Blog
New recording
A recording of my recent piece Struction (how I attempted… is now available here. It’s a bootleg-esque recording from the first performance given by Red Note.
A little confession: I’m not entirely sure this piece works as an audio recording. If you do listen, bear in mind that the voice of the composer is disembodied – the “composer” isn’t in the room and his voice is delivered through loudspeakers. Without pictures, however, you won’t see the physical exertions of the ensemble as they react to this voice. It’s deliberately physical music.
As normal, Struction was conceived as a concert piece (and these days I’m always thinking about the relationship between music its context) and hearing this recording reinforces my belief that live musical performance and audio recordings are two completely different mediums, each with their idiosyncrasies. Why do we so often consider them the same when composing?
Plugged and Struction done
One of the highlights of the RSAMD year is the annual Plug festival of new music of which the 2011 variety took place a couple of weeks ago. It’s usually a good week for the composition department, both musically and socially, as the Academy puts on around ten concerts of new work (almost) exclusively created by its students and staff. This year there were, apparently, 35 new works for various ensembles and a further 30 new German songs which formed part of the department’s “Glasgow Liederbuch” project. I say “apparently” because unfortunately I was unable to make most of the concerts due to a string of other commitments and rehearsals for my own piece, Struction (how attempted to get the thoughts in my head into your head using only five instruments, five instrumentalists, metronome sound and MIDI), which was performed by the Red Note Ensemble on the Friday evening of the festival.
I’ve blogged about the creation of Struction before. In its final version it became a 25-minute blast; five instrumental lines, often demanding and virtuosic, are set to an unrelenting, totally audible clicktrack with the composer’s voice booming over the top issuing ad hoc instructions to the performers and apparently composing / recomposing the piece as it goes along. There are occasions when a computer-realized performance of the piece plays in tandem with the real-life instrumentalists, all of whom are amplified. My thanks go to Tim Cooper for all his hard work in engineering the live sound for this performance and for graciously putting-up with me changing my mind every few minutes. I hope to get an audio recording on this site as soon as possible.
One of the necessities of the PhD process (of which this piece forms a part) is the complete documentation of research; consequently I have 31 work-in-progress versions of the score, a “complete” intermediate demo of the piece, three versions of the recorded voice part (including two hours of out-takes), several versions of the tape track, four written documents discussing the piece and a lot more besides. Although I always know that the piece I’ve just finished is a little different from the one I set-out to write this excess of documentation allows me to reflect on how, when and why the piece shifted, conceptually and musically, before settling down into its final form. For me the end product touched on several topics, including, to greater and lesser extent, the relationship between composer, performers and audience, the compositional process, the relationship between people and technology, and role-playing/performativity. However, it was this final element, that I performed the role of “The Composer” whilst also being the piece’s composer, which changed the most since the genesis of the work. (A quick aside; did the performers play the role of Performers during the performance?) Originally I had planned to characterize The Composer differently; he was to be my tyrannical alter ego, overbearing, over-demanding and cruel (hence the working title Struction (shut up and listen)). It all got a bit hammy so the Composer’s persona was scaled-down and became perhaps a little more autobiographical. Not only did this allow for more humour in the piece, which in turn added another dimension to The Composer’s characterization, but it made The Composer a more universal figure; the (often ludicrous) demands made by the composer’s pre-recorded voice were not the rantings of a madman but became characteristic of a system that sees the composer as auteur. These themes will be revisited in future work; Struction is definitely the first chapter, not a conclusion.
I was very pleased with the concert. Red Note pitched the performance just right, having found the flow and humour of the piece early on they threw themselves into the wilder passages and played the quieter moments with great poise. The performance was probably best summed-up by a composer colleague of mine who, when asked how he thought the ensemble did with the piece, responded “they played the arse off it”. I’m inclined to agree, and, for a performance of this piece, there’s probably no greater compliment.
Making the unmusical musical
How does one write a piece of music about privacy? How does one write a piece about slavery, conspiracy or authority? Is it possible to write a piece that explores issues of fiction and non-fiction, truth and lies?
It was this type of question that saw me begin an extended bout of research (read: PhD) at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. For a few years I’d had a general frustration that I felt unable to write music about topics that genuinely interested me, topics that are essentially extra-musical or at least rarely explored in the musical domain.
So where to begin? How can a composer put across, in a clear manner without relying on programme notes, non-musical ideas in a piece of music? For me the key lies not just in musical parameters but also in the manner of performance. This research project has, since inception, implicitly acknowledged that the act of composition is the creation of a performance in its entirety rather than the construction of a text which is to be interpreted and then performed within the confines of a pre-existing performance grammar. I maintain that the separation between text and performance is an artificial one; music is a performing art but traditionally the physical nature of the performance itself has fallen outside the jurisdiction of the composer in strictly instrumental / vocal music. Traditional concert performance practice has been widely deconstructed in academic circles particularly since the 1980s (and if you want to find out why in fact “a concert hall is a place middle-class white people can feel safe together”, and not simply a neutral auditorium for the preservation of music by dead white men, read Musicking by Christopher Small). Despite this, however, concert hall performances still usually require the composer to utilize pre-existing performance protocol rather than allowing him / her to create new means of expression that may be more fitting to the ultimate aims of the work.
So, my starting point for this project was the following (rather broad) question;
How can consideration of the theatrical elements of performance benefit the conceptual content of a musical work?
Here, the term “theatrical elements of performance” refers to the visual nature of performance as opposed to the purely musical and could encompass, for example, the physical movements of the performers, lighting, costume, the location of performance and even the medium of dissemination (does the work have to be performed live? What about an audio recording, for example, or video?). In what way do these changes from the norm affect the way the piece is heard and how does this affect the relationship between the work and audience? Is it possible to delve into non-musical topics, such as authority, fiction and privacy, in this manner? We shall find out in due course.
This is control
A few years ago I was privileged to have a work of mine feature in a composition workshop given by a renowned Scottish orchestra. It proved to be a pivotal experience for me, but not in the way I could have predicted. I had written quite a fun piece, all melodic riffs and catchy rhythms, that ended with a single, undulating tune echoed from the beginning of the work. Even though this melody was taken-up by most of the ensemble, including three woodwind parts, I didn’t want this phrase to be broken anywhere; putting in places for woodwind players to breathe seemed implausible. So, I took the decision (rather naively, perhaps) that the performers would just have to choose the places to breathe themselves; I assumed that they’d take a breath when necessary in the most musically-sympathetic place.
Well, I was wrong. What actually happened (rather predictably, with the benefit of hindsight) was that my refusal to comply with the practicalities of playing wind instruments resulted in those players continuing the phrase until they literally couldn’t play any further. At this point they desperately gasped for breath, having starved themselves of oxygen for far too long. And I thought: “Well, how weird is that?! Something that I wrote on a piece of paper resulted in three people I have never met before half-asphyxiating themselves!”. It occurred to me that the written score is not just for transmitting musical ideas but also a kind of encoded choreography that the performers adhere to, a series of physical instructions that govern the movement of the group for the duration of a performance.
A second experience, in contrast to this, occurred more recently. Whilst looking over some of my sketches (for a piece that was ultimately abandoned), an instrumental student at the RSAMD complained to me about the way I had written something; “That’s typical of you composers”, she said, “you’re always trying to control us. But you can’t”.
This seemed to juxtapose my experiences in the orchestral workshop and got me thinking; is not all written music a form of control? After all, if you write “down bow” over a note, that symbol controls the violinist’s right arm for a split-second; a semi-breve dictates how a brass player’s natural breathing is interrupted etc. If these actions are all required to create the composer’s music, does this mean the composer has authority over these actions as well as the music itself?
So, I set upon writing a piece that looked into the idea of a musical score being a document that creates a contract of control between composer and performers rather than an artefact that is ultimately independent of the composer and is realized / interpreted by others. The piece is currently entitled Struction (shut-up and listen) and is quite a theatrical work for small ensemble and the composer’s (pre-recorded) voice which makes demands of the instrumentalist, seemingly on a whim. The pre-recorded composer is called Thomas Butler, he shares my name and voice but is essentially a fictional character. He is demanding, often rude, and unrealistic in his expectations of what performers are able to do (quite unlike the real Thomas Butler, I would hope).
Struction isn’t finished yet; it’s currently about seven minutes too short and there’s plenty more to explore in the concept. I’ll write more about this piece as it happens.
