomena
as “subharmonics” , although I should add that my primary concern
has been firstly to create a continuum between the various
playing possibilities of the instrument (rather than treating them as
separate “sound-effects”), and secondly to extend the range of these
possibilities only in response to the impulse of the music. The result
is that the technical range of the piece is not “encyclopaedic” -
for example Blattwerk contains very little double-stopping (while
Ne songe... is almost full of it), the reason for this being
connected to the use to which the material is put by the “automated
sampler”.
The poetic origins of Blattwerk are almost childishly simple: I
imagined the path taken by a leaf as it falls from a tree and is then
moved in impenetrably complex trajectories by the action of the wind, or
just as suddenly laid temporarily to rest by a moment of calm, or set
quivering by the merest movement of air; and I imagined this path as
taking place not outside the window but in the multidimensional
“configuration space” of the cello, leaving a sonorous trace as it
goes. Again one might catch a faint echo of a Japanese orientation here:
images of nature as symbols of transitoriness. But actually the word Blattwerk
comes from Paul Celan, in whose early poems (along with seasonal, and
particularly autumnal, references almost Japanese in their ubiquity) it
stands for the “leaves” of his written poems.
To give a brief overview: Blattwerk consists of five main parts,
which, though playing continuously, succeed each other like “scenes”
in which the cellist is confronted by a sequence of different
sound-environments.
The first (foreshadow) does not involve the live cellist at all,
while the second (folio) is for amplified cello alone, and most
directly embodies the “falling leaf” idea mentioned above. In the
third (foliage), the cello is surrounded by fragmented and
transformed “images” of itself generated by the MaxMSP computer
program, which begins with a recording of the second part as its
sound-material, gradually replacing this with material from the third
part, which already contains “lacunae” in which the player may react
spontaneously to this environment. In the fourth part (foliation),
the “lacunae” become more extensive than the notated material; at
the same time a third element is added in the form of an active part for
the live-electronics performer - the environment becomes as it were
conscious, with various consequences both obvious and subtle for the
poetic evolution of the music. The fifth part (fossil) returns
suddenly to precise notation for the cello, which is now “fixed”
within an ensemble of prerecorded cellos.
foreshadow, as mentioned previously, is based on an
“exposition” of the pitch-material of the whole piece. This consists
of four lines, one for each string. Together the four lines consist of
72 pitches, in which each of the 24 quartertone pitch-classes is
represented three times, so that at this level no emphasis on particular
pitches occurs. (There is however a certain emphasis in the way these
pitches are distributed across their respective strings: on the first
string they are concentrated more on the upper positions and on the
fourth more on the lower, with the other two strings containing
intermediate kinds of distribution). The line for the first string
consists of 24 pitches, that for the second string 20, for the third 16
and for the fourth 12, which, superimposed in the durational ratio
10:12:15:20 (so that their beginnings and endings coincide) and with
glissandi of various lengths between the pitches, produce the material
of foreshadow. (I don’t want to dwell on which pitches
they are, since this has no relevance to the kind of description I am
trying to make.) Each of these lines was recorded twice, once molto
sul ponticello and once sul tasto, synchronised with a
clicktrack rather than with one another so as to encourage slight
discrepancies, especially in the course of the glissandi. Each pair was
then subjected to cross-convolution, comb-filtering and reverberation,
so that the original recorded material becomes somewhat shadowy and
obscure at this stage. The final process generated a four-channel
sound-object which begins spread between the rear loudspeakers (that is,
behind the audience) and ends centred between the front speakers,
coinciding with the position of the cellist, who begins playing folio
at a specified point shortly before the end. Here and elsewhere, Blattwerk
represents a development and extension of the compositional and
technical ideas of transmission for electric guitar and live
electronics. A prominent similarity between the two compositions is the
fact that their “basic materials” are elaborated in two distinct
ways: by technical means (using a recording of the materials) and by
“compositorial” means (using the various compositional techniques
described in more detail below).
folio for cello solo, which is fully-notated throughout, actually
consists of four different “pieces” which I called sequences,
which were written separately and then intercut, together with various
kind of intercalated transitions and silences, to produce
the composition as it stands. (Of course there is a strong connection
here with electronic-music practice.) Each sequence is
extrapolated from the same materials (as described above) and is related
to the others also in its formal proportions (all four have exactly the
same overall duration and are divided into six sections each consisting
of six phrases). The sequences can be summarised as follows:
Sequence I: rapid movements both along and across the strings,
using one or other of the four basic glissando-lines to indicate a
hand-position, with the extension of the left hand between first and
fourth fingers (between 6 and 12 centimetres) and the degree of shifting
between strings controlled by sinusoidal probability functions. The
reason for this highly systematised approach was to produce rapid but
idiomatic movements over the entire range of all four strings without at
this stage invoking particular preferences of my own. These were brough
to bear in the following stage of work: “composing into” this
stream of notes in order to specify different states and transitions for
the various gestural/timbral behaviours appropriate to it. Sequence I
develops from homogeneity towards heterogeneity in terms of these
behaviours.
Sequence II: alternations of sustained pitches and glissandi,
always following one or other of the four basic lines. These are also
“internally sculpted” into more elaborate sound-processes similarly
to sequence I but evolving this time from heterogeneity towards
homogeneity, ending up almost exclusively using “subharmonics” where
a particular kind of bowing produces a pitch approximately one octave
below the fingered pitch, and with a particular harsh kind of timbre.
Sequence III: again derived from the same materials, but at
several removes, so that the result is a scatter of “points” across
the whole range of the instrument. The evolution of the material is also
more complex, resulting in a situation around the middle of its duration
where almost every sound is produced using a different technique, to the
situation at either end where sounds produced by the same technique tend
to be more clustered together.
Sequence IV: a “melodic” process (from homogeneity to
heterogeneity and back) in which the basic pitch-materials proliferate
into complex networks of recursive self-similarity and
“ornamentation.”
There are also four fundamental kinds of transition which can be
described as follows:
1: a transition (in any or all “parameters”, however those
might be identified) between two segments from different sequences,
between a sequence and another transition or even between
two transitions.
2: an “intensification” (likewise) from the previous or
following segment.
3: a “dissipation” from the previous or following segment.
4: a “freeze” from the previous or following segment, which
may take the form of a simple sustain or might involve “looping” a
small fragment.
Together with more or less long silences, these eight types of
musical element and their interactions generate the structure of folio.
Obviously the actual composition process involves much more than the few
outlined evolutions I have described above, since it consists at every
stage of a total interweaving between deterministic, random and
“intuitive” processes of generation. The ways in which the sequences
are cut into segments, the kinds of transition which are allowed
in different regions of the piece, the available dynamic range, and many
other important features, are structured to produce a single (though
highly internally-differentiated) musical Gestalt. Also, the evolutions
of all of these materials often leads to a situation where their musical
characteristics become “tangled” with one another, so that the
result is by no means a straightforward sequential collage, but a music
in a state of accelerated change, almost constantly except for moments
when it slows or stops at a particular point along its twisting
itinerary, as when one or other of the strings has a brief “solo”,
when a series of “unrelated” fragments “just happen” to all be
centred on the same pitch, or when a seeming perpetuum mobile
becomes “stuck”, and these “phenotypic” features contribute at
least as much to its character as the “genetic” material behind
them. folio is in a sense a sound-image of a musical
“organism”, in which sense it differs from the “monologue”
character of for example Ne songe plus à fuir, although this is
a question of degree and emphasis rather than a fundamental difference
of approach or poetic intention: an “organism” is not necessarily
always blossoming in harmony with itself and its environment. I at least
am not.
While I have used the above-described strategy of making a composition
out of a number of quasi-independent “sub-compositions” in a number
of previous works (most prominently ruin for 6x3 instruments, Trawl
for quintet and the fourth act of the music-theatre piece Unter
Wasser) this is the first time I have applied it to a solo
instrument. Because this medium necessarily involves a certain linearity
in which elements are organised sequentially rather than simultaneously,
the approach had to be altered, most obviously by adding the
“transitions” - these are intended to serve the function of creating
a higher “dimensionality” , which in an ensemble piece might be
achieved by creating multilayered textures and processes.
In foliage, which follows, the solo cello is confronted by an
“automaton” (the MaxMSP program) which is able to record, play back,
filter, spatialise and reverberate whatever sound material is fed into
it, in ways which can range from completely random to completely
controlled, with variable degrees of speed, density, recognisability and
so on. Interspersed between the notated passages of foliage are
improvisational lacunae, whose duration is given in terms of the
prevailing tempo (and ranges between less than a second and over 40
seconds) but which otherwise specify nothing at all except that the
cellist may improvise within them. The computer program gradually
replaces a pre-recording of folio with real-time recording (thus
including the improvised elements), all the time replaying its material
in various ways specified in the score as “live” changes (abrupt or
gradual) in the playback parameters, controlled by the electronics
performer, although without a sense of “responding” to the cello.
The notated material of foliage behaves in an analogous way. It
is all derived from the music of folio either by applying the
aforementioned transition processes or by simple
“reproduction” (but always in reverse), generally giving the
impression that a small element of the foregoing music is subject to a
“microscopic” examination, revealing layers of detail which
couldn’t previously be discerned. The processes are applied to a chain
of moments from folio , starting at its end and working backward
towards the beginning. For example, bars 12-14 of foliage form a
transition between the second half of bar 130 and the middle of bar 129
of folio, transforming a high sustained sound (with vibrato over
part of its duration) into a timbrally-differentiated group of five
lower sounds. Other treatments of folio material are clearer
and/or more obscure than this. The time-structure is however much
simpler than folio (being based on “self-similar” proportions
of sound and lacunae) and much more deterministic. The instructions
given in the score to the cellist are as follows:
The “silent” bars marked with°(in the place of a rest symbol) are
lacunae in which improvisation may take place, in response to the
sampled and processed sounds from computer I, not necessarily filling
the available duration, which may even be left silent. The idea is that
these improvisations (and/or silences) should attempt to make
connections between the notated sounds (which, it will be noticed, are
entirely derived from the music of folio), and between these and
the computer sounds. The high degree of discontinuity of the notated
music is intended to create structural/expressive “questions” which
can only be answered (if at all) by improvisatory actions. On the other
hand no kind of musical material should be excluded a priori
on grounds of consistency or taste. One could imagine a context for
anything. Nevertheless the musical context of this work is the issue.
The durations of the lacunae should be as close as possible to those
given in the score (which add to 50% of the entire duration of the
section), although a certain amount of variation according to
improvisational considerations might be appropriate.
The second electronic layer, which enters in the fourth section, foliation,
uses the “instrument” I have been developing for some years in both
compositional and improvisational contexts, which consists of a
synthesizer keyboard and various other “control surfaces” which
(mediated by another Max program) access the LiSa sampling software,
which is provided with sound-materials derived from cello sounds
(including some from a recording of Arne playing Ne songe...,
although hardly recognisable as such). At the same time, the MaxMSP
program continues, now with its playback parameters more or less
randomised while the sound material is gradually replaced by silence.
The notated (cello) or prerecorded (electronic) material takes the form
of four musical “blocks” which expand in duration from 15 to 60
seconds and alternate with improvisations expanding from an initial
duration of 45 seconds, so that the “climactic” passage before the
section ends is a completely free section of about three minutes’
duration, by which time the MaxMSP program is playing back almost only
silence. The cello part for the blocks returns to the sequences
of folio, whose material is now radically “reinterpreted”,
just as the electronic parts involve more extreme processing of the same
sound-materials as are elaborated elsewhere in Blattwerk. They
are bound together in the first instance by the way in which each block
is emphatically divided into seven equal subdurations - thus the
tendency towards increasing strictness and simplicity in proportional
structure continues with foliation, while of course at the same
time the structural weight allocated to improvisation increases further.
The first block takes material from sequence I and connects what
were originally widely-separated parts of the sequence with
glissandi. The second block reinterprets the material of sequence III,
reduced to consist only of finger-percussion and pizzicato, but with
independent parts for the left hand (on strings I and II) and right hand
(without the bow, on strings III and IV). The third block uses sequence
II-like material, but now with double-stopping and being gradually
substituted by increasingly “marginal” sound-producing techniques,
ending with a long quiet sound produced by bowing the tailpiece of the
cello. The fourth block applies the “fractal” procedure of sequence
IV to a repeating set of twelve pitches (those allocated to the C
string in the original materials). Thus the four blocks create an even
more disjunct set of “snapshots” of an imaginary process which again
must be completed by improvisation.
This is interrupted by the electronic part of fossil, which
returns to the original pitch-materials, now in a four-part homophonic
texture without glissandi, into which the glissandi of the live cello
are rhythmically locked. This time the four parts played by the computer
were recorded note by note, so that the synchronisation and durations
are the result of hundreds of edits, producing four “impossible
cellos” (each with only one string) whose players can not only
synchronise precisely with the constantly-changing rhythms, but also
make instantaneous leaps to any point on their respective strings. The
processing of these sounds was relatively simple, involving mainly the
“movement” of each cello (-string) between a different pair of
speakers, which was then preserved in a four-channel soundfile.
Thus the cello and electronics of Blattwerk progress through a
structural dramatisation of their possible mutual combinations.
Previously, in transmission, the dramatic relationships between
electric guitar and electronics tended to be somewhat antagonistic; Blattwerk
presents not so much a reconciliation between the constituent elements
but an expression of their deeper symbiotic relationship. Apart from
exploring different strategies for combining composition, interpretation
and improvisation, Blattwerk is intended to express a belief that
both “acoustic” and “electronic” instruments can continue to
have a vital role to play in progressive music, and that this involves a
particular attitude with regard to the “acoustic” side: anything an
instrument(alist) can do which a computer can reproduce or improve upon
should be excluded, in order to concentrate on those inexpressibly
complex sound/form/presence phenomena which, perhaps even in principle,
require a human mind and body for their realisation. In the same way
there are some musical phenomena which may only be realised by means of
an intensive process of composition, and others which may only be
realised through (equally intensive) improvisation.
Finally I would like to return to my reasons for wanting to explore
regions beyond the purview of the 20th century composer/performer
relationship. My reasoning could be summarised as follows:
(1) My personal experience of listening to contemporary music is that,
with few exceptions, the art of composition, as it is “understood”
by the institutions which purportedly exist to promote and nurture it,
is moribund in comparison with what is being achieved and developed in
the context of improvisation.
(2) I believe this exhaustion in the world of composition has
straightforwardly political roots in the way that the accepted social
model of this art mirrors the structure of the society which generates
it, that is to say, it is characterised by dehumanising economic/power
relations. It is therefore no wonder that composers (to name only these)
seem to have only two choices before them: to capitulate to commercial
interests and become small-business entrepreneurs in the music industry,
or to turn inwards, towards a “group-solipsism” where they and their
peers can convince each other that their creative impoverishment is
actually something vital and significant. I feel it is necessary to
reject both of these standpoints as different forms of fin-de-siècle
pessimism, neither of which can produce a visionary art worthy of the
potential of human imagination and intelligence.
(3) Nevertheless, there is nowhere else to go; and, as I hope to have
made clear, I believe that the art of composition in the widest sense is
not exhausted. Most of the work I have done in recent years has
had as a fundamental motivation a search for ways to “make it work”,
in the context of various collaborative and collective musical
activities. This isn’t the place to enumerate these activities, nor is
it yet the time, at least for me, to assess them. For the present I
would merely like to suggest that Blattwerk is intended to take
its place in this process, or at least in defining some potential
directions it might take. Every musical score embodies a question, to be
answered by its performer(s). (Most composers seem only interested in
receiving the answer YES.) What I am trying to do here is put that
question in the musical foreground, in the hope that when the performer
makes his/her music in response to it, some opening-out of the
imagination comes into being which might not have occurred in other
circumstances, and in the hope that this process communicates itself to
activate the imagination of the listener. This may seem like a tall
order; but in the words of Edward Bond, “clutching at straws is the
only realistic thing to do.”
Richard Barrett, Berlin 2/8/2002
Blattwerk performances:
Arne
Deforce, cello en Richard Barrett, live electronics, CRFMW computers
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Festival Musica, Strasbourg, 2 october 2002 (première)
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Festival Format, Brugge, 5 en 6 october 2002
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Festival Images Sonores, Luik, 16 november 2002
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Festival Wien Modern, Wenen, 24 november 2002
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Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield, 29 november 2002
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Handelsbeurs, Gent (performance of part II FOLIO), 05 december 2002
CD recording planned november 2004