On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, mwp wrote:
[Arggh, I feel the hostility meter starting to flutter into the red? If
that?s the case, I?m outta here.]
No hostility intended.
Don?t know why such a list of commands wouldn?t cut it to bring some
sense of life to a piece. Composers use such notations all the time to
indicate precisely what they need from performers, and Talan M?s work is
a composition, not a performance, however much he may intend it to sound
?performed.? And there?s no reason these controls couldn?t be
implemented live in real time with foot pedals or something, so there?s
plenty of room for overlap between composition and performance.
It may well bring life into a piece. That's not what I was on about; of
course I agree with you here.
I don?t believe improvisation can ever be totally in the ?moment.?
Improvisors are always recycling and borrowing from buried experience and
spinning motifs, etc. The idea of the mind as blank slate creating order out
of nothingness just doesn?t ?cut it? for me.
No one ever said improvisation came out of a blank slate; of course it
doesn't. But it is in real time, and all that recycling etc. - more
important where you are in the piece - can't be a second-take; what you do
then is what you get. And there's no 'nothingness' - there are chops and
what you're doing.
There's a whole politics behind this, which Ayler and New Thing music in
general came out of. It came out of the black revolution of the 60s as
well, and the rhetoric around it was part of it; with people like Baraka
it entered linguistically into the pieces as well. And this politics was
connected with notions of black soul, black body, black spirituality, even
the black church. At least for myself, I can't put this aside. In other
words improvisation - being-live-in-performances was _inherently_ part of
the music of these musicians.
And by ctl doesn't cut it, what I meant was, take your commands -
SAXOPHONE:
Flatten the pitch in the upper registers YES
Squeak SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-S
Pad SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-P
Breath SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-B
Force virtual fingering SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-V
Etc.
- Take the first. How much flattening? In relation to what? In what
phrase? What do you do about the control and dimunition with the upper
overtones that occurs when you slack the reed a bit? Etc. etc.
This doesn't mean you can't 'set' an Ayler-type solo, note-by-note
modification; you could always build something out of sine-waves note by
note. It's not magic. But it is missing the point - when 'squeaks' are
used, they mean something about the soul and positioning of the musician
at that point; they're not devices. It's also very hard to program a
squeal (if that's what you mean, you generally don't get pad squeak, so I
think you're referencing the reed?), which has incredibly-fast changing
overtones resulting from teeth/lip/pressure/moisture-degree/breath/-
pressure - all changing dynamically at an equally incredibly-fast speed.
I do agree with Talan's take, which seems a bit different than yours. In
any case I've heard a lot of electronics, as I'm sure you have as well,
and the types of sonority that Talan uses seem fairly accessible; on the
other hand, I've heard nothing approaching, say, Bells, in that regard.
- Alan
