Apologies for the lack of new material here recently. I've just finished my third module as a composition student at Oberlin Conservatory and I'm simply too busy during term time to write much. However, I have a week off currently and the plan is to write three times, each covering one of the three residencies we had at Oberlin so far this semester. I'll be working in reverse chronological order, so the most recent is Keith Rowe's 2 day residency.
Ideally, a write up of both Tim Feeney and Vic Rawling's workshop and concert and Seth Josel's 2 day residency will also appear within the week, but as I also have a significant amount of composing and reading to get done this week, on top of wanting to spend some time walking, recording, resting and listening, on top of the fact that the other two residencies are fairly distant memories at this point only partially supplemented with notes/recordings of the events, they may not get written.
KEITH ROWE at Oberlin Conservatory
*this photograph taken from the MMG website
Keith Rowe's visit to Oberlin on the 11th and 12th of March was by far the most eagerly anticipated residency of my stay at Oberlin so far, and proved to be one of the most thought provoking. Sponsored by both the modern music guild and the TIMARA department, he gave a master class on improvisation on the Thursday and performed a solo set in Fairchild chapel on the Friday. Following the master class I was fortunate enough to be one of four other Oberlin students to eat dinner with Keith Rowe, a situation that made me incredibly grateful of Oberlin's location out in the middle of nowhere, as this kind of direct experience with a visiting artist would, I imagine, be almost impossible to come by in a more urban location. As the conversations over dinner essentially functioned as a more intimate extension of the master class, I will be splitting the residency into two: masterclass/dinner, and concert.
Thursday night: master class and dinner.
The workshop on Thursday evening was predominantly dialogue driven. Keith explained that what he valued most from his days as an art student was the visiting artists they brought in who spent time with the students and shared their perspectives with them. The topics covered over the course of the two or so hours were fairly broad, covering everything from Keith's background/history as an improvising musician to concepts at the heart of his improvisational practices, including "The Room".
"The Room" was introduced by way of an anecdote about zen archers, whose abilities had been a powerful source of inspiration for AMM in the early 1960s. Keith spoke of how these men would enter a large space, not dissimilar to the orchestra rehearsal room we inhabited for the workshop, solemnly and slowly set up their equipment, before taking up their bows, loading an arrow, and without having looked at the targets since they had entered the room, release the arrow and have it hit the target. It was a thorough understanding of the room, a thorough awareness of their environment, that enabled the archers to place their arrows so accurately with only a single attempt. Keith argued that this concept was also of vital importance in improvisation. The need to place each sound so that it belongs in the room at that moment, to place each sound as if that were the only chance you had.
When coupled with the necessity to improvise exclusively with one's own creative voice (a condition KR assimilated from his experiences as an art student) it was emphasised that the creative act became HARD. Almost impossibly hard. He talked about the daunting experience of being seated before a blank canvas, required to make each stroke completely original and unlike the strokes of every other painter who came before him. In applying this to improvisation, the pressure became even greater, as a wrong stroke in a painting can be discarded, thrown away, but when improvising you cannot take back a sound. "Its terrifying" was Keith's summation of this experience. Absolutely terrifying, and yet it should not cause constipation. The creation of a sound should be an affirmative and strong action. "Grab the sound by the balls" was, I believe, the phrase he used.
Following this we (the ensemble, OINC) tried an exercise in which we were to each play a single, short sound over the course of ten minutes. We were later to try two sounds over the course of five minutes, but aside from this and five minutes of free improvisation at the end of the masterclass, we didn't play anything else. The first two exercises were very weak, although I feel this had less to do with the collective strengths/weaknesses of the constituent musicians as improvisers as it did with the large size of the group (15+). The final improvisation was a little more successful, with some passages that worked very nicely indeed.
In talking more about the difficulty of improvising, Keith asserted that it was of the utmost importance to feel honestly comfortable presenting your work alongside a Haydn String Quartet. He argued that, regardless of whether one is happy about the notion of 'masterpieces', one's work will inevitably be compared to those works that are considered masterpieces by society. He also asserted that, regardless of their status within society, these works are great musical accomplishments and improvising musicians as much as any other creative artist would do well to study the Bach partitas, Haydn's quartets, Shostakovich's quartets, etc. etc. all the way through to the likes of David Tudor's recording of Cage's Variations II, and experiment with translating the spirit/timing of these works into one's own contemporary medium. This belief is a controversial one in the world of improvised music, and Keith acknowledged that he was well aware of its controversy, as well as the apparent contradictions between this referencing of various traditions and the practice of attempting improvisation with a genuinely original voice. Indeed, this contradiction exists not only in Keith's thoughts but, for better or worse, it is the reality of our situation as improvising musicians [or, for that matter, as creative musicians/composers]. No matter what our intention with regards to the histories and traditions of music, it is those traditions of music that will shape a listener's perspective of our music in some way, shape or form. Keith did say that he was not insisting that an improvising musician should be comfortable with the idea of tradition taking such a strong place in his/her work, but that one should be aware of the influence tradition has on the listening ear.
Following the master class (and later, during dinner) I spoke to Keith regarding various questions I had pertaining to the performance of indeterminate scores (Christian Wolff's Edges, Cornelius Cardew's Treatise), the idea of improvisation in other composed contexts (e.g. the music of Richard Barrett), and potential expansions of "the room" as seen in projects such as Toshimaru Nakamura and Ami Yoshida's Soba To Bara record, and the MIMEO album Sight. Over dinner Keith spoke more about his involvement with Zen Buddhism (he discussed his years studying perception with a Buddhist monk), his involvement with Cornelius Cardew, and his thoughts on the music of Stockhausen (including a fantastic anecdote about a meeting Keith had with Karlheinz on a train).
Much of what was said over dinner is, even now (several weeks after the fact), being chewed over and considered. Perhaps the most immediately eye-opening discussion over dinner, however, was regarding the performance of Treatise. An aspect of performing Treatise that I had not considered before was that, even when performing a single page, one is automatically performing the score by default. Drawing on Wittgenstein's philosophy, Cardew constructed Treatise as a world that the musician reacts to. Therefore, if you are interpreting a small black circle on page 72 (hypothetically), one has to take into account that there are much larger black circles elsewhere in the score, and adjust one's scale regarding whatever that symbol represents accordingly. Of course, Keith was the first to admit that almost everyone (himself included) gets that wrong, and that the contradiction between knowing that everyone gets it wrong and living with it is one that should be embraced as a part of the piece.
Friday Night: Keith Rowe solo
Keith Rowe’s solo performance in Fairchild Chapel on Friday, March 12th was an impressive, challenging, precise and subtle 40 minute improvisation. This is the first time I have seen him play solo (second time I’ve seen him live in any configuration), and following the master class from day before, the strength of his ideas and their realisation had never been clearer to me. The reflective qualities of his instrument and music were the most striking aspect initially, only equaled towards the second half of the piece as the strength of the trajectory Keith was weaving became apparent.
Keith Rowe’s current sound world, then, for those who are unfamiliar with his recent work, is a fairly nuanced array of rustling, crackling textures generated from the use of various materials/preparations on his guitar and the use of a contact microphone. In addition to this, the shortwave radio provides snippets of radio talk show and pop music stations, perhaps the most consistent staple of Keith Rowe’s voice and technique. A significant aspect of Keith’s current working methods also seems to be re-visitation of previous techniques from his earliest days with AMM. From what I can gather this is an extension of his insistence on not becoming reliant on a specific technique as pure affectation, in that just as one should not become dependent on a technical crux, one should also not be afraid to return to previous technicques/ideas/sounds. During this performance the ominous sound of the infamous handheld fan, a nasally buzzing sound anticipating a deep and threatening drone as its (prepared?) fans rattle the constantly detuned strings of his guitar, made several appearances, a long side a variety of less (physically) obvious yet still clearly referential sounds that attach a strong sense of personal history to the performance.
*this photograph taken by mshiflet from the ihatemusic forums
The set started with page 72 of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, interpreted a la John Cage (I think… might have been Rzewski?), with the black circles representing radio grabs. Football game coverage after football game coverage, with the occasional pop music station, surfaced amidst the supporting rumbles of the table top guitar, providing an initial palette, a response to Treatise, with which to situate oneself. This opening section was by far the most difficult portion of the set. As Keith moved from radio broadcast to radio broadcast, underlying textures from his guitar cutting in and out creating a fairly rocky, unsettling macro-rhythmic gesture. The almost excessive use of the radio in this section became very apparent very quickly, leading my mind to question where and how he was going to take this material that would result in anything but further radio sampling.
Soon enough, however, Rowe’s guitar grew in prominence and the radio grabs came through less and less, bringing to an end the significantly lengthy opening section, leading into a good 15 minutes or so in which rattling guitar strings, electric fans, contact microphones, occasional brushed string tones and bursts of shrieking feedback became the prime sources of sound. In comparison with the opening section, this was an excellent example of the very direct narrative that is somewhat of a stable characteristic of Keith's creative voice (in both solo and most collaborative contexts). As fairly thick textures built up and changed over time Keith would, on occasion, pull a layer of sound that was doing a lot of fundamental supporting work out from underneath a developed and sustained sound-world, exposing a quite radically different world of sounds, changing the pacing of the music, and adding an element of rhythmic surprise. These moments for me are some of the strongest aspects of Keith's work (they occur not infrequently throughout his playing on record) and are very strongly indicative of the reflective quality of his music. They seem almost to prevent the listener from becoming too completely absorbed in an immersive, droning texture/soundscape. They very suddenly force a shift of perspective on behalf of the listener, very powerfully reflecting the location, both spatially and temporally, of the improvisation, causing the listener to consider these parameters in combination with the sounds. Sometimes these moments would be combined with the surfacing of a (now much more sporadic) sample from a radio station, or allow for the louder sounds from outside Fairchild Chapel (sirens, on a number of occasions) to come through.
*this photograph taken by mshiflet from the ihatemusic forums
The final section of the improvisation revealed the coherency of the trajectory mentioned in the opening paragraph. The sustained sound world was built upon and under a drifting cloud of mid-upper range, almost-tertian sonorities, possibly a result of looped feedback from previous radio grabs, recalling a very vague contour, register and harmonic content of the radio material from the beginning of the set. This was coupled with a couple of radio talk show samples as well as the extensive guitar work from the second section, gritty rustling and crackling from various objects pressed and rubbed into the strings over the pickups, the whirring and somewhat ominous drone of the handheld fan, and increasingly violent feedback interruptions. As the tertian-drones started to pick up and become more prominent the sudden cutaways mentioned above became less frequent and Keith allowed the sound world to build up into a more immersive composite sound. This was incredibly powerful, providing resolution as a result of a) allowing this immersive build up of sound, b) tying together and bringing to a logical climax the trajectory of the piece, and c) finishing a powerful 30 minutes of reflective and compelling improvisation with a 10-15 minute coda of sorts imbued with such a mournful, sad character, a simplicity of emotion rarely found in such a complicated and multifaceted music (that is no comment on the profundity of said emotional expression, merely on its method of transmission).
Coming away from hearing live music such as this I found myself incapable of even starting to make any coherent sense of what I had experienced until the next morning. Indeed, aside from a few very practical notes jotted down the next day regarding any formal divisions I perceived in the music as well as the progression of the sound world, many of my more significant thoughts and observations have been slowly arrived at over the course of the last few weeks.All in all Keith Rowe's residency, both workshop, dinner and concert, was an incredible experience, every minute of which was something to be learned from.
No comments:
Post a Comment