This year Sō Percussion embarks on a retrospective project looking back on our first 15 years of commissioning new works for percussion quartet. The ruminations below are an extended exercise in getting myself psyched up to write about it all.
When I write about music, it’s a kind of advocacy. I believe scholarship is important, and I employ those tools occasionally in order to support the subject I’m writing about. But the nature of my career as a performer has lead me right into the thick of things, working with living composers to make new music all the time. I encounter the music I know best every day while I’m playing it, and when I write about it, I see this intimacy as a strength.
I remember as a student imagining that there was a disembodied objective-consensus-monster moving through classical music history making decisions about what music to keep and what to discard. I knew it must have consisted of a collection of people, but their purposes and agendas were opaque to me. I heard a lot of older musicians talking about “our repertoire” and “the classics,” and it seemed that I was mostly expected to take the quality of the work they referred to on faith. The objective-consensus-monster is a common fallacy (which I perhaps just made up), or actually a product of lazy historical thinking. There are always specific people influencing any canon, advocating for certain things to survive. In many cases, those influencers are artists themselves, taking inspiring ideas and branching off of them to create new veins of work. Sometimes they are writers, other times listeners. In most cases, the genesis of the influence is not as widely distributed or as amorphous as we might imagine.
One of the most vivid examples of this involves Felix Mendelssohn’s tireless promotion of the music of J.S. Bach, passed along to him by connoisseurs like his great aunt Sarah Levy. Levy maintained an active salon which presented Bach’s music. For decades after his death, Bach’s work was marginalized and nearly forgotten, appreciated as the work of an accomplished craftsman, but very much out of style. Mendelssohn lead a number of efforts, most famously his triumphantly massive performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, which almost single-handedly restored Bach’s popular reputation and lead to a culture-wide revival of interest in his music which has not yet abated. (The library of congress has a tidy summary of the events here).
In Bach’s case, a widespread consensus did congeal after the efforts of these early 19th-century champions, but the push toward acceptance was delivered through the social vehicle of spectacle and via the authority of a respected composer and conductor. If not for Mendelssohn, how might we view Bach now? Perhaps we would still have acknowledged and discovered his greatness, but nothing in history is truly inevitable.
In 1802, before Mendelssohn was even born, another German named Johann Nikolaus Forkel published the first substantial biography of Bach. In his forward, we find this declaration:
“For Bach's works are a priceless national patrimony; no other nation possesses a treasure comparable to it. Their publication in an authoritative text will be a national service and raise an imperishable monument to the composer himself. All who hold Germany dear are bound in honour to promote the undertaking to the utmost of their power. I deem it a duty to remind the public of this obligation and to kindle interest in it in every true German heart.”
In Forkel’s case, appreciation of Bach’s work was hardly just a case of idle aesthetic appreciation. He advocated for Bach as a German Alpha Composer, cajoling - rather creepily, if the tone of this translation is accurate – ordinary people to cultivate a love for his music as a matter of patriotic duty. Did the overwhelming quality of Bach’s work draw him to this pronouncement, or was he already looking for an icon to fill the role? Likely, it was a little of both. What we know is that his agenda succeeded: the German-centered Pantheon of composers still exists, and Bach is right at the center of it.
As a college student, when I first encountered these historical complexities, it turned me off to the idea of the canon, the classics, any of it. I didn’t want to be manipulated by dead German guys! But I realized that there is a further fallacy in thinking that just because there is a social or political motive involved in promoting music, that it can’t also be truly great. It often is!
I felt empowered knowing that “objective” greatness was not some mysterious and disembodied force propelling Bach’s work into our time. I knew who these guys were that believed in it, and I vaguely knew why. I was more or less free at this point to accept or reject their points of view without stumbling through the objective-consensus fog. And I dared to make up my own mind. This sometimes lead to strange moments in lessons, when I was liable to offer up the opinion that honestly Bach was a very excellent composer. A teacher would gape at me like “we knew this already, Sherlock,” but I liked the idea – real or illusory – that I was deciding for myself, and that I had concrete reasons for doing so.
A lot has changed in 200 years, and my own motives are very different than Forkel’s. I do want every American to know about Steve Reich’s music, but I wouldn’t go so far as to make an argument for patriotic nationalism based on it. Furthermore, my position in relation to the music I advocate for is much closer than Forkel or Mendelssohn were to Bach.
As a result, I always write better when avoiding the trappings of authoritative language, or of claims of universal importance. This is especially true when describing music written by a friend who lives down the road and our kids play together (Dan Trueman), or somebody whom I unabashedly worship (Steve Reich). When you work closely with brilliant people, they transform your life, and there is no way to step back from that and achieve critical distance, nor would I even care to do so.
My best teachers always showed me why a piece of music mattered to them. They never expected me to take it on authority. To them, the qualities of the work were so evident that no such authority was necessary. I try very hard to practice this kind of evidence-based teaching with my own students.
In the coming months I’ll be examining a number of pieces written for Sō Percussion that strike me as significant. A few of them have had the time and exposure to become important to other musicians and audiences as well, which is wonderful. Many of the pieces have qualities that matter to me not only intrinsically, but as statements and ideas that I think are invigorating for the percussion medium going forward. As I’ve written often recently, Cage had it nailed in proposing that “percussion” is a refreshing idea for our whole culture, not just an exciting new(er) offshoot of contemporary classical music.
We are standing backstage at Disney Hall in Lost Angeles just before going on. The entire LA Philharmonic is waiting for us, the hall is full, the NPR live broadcast machinery is revved up, and we are commiserating with the Phil's artistic director Gustavo Dudamel.
"Why don't we all just get up and go to the bar right now," he quips, accompanied by a mischievous smile I am accustomed to seeing on a 9 year old boy right before he wreaks havoc. Peals of laughter explode, as that's about the last thing you expect somebody in that position to say right before walking onstage. Any performer who is honest will admit that some variation of this thought goes through their head every time they are about to play a big concert. It was exactly the tension release we needed, just imagining the world-famous Gustavo Dudamel and moderately well-known So Percussion tossing back Negronis at the bar while the entire orchestra and audience sits there waiting.
This sense of dread morphing into excitement is a ritual, and I think it's a healthy one. If you're not a little bit afraid, are you really expecting to do something urgent and risky on stage?
The piece we were about to play was David Lang's man made, his new concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra. The work was co-commissioned by the LA Phil, and this was the North American premiere. Risk is built into the piece on multiple levels. Aside from just the challenges of performing, there are aesthetic unknowns - we were about to kick off the LA Phil's subscription season with 7 minutes of snapping twigs. Most of the audience had undoubtedly come to see Dudamel and the orchestra masterfully tackle Mahler's Fifth Symphony, but that was not what they were going to get at first.
Beyond aesthetics, there were substantial performing challenges. Snapping twigs in precise rhythm is surprisingly difficult, and the second movement involved delicately navigating a row of tuned wine bottles. One wrong move and a bottle can go flying, clanging onto the floor and shredding the placid texture of the piece.
Here's a video of us with the orchestra during rehearsals:
The opening night was a smashing success. We received positive feedback from the audience at Disney Hall, the listeners online, and the LA press. This has been our first major foray into the orchestra world as soloists, and we left the experience in LA feeling like we had established an important presence.
"The program is profound...in ways deep and meaningful [Lang] question[s] progress while embracing it."
This year, man made received further performances in The Netherlands, Denver, Cincinnati, Ireland, and Finland. Although the novelty value of the instruments we play in the piece is high, the work seems to reach audiences on a more fundamental level, drawing a meaningful connection between the sophisticated violin and a simple twig. This habit of flinging ourselves headlong into unknown territory is the consistent thread that defines what So Percussion is about. Our activities now spread across the realms of contemporary music, education, presenting, recording, and even social service. But that risk is always there.
II. Music for Wood and Strings
"Percussion" is not actually a thing - it is more like an open-ended proposition. A long time ago, we abandoned the idea that we should only play instruments which are already categorized as percussion instruments. Whenever we begin working with a new composer, the first question is always "what shall we play?" In no other kind of ensemble can I imagine this question being so pervasive and fundamental to their identity.
With most of the pieces written for us, the answer places us somewhere in the ballpark of traditional percussion instruments - after all, that's where we received most of our training and honed our skills. With Music for Wood and Strings this tendency is abolished. In conceiving the piece, Dessner actually pulled us closer to his world of the electric guitar by designing a new instrument called the "Chordstick." Resembling a kind of electric guitar/hammered dulcimer hybrid, the instrument design deftly calls upon the sound of a stringed instrument while employing mostly percussion-related playing techniques.
Bryce is best known to the wider world as guitarist and songwriter for the rock band The National. This helped enormously in getting the music out there, but had very little bearing on the content of our collaboration. We have known Bryce since we were all students at Yale. His experience as a classical guitarist and composer runs as a parallel thread along with his career in pop music, so there was really no moment where any of us were trying to "cross over" from any one style to any other.
After the Carnegie Hall premiere in November 2013 and many subsequent performances, we released Music for Wood and Strings on Brassland Records in May of this year. We were incredibly pleased at the reception it got, especially its debut as number 15 on the Billboard classical charts in its first week of release!
The piece seems to have the ability to reach different audiences who enjoy the chordstick's connection to the electric guitar, the originality of its design, and the visceral excitement of the work's driving rhythmic patterns. We toured it far and wide this year: Brooklyn, Paris, London's Barbican Centre, Arkansas, Dublin, and so many more.
Two of our opportunities to perform Music for Wood and Strings this year best exemplified the broad appeal that it has. First, in May we were invited to participate in a live broadcast of the hit WNYC show Radiolab. We collaborated with the host Jad Abumrad on a fascinating story about a woman who happens to have an unnaturally loud heartbeat. This performance to a sold out BAM Opera house in Brooklyn included a segment where we performed an excerpt of Music for Wood and Strings. The crowd's reaction was incredibly gratifying, and we were even tickled to learn that 80's movie icon Molly Ringwald was getting into it from the audience as well.
Our Radiolab segment made it onto the podcast:
Second, we were invited to perform a set on the gigantic Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. Normally reserved for major pop acts like Billy Joel and Mumford and Sons, we were somewhat flummoxed but obviously also ecstatic to participate. Bryce's piece was the perfect fit for this outdoor festival. Curious listeners started to flock from all over the festival grounds, and by the end of the set, we had a huge but also perfectly respectful crowd checking out our 20 minute long pieces.
I managed to get one photo in during our performance of Steve Reich's "Drumming."
III. Princeton University
When I was a college student, most performance majors were actively discouraged from pursuing a career in contemporary music. This reflected the economic realities of the music world at the time: orchestras and other classical institutions were seen as stable and relatively popular, while composers and contemporary music ensembles operated on an exciting but impoverished fringe. The greatest legacy of groups like the Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a Can organization is that they actually achieved so much in the face of a heavy cultural crosswind, a fact that is difficult to fully appreciate today. Many performers moonlighted in contemporary music, but very few did it full time.
Part of that long-standing structure is the centrality of the string quartet at the top of the chamber music heap. Let me state the obvious, which is that the prestige of the string quartet is extremely well-deserved. When your pioneer is Haydn, your apex is Beethoven and Bartok, and you have had a steady stream of excellent ensembles for 250 years, you have a good thing going. As a result, having a string quartet in residence at any music school has been the standard model for years. Though we dreamed of such a residency for ourselves, it seemed far-fetched if not impossible. Percussion is the late blooming hanger-on in the great classical music tradition. Who would ever be willing to invert this pyramid?
In 2014, the faculty and administration of Princeton University took a chance on a new model, and they asked So Percussion to be Edward T. Cone ensemble-in-residence. Although we had been building our experience up to a point where we were ready for this move, I still couldn't quite absorb the paradigm shift that allowed it to happen. It reflected not only our work as an ensemble, but also the contributions of countless other artists and advocates towards appreciating percussion's role in refreshing the culture of classical music and pushing it forward.
During our first full year in the position, we dove in head first. Our two major concerts at the Richardson Auditorium were extremely well-attended and successful. We commenced a number of new projects with Princeton faculty and student composers (premiering 10 new student works), coached undergraduate chamber music from Mendelssohn to Faure, collaborated with other guest ensembles on campus, and taught a semester of writing for percussion in the music department. In the 2015-2016 season, we'll be performing Lang's man made with Princeton's undergraduate orchestra, workshopping our new show for BAM's Next Wave Festival in their blackbox theater, and continuing to develop new work with composers and working with undergraduate performers.
Princeton is also the site of the So Percussion Summer Institute (SoSI), an annual program for performers and composers that just wrapped up its seventh year. This year, we had 25 percussionists and 10 composers from all over the country and as far away as Brazil and Australia. This year's theme was "Percussion, Staging, and Movement," and we immersed the students in sessions with world class directors, choreographers, and performers to focus on how we present our craft onstage.
Although we initially imagined that SoSI would be more like a summer retreat, there are just too many interesting things to do! This year we and the students performed a blistering 11 concerts in two weeks, extending our annual tradition of performing all around the Princeton community.
IV. Brooklyn Bound and A Gun Show
When we first landed in Brooklyn in 2004, opportunities abounded to experiment and try ideas around town. Many of these gigs, at venues like the now shuttered Galapagos, flew just slightly under the radar. Failure is an important part of creativity, and - especially in the performing arts - you need to fail in front of people to really know what's working and what is not - it just isn't the same as in the rehearsal studio. These days, we are very happy to have higher profile gigs, but this window for failure shrinks as your work becomes more known and presented more widely.
We now have enough repertoire from nearly 15 years as a group to go out and play concerts with confidence that the work we are presenting will succeed. But we are itchy to keep moving forward, especially when composing our own music. It occurred to us that we could build these opportunities for ourselves at our studio in Brooklyn, while at the same time giving younger groups a chance to do the same.
Brooklyn Bound was born out of this thinking. In six concerts this year, guest ensembles from around New York came to our studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to play for intimate audiences. We told them to come with their work in any state of development to try out in front of a trusted group of friends. We seized the opportunity for ourselves, using the events as a series of workshops for our next show at the BAM Next Wave Festival, which we are now calling A Gun Show.
As a work-in-progress, A Gun Show is still taking shape. It tackles - in a rather abstract way - the emotional resonance and lingering spiritual detritus that gun culture leaves in our society. We've decided that the work is not fundamentally political, although you can hardly strip such a fraught issue of all of its baggage. For this project, we are collaborating again with Ain Gordon and Emily Johnson, both of whom helped us bring our last project Where (we) Live to maturity.
We've started to call these works, which along with Where (we) Live also includes the show Imaginary City, "multi-genre programs." They incorporate original music, artistic collaborations, theatrical production values, and visual art into an immersive journey through the 21st century creative experience -- or at least through OUR 21st century creative experience.
V. The Future - Expansion and Service
The "open-ended proposition" of percussion is an extraordinary opportunity, but it is also a remarkable challenge. We must constantly ask ourselves not only where we are headed, but why? What does all of this amount to? Obviously we love all of the ongoing artistic adventures, the students whose lives we impact, and just generally having fun at our jobs. But at this moment we also feel that we as artists must engage directly with society through meaningful service.
Music is not a trifle or a luxury -- it is a social bond and an effective tool in creating agency and citizenship. That is not the same thing as saying that art itself is "useful." It may not be, but the social act of creating and responding to art is meaningful. The habits that people develop out of making music together encourage them to think independently, work cooperatively, and share a kind of communion. Music has been the center of ritual life for eons. It is not a compartmentalized and specialized slice of industrial culture, but an entire way of being in the world.
Musicians, as such, are not limited to being agents of advocacy for art in the world, but can directly catalyze social and environmental change. We have started to take our very first steps in making small but meaningful contributions in this way. During this year's SoSI, all of our students participated in a day of service, packing 25,400 meals for the Crisis Center of Mercer County through the organization EndHungerNE.
Starting this year, So Percussion is committed to purchasing offsets to compensate for our carbon-heavy activities such as touring travel. Within the next couple of years, our annual budget will provide for 100% offset spending. This again is only a partial solution, but it is something we can do right away. We are currently rewriting So Percussion's vision and mission statements to reflect this increased emphasis on service.
Artistically, there are so many activities we are looking forward to: newly commissioned pieces by Caroline Shaw, Vijay Iyer, Dan Trueman, Steve Mackey, a new collaboration with soprano Dawn Upshaw, return appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and much more.
For the last 8 months, I haven’t written anything new in this space because I’ve been working on a wonderful project: a new volume in the Cambridge University “Companion” series about percussion. Russell Hartenberger is the editor, and I was honored to contribute the chapter about percussion chamber music. It is titled “Lost and Found: Percussion Chamber Music and the Modern Age.” This was my first high-profile writing project in print, and I must say I’d grown used to the conditional nature of a blog…any second thoughts or changes, just hit the “update” button! Trying to address 100 years of history and articulate how my work fits into it was a great challenge.
Now that I’ve turned in my final draft, I want to address the issue that my last big blog article dealt with: practice. As that essay mused, my interest is not as much in how to practice your instrument as it is in the conceptual framework of what it means to have a practice. What do you practice, and why? How do those choices affect the body of work that you produce? Most importantly – to me—how does a musician’s actual performance practice affect compositional practice?
My just-finished writing project for Cambridge emphasized percussion not as a specific and separate category of practice, but as a new model of flexibility and curation. Underneath that umbrella are many micro practices as well, each with their own norms and similarities to other instruments.
Within each of those micro specialities, a percussionist learns how to rank or gauge himself within the field. For instance, I’d consider myself on the higher end of solo marimba capability, on the highest end of contemporary chamber music, and at a high level of orchestra capability (though not elite). On the other hand, my drumset playing is at a basic fundamental level, my steel drum playing is completely non-existent, and I’d be kicked out of an afro-cuban band on congas by the end of the first bar. You might say that nobody is good at everything, but it's quite surprising how much percussionists are expected to be able to do.
One of the instruments I’ve always loved is the piano. I’ve played since I was a kid, and even did pretty well in a competition in high school. But compared to the crowded world of ultra-elite pianists, I do not have the technical capabilities or breadth of repertoire of the best players. My wife Cristina is this level of player, and some of her close friends are top pianists like Ingrid Fliter and Vanessa Perez. I’m surrounded by them quite a bit, which I love.
For a long time, piano has been a fun extension of my percussion practice. Within this category, everything seemed to fit just fine. In college, I was the go-to pianist in the percussion group, sometimes even missing out on good drum parts. When So Percussion initiated our John Cage project in 2012, it only made sense that I’d tackle Credo in US, First Construction, and others part for piano within the percussion ensemble.
I would never play Bach or Chopin on piano in a professional context, so why was I comfortable tackling Cage? Well, it wasn’t really the instrument – the tool or organum - that defined my expertise and the limits of my practice. Viewed objectively, the piano can be considered a perfectly normal percussion/string hybrid instrument. It was the style and aesthetic purposes of the music that offered me a place to explore. I had never felt self-conscious about sitting at the keyboard anytime I was surrounded by drums. Those drums signified that I was in a comfort zone, an ecosystem that I understood and was identified with externally.
A few years ago, Dan Trueman showed me some experiments with a new software for a “prepared digital piano,” where an 88-key digital piano feeds into a laptop via USB. The concept was obviously an homage to Cage, but his inventive preparations were only possible with the latest dynamic technology. I was astounded by what it could do, and also tantalized by how the first few pieces were shaping up. For some reason, I was gripped by the conviction that I could play this music.
Actually, that reason was not hard to identify: I was not primarily motivated by a vision of myself as a pianist, but by my deep understanding of Dan’s work and of what he was trying to accomplish. So Percussion had just released the recording of a 5-year project with Dan entitled “neither Anvil nor Pulley,” a kind of sprawling magnum opus that defined Dan’s work up to that point (video below).
nAnP doubled down on two major strands of Dan’s work: folk influenced fiddle music and newly created software instruments. In 120bpm, the second movement, contact microphones attached to woodblocks constantly trigger and reset metronomes. The outer movements are quirkily orchestrated fiddle tunes, standing in stark relief to the mechanized chaos of the larger inner movements.
Dan called his piano etudes "Nostalgic Synchronic," after the primary effects of the preparations. "Nostalgic" refers to the ability that the computer has to play back notes right after the pianist plays them, reaching back in time to the initial attack. "Synchronic" refers to the many ways in which pulse and rhythm can be manipulated and multiplied after the pianist plays a note. Within his program there are also endless possibilities for alternate tunings, sometimes changing within only one piece.
The first bar of etude #1 announces itself with exactly the same kind of metric ricochet that I had mastered in 120bpm. I understood immediately how he had transferred this idea over to the digital piano…actually I should say I understood why he had done it. To this day I have no idea how he did any of this. Our video of the Prelude from I Care If You Listen is below:
I begged him to let me download the instrument to my laptop and tackle this first piece. To Dan’s credit, I’m not sure he’d ever heard me play piano before, but he said “sure.” I discovered quickly that many of the compositional ideas he was exploring fit my playing like a glove. Actually, I took pride in the fact that the tricky aspects of rhythmic timing were second nature. I’m sure most classical pianists have never had their own sound fired back to them in rapid, precise metric quanta, which they then needed to play off of, but I had.
Just as quickly, I ran into a problem that in my breathless enthusiasm I hadn’t really stopped to consider yet: I’m just an ok pianist. The many years that I’d spent in the conservatory progression of acquiring percussion skill only translated up to a point with this instrument. I hadn’t had to sit down and slowly solve a knotty technical playing problem in about ten years. My brain knew exactly how this music should go, but my fingers pushed back.
At this point I experienced my first (though certainly not my last) dip in confidence. I was still having fun, but was I doing service to Dan’s vision? Should I continue to pursue the project, premiere subsequent pieces, record them? Or should I do my part to get them in the hands of a real pianist – a poisonous thought that I’ve since banished from my mind. Dan was extremely encouraging, as I think he sensed that a performer’s enthusiasm for a composer’s work goes a very long way in bringing it to life.
I knew that I had one card up my sleeve. My wife is a dazzling pianist who studied for years at the elite Academia Pianistica Imola in Italy, first privately and then on a Fulbright fellowship. I’ve included a video below of her playing Carl Vine’s “Sonata #2” to give you a sense of her skill. She is also an experienced teacher, so I knew that she could help me when I bumped into my own inevitable limitations.
All of a sudden, I felt like a 16 year old student again, plodding carefully through exercises while my technique slowly improved. Her initial diagnosis, along with a few lessons in posture, muscle efficiency, and finger position, was simple: “you need Bach.”
Who doesn’t? But, since I told her I wanted the real deal, no sugar-coating, she turned to the D-major prelude from book one of the Well Tempered Claviers. “I played this forte and slowly every day for 3 months. That should get you going.”
What was I getting myself into…
With a punishing touring schedule, increased teaching responsibilities, a family to think about, why would I start up this whole new phase in my practice? As it turns out, the major advantage 33-year-old me had over 16-year-old me was experience. I could see my slow fingers improving only incrementally, but I knew exactly why she had me doing that prelude, and I had a general sense of how long it would take for that skill to improve.
I knew that it would seem to stagnate for awhile, then I could leave it alone and go on to something else, and when I came back it would magically have leaped forward. I knew that if I stayed relaxed and played slowly with a big sound, my muscles would learn the deep relationships of the key spacing and be reminded of the sound I was always looking for. I felt in my mind that my obstacles were just piles of junk in front of me that I could see clearly over. A young student has to trust their teacher blindly about these things, but I saw how it would play out if I persevered.
Many times, when she corrected me or instructed me on aspects of technique, I’d realize how similar her piano technique was to the way I teach percussion: the largest and smallest muscle groups work together as a unit in the most efficient way possible, never isolating themselves, but rather transferring energy one to another when the music demanded. Torso, shoulder, and arms worked together to provide sound, wrists fed energy to fingers to make their work lighter.
The idea of technical problems as inconvenience rather than impassable barrier was exhilarating. Many times, I’d find that I was projecting into my body certain ideas I had about what it meant to be a pianist, only to have Cristina show me that the solutions were much closer to my familiar percussion practice than I had ever imagined. Gradually my technique improved. Spurred partially by my investment in the project, Dan churned out 8 fascinating, wildly inventive etudes. With each one, a similar process played out. Dan’s musical conceit was familiar, but I had to work to extend my technique in order to play each piece.
But this is when I started to drop my hang ups about being a real pianist…this process is what etudes are supposed to be for! I just happen to be able to develop my skills in varying tuning systems, with digital metronomes hounding me and the occasional need to wait for a reverse playback note to catch up before moving on. After my initial interest in this work, Dan started writing more and more etudes, constantly upping the ante on inventiveness and challenge. Some of the pieces, like the 4th etude entitled Marbles, work my fingers to their last. Others, like the 7th etude Systerslått, test my musical skills with mirrored asymmetrical underlying metronomes or slowly enveloping reversed chords. Dan is very generous to credit my involvement as spurring him to work harder and harder at developing this instrument, all the while keeping in mind my willingness to tackle the strangest and most thrilling challenges in the music.
I’ve since premiered and recorded these pieces, which Dan and I are releasing in fall of 2015 on New Amsterdam Records. It feels strange to me that my first solo record will be as a pianist. I have all my degrees in percussion performance, but my thinking has expanded to imagine that a practice is not only about an instrument. It is about the context of style and the particular demands of the work that you want to do.
In this sense, my conflict about daring to be a pianist was not the piano’s fault – it just sits there. It was my lingering awe at the tradition that the instrument and its forbears represent. I was aware that I’d never have enough time left in my life to play the Chopin etudes or a Beethoven sonata at a world class level. But the piano is not just about that music, it is a tool. Furthermore, Dan’s digital piano was a related offspring of the piano, the same way that the fortepiano was from the harpsichord. Why could I not use that tool to say something new?
For more information about the Nostalgic Synchronic Etudes and the Prepared Digital Piano:
This past week was a kind of waking dream for the four of us in So Percussion. We were invited by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to open their 14/15 subscription season at Disney Concert Hall by snapping twigs...
The Phil co-commissioned David Lang to write a new concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra. Titled "man made," the pieces uses our skills and curiosity as instrument builders and foragers to place homemade instruments in a very classical context.
Below is some footage of each part of the piece during the dress rehearsal for the premiere:
footage of Disney Hall and the LA Phil used by kind permission
of the LA Phil
"man made" is in four parts. The soloists perform mostly on found and homemade instruments: twigs, wine bottles, steel pipes, and trash cans. The orchestra engages in a dialogue with the found instruments, sometimes complementing and sometimes overwhelming them.
The four performances to the packed hall were a success, and to us it all seemed unreal. That the experiments in found sounds and amplified plants that John Cage pioneered had come to this point was hard to believe.
Every single person we met at the LA Phil was warm, encouraging, and ultra-professional, from Maestro Dudamel himself to every member of the stage crew. Players from the orchestra approached us backstage during the breaks, asking about the sounds we were making and the compositional processes involved.
The LA Times' chief classical critic Mark Swed seemed to really get what we were after. Find his insightful review here.
After the weekend orchestra concerts, we switched gears to prepare for our own concert on the Green Umbrella series, the LA Phil's signature new music programming. We performed David Lang's quartet "the so-called laws of nature," as well as Michael Gordon's massive "Timber." Again, Mark Swed attended, and his review was very apt.
This is just a quick digest. I've only started to absorb what made this particular gig so special. There was something wonderful and surprising about being included in the orchestra's core series, not shunted off into the "new music" corridor of orchestral programming. That may be another post of its own.
In the fall, So Percussion will be releasing Bobby Previte's Terminals, a sprawling series of concerti for percussion quartet plus improvising soloists. I wrote this short essay for the LP liner notes.
Terminals Liner Notes for LP
Bobby
Previte’s Terminals proposes a simple
idea: that the percussion ensemble is actually an ideal vehicle for the 21st
century concerto. Writing for percussion allows the composer free reign to grab
the flotsam of sounds and ideas that have floated through his life. He’s a drummer, and so the choice of percussion
seems natural. But anybody
who knows Bobby’s music knows that drums are just a part of the equation, the
instrument that spoke to him earliest and strongest.
Terminals is a compendium of ideas
that – though the percussion ensemble itself is young in the context of western
music history – also have sentimental resonance. The sheer magnitude of orchestration recalls the huge
mid-century novelty percussion orchestras, or the clashing and wailing of
Edgard Varese’s Ionisation. Bobby knows these references well, and
he celebrates the spirit of joy and chaos that they conjure. Some of his compositional choices – a
swing-era drum battle, an abrupt break into slow blues, VERY long rhythmic
vamps – would feel awkward or contrived in the hands of other contemporary
composers. But Bobby has lived
these musical moments deeply: in Terminals,
they form a coherent viewpoint.
We half-joke
with him that he is our favorite marimbist of all time because of his inspired
contribution to Tom Waits’ song “Clap Hands” on the album Rain Dogs. His career
spans an incredible breadth, including collaborations with the soloists on this
record. But Terminals alsointersects
with an earlier phase of his life, as a student of the influential percussion teacher
Jan Williams at the University of Buffalo. Jan opened the door for Bobby to a whole world of
avant-garde concert music: the percussion experiments of John Cage and Lou
Harrison from the 1930’s, the hard-edged modernism of Pierre Boulez, the
uniquely serene assemblages of Morton Feldman.
This
early exposure seems to have had an impact on him: Terminals is an ambitious statement in the vein of those bold
composers. This big statement is
made using percussion, but not in the way Cage and Varese used it for their
youthful radical gestures. Bobby’s
percussion statement feels more like a summation than a revolution, a
repository of decades of thinking about these instruments.
“How
much of that did you make up, and how much was written down?”
This
is the question we are asked at almost every So Percussion concert, one we’re
happy to answer. That ambiguity means we’re doing our job. It comes at the threshold where predetermined
and spontaneous ideas blend together.
A good classical performer, though he or she is often playing prescribed
notes, is striving for that balance with every performance.
In
Mozart and Beethoven’s time, the concerto soloist was partially an improvising
soloist. The cadenza was a bravura display not only of technical ability, but
also of imagination and spontaneity.
The way that Bobby weaves masters of contemporary improvisation into the
fabric of Terminals may at first seem
like another cross-genre experiment. But actually, his combination of sturdy,
crafted ensemble writing with careful curation of the soloists’ talents is one
of the oldest formulas we have.
And
what soloists! The first time we
performed Terminal 3 with Nels Cline, I actually forgot to play for a few bars
because I was so enraptured by what he could do. In live shows, John Medeski’s climactic entrance on the
organ always electrifies the room.
It is a credit to
Bobby’s composition and the soloists’ artistry that I’m always listening to
this record wondering “what is improvised, and what is fixed?” The happy truth is that it hardly
matters, because in this universe good ideas are simply good ideas, no matter
whether they jump off the page or directly out of the fertile minds of the
musicians.
Working
with Bobby on Terminals was
exhilarating and revelatory. Traipse
out in front of the audience to perform a clichéd, deadpan stick-clicking
routine? Not on your life, but for
you Bobby ok, because somehow it will work. Learn to crack a bullwhip, because that’s what the
Buddy-Rich-Gene-Krupa drum battle section requires? You’re insane, but yes, we trust you. Interrupt the fourth movement with a
duet between washboard and spoons, or spend ten minutes performing no other
action than setting up a whole drum kit on stage? Why the hell not, at this point?
Bobby
pushed us beyond our boundaries. In preliminary meetings about Terminals we told him we’re a touring
group, so really he should stay away from instruments like chimes, timpani,
huge drum setups, and a thousand pesky accessory instruments. This is of course exactly what he ended
up using.
His
winning combination of dogged conviction and convivial humor always helped us
jump over the next hurdle. Very
few composers can ask so much while also making you feel so invested.
In May, So Percussion is featured on Cenk Ergun's latest release Nana performing Proximity, a ravishingly beautiful piece made of metal sounds that he wrote for us in 2009.
We've known Cenk for years - he and Jason attended Eastman together - and this project gestated very slowly. It represents a unique vision that could only be Cenk's music.
On Wednesday, May 14, Cenk releases Nana on Carrier Records. We also have a release party at the So Percussion Studio. So Percussion, Cenk, Grey Mcmurray, and Jeff Snyder will perform.
Wednesday, May 14 - 8pm
20 Grand Ave #205
Brooklyn, NY 11205
In this post, I have included some excerpts from Proximity, as well as a couple of questions that I asked him about his work.
I've always liked Cenk's music, and I trust him, so I enjoyed working on the project. But sometimes I had a hard time wrapping my ears around what this piece was about. Undoubtedly, this stemmed in part from having a click track in my ear and being consumed with my local tasks during the piece. When I heard the final mix of the recording, I had my "eureka" moment.
I've come to believe it's one of the most stunning pieces of music anybody has written for us.
I asked Cenk a bit about his music:
Me: I wouldn't normally interrogate you about how your Turkish background influences your music, but you specifically mentioned to me that Proximity features that influence. Can you tell me more about that?
Cenk: "Traditional Turkish music is monophonic. Melodies are played by a large variety of instruments in unison or at octaves, and always in rhythmic unison. Instruments like the saz, ud, ney, kanun are impossible to tune perfectly together and thus create a unique sonority when playing in unison. This sonority is the impetus for Proximity and is clearly audible especially in the opening minutes. Another influence present on the opening was Japanese Taiko drumming. I remember when I finally felt ready to puts notes down on paper after months of preparation - I was at a Kodo concert. It was their concentration and the focus on the music - the intensity of the moment - I decided I wanted to begin the piece that way."
Me: How would you describe your aesthetic briefly to somebody who is just getting to know your music?
Cenk: "Always experimental in spirit. All sounds in any combination. No sounds in one combination. A dedication to simple, clear, unified shapes in time. A focus on individual sounds rather than the relationship among them. Interest in time, memory, perception. Interest in instruments and instrumentalists. Listening.
I love the highly amplified sounds of quietly played instruments. These sounds do not have the harsh quality of loud playing, and yet because they are amplified they are loud enough to reveal all their detail to the ear. This is why Proximity is scored for amplified percussion quartet. It's a relatively loud piece produced by amplified quiet playing. The pitch content in my works is usually extremely limited. I like to focus on a specific, limited set of pitches for long spans of time - as my goal is always to establish a single sound texture and maintain it for as long as possible with minimum variation. Regardless of the tuning method I'm using, or the length of the piece, I often find that by the end of a piece I've used only about 7-8 different pitches as well as their siblings at different octaves. The first 8 minutes of Proximity is only 3 pitches, played at several different octaves on several different instruments."
The last part of Proximity consists of the elemental sound of tam-tams, the ultimate vibrating metal. In a way, Proximity is Cenk's "Construction in Metal," although his voice is wholly his own: indebted to Cage, Feldman, and many others, but totally unique. I find that the frenetic activity found through Proximity - and especially at the end - steers the sounds away from ritual or cultural assignment. The steady hum of the tam-tams grows and accumulates mass, but the molecules continue to vibrate.
Proximity may be one of the most successful realizations of something we've long cherished: percussion as the vast world of things that vibrate, piercing an inner emotional core with sound.
“An intellectual or bodily habit is therefore a structured discipline that generates knowledge. It is a discipline that requires a special kind of training, specific to each organum, and habitually idiosyncratic to an instrument.” - J.F. Gauvin (333)
These words zoomed out at me as I was reading a paper my wife prepared for her graduate course on the interdisciplinary practices and ideas of 17th century Italy. It seemed to perfectly describe the way I was thinking about an old and frustrating question in teaching music: technique or musicianship?
Of course, excellent musicians know that this is a false dichotomy. In reality, the two are holistically connected as part of a continuum. I asked to see the article in order to investigate the context of this extraordinary statement. Actually, the article was not about music at all: it was about the role that scientific instruments played during the early modern era in moving knowledge from the purely speculative and rational to the empirical through experimentation.
The author is an academic named Jean Francois Gauvin, curator of the collection of historical scientific instruments at Harvard. As I read further, I noticed that the purpose of his work was not only to highlight the role of instruments in advancing scientific discovery, but also to argue that the practice upon the instruments themselves yielded knowledge, and that part of that practice was beyond the realm of words and rational discourse:
“Instrument practices, whether to survey a field, observe the moons of Jupiter, perform logarithmic calculations, or generate new experiments under a controlled vacuum, all have something in common; they require coordinated movements, precise gestures that are difficult to characterize and ascertain. Such a bodily knowledge, impossible to articulate in plain spoken words or in writing, is often understood nowadays as tacit knowledge.” (328)
“Tacit knowledge!” It was this word “knowledge” that captured my attention in the first quote. I struggle sometimes to articulate the role that fundamental skills play in musical training. The word “technique” has a sterile, wooden feel to it: to many musicians it conjures the unthinking automaton, the skilled but uninteresting performer who has no imagination or heart. But “knowledge” is a powerful, sinewy word.
The concept of “tacit knowledge” seized me, because it provided a label for a concept that usually passes wordlessly between teacher and student. Both of my main percussion teachers - Michael Rosen at Oberlin and Robert van Sice at Yale – used to say to me “don’t tell me, show me!” The rational comprehension of what I was supposed to do, and the tacit knowledge that my hands and brain had to acquire to actually do it, were NOT the same in their eyes.
In Gauvin’s historical account, the practice or habit of acquiring tacit knowledge was called habitus. The concept of habitus was important enough to warrant a definition by the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
“Habit…is a generation of motion, not of motion simply, but an easy conducting of the moved body in a certain and designed way. And seeing it is attained by the weakening of such endeavours as divert its motion, therefore such endeavours are to be weakened by little and little. But this cannot be done but by the long continuance of action, or by actions often repeated; and therefore custom begets that facility, which is commonly and rightly called habit; and it may be defined thus: HABIT is motion made more easy and ready by custom; that is to say, by perpetual endeavour, or by iterated endeavours in a way differing from that in which the motion proceeded from the beginning, and opposing such endeavours as resist." (331)
Habitus is essential to any discipline: art, craft, science, or sport. But the purpose of habitus is not mindless repetition for its own sake…it is to acquire a special kind of knowledge, without which the goals of those activities are not attainable. It can be a habit of the body (in corpore), and/or of the mind (in anima) (329). As a practicing musician in a physically demanding field, I'm fascinated by the implications of the habitus in corpore, the effect that the training of physical movements has on the knowledge we acquire.
One of the problems with the question of technique in music is that the discussion rarely centers on the broad, encompassing vision of habitus. It is usually local to the practice that the speaker values or is familiar with. In the world of percussion playing, it might refer to a seamless snare drum roll. One might argue that acquiring the tacit knowledge of how to do this roll is essential to achieving mastery, but they are only talking about mastery of the specific types of music for which a roll is necessary.
As a teacher at a conservatory of western classical music, I prescribe many required habits that fulfill the demands of the music we study. That snare drum roll is among them, and so I put our students through the ringer of applying the habit of being able to play a roll. When they are called upon in orchestra to do it, they must already have a “motion made more easy and ready by custom,” and they must have spent much time “opposing such endeavours as resist.” Otherwise additional demands will overwhelm their capacity to perform well.
Too often, we are limited by the confines of the genre we operate within. "Technique" then only applies to whether you can swing like Philly Joe, play a perfect snare drum roll, or lay down Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" on the xylophone without missing a note (all excellent things to be able to do). Habitus asks the question: what do you seek? The answer may very well be "I don't know."
Gauvin’s orbiting concept to complement habitus is organum, the instrument.
An organum is "'that which is used by an agent in or for the performance of an action.’ It is a 'thing with or through which something is done or effected.' An instrument, at its core, is thus 'anything that serves or contributes to the accomplishment of a purpose or end.’” (319)
Human-produced sound requires an instrument. Gauvin makes clear that the ancient definition includes more than material inventions, such as "a person...an organ or body part...a religious or sacred text..." (319) An instrument is the means to the end, and understanding the instrument is as important as any of the purely abstract knowledge we could hope to deduce or acquire about the structures of sound.
The nature of the habitus we develop is directly affected by the peculiar nature of its corresponding organum. I’m struck by how well this corresponds to a musician’s practice, and Gauvin even spends a page detailing the misfortune of a plucky organ inventor of the 1600’s who was sure that his 27 key octave was going to catch on with musicians because it contained “a greater number of consonances and other intervals in their justness,” and which would “be played as easily as the others when the hands become accustomed to them, because they follow the infallible rule of reason."(332)
Habitus does not only serve to achieve mastery over something that already exists. Gauvin illuminates that the main purpose of applying the scientific method to the use of instruments was to harness the practice upon the instruments as a technique towards discovering something new, the essence of the “experimental.”
“…Galileo’s telescope was meant to observe something that was never seen before, though precisely what it was remained undetermined. Hence, a seventeenth-century organum was not an instrument restricted to a terminus ad quem (final limiting point), in the strictest scholastic interpretation (the hammer in the blacksmith’s hand was the most common example used). Instead, an organum, in the hands of an increasing number of natural philosophers, grew into an instrument guaranteeing a terminus a quo – a starting point, if used properly.” (316)
John Coltrane’s relentless and obsessive saxophone practice comes to mind: not just the mastery of an existing craft, but a push beyond, a searching into the void. In a recital I just attended, the pianist Richard Goode displayed a completely mastery of his instrument, transcending it and achieving a kind of pure ephemeral poetry. Only habitus achieves this, and only daily negotiations with the mechanisms of a cumbersome piece of 19th-century furniture produced the knowledge necessary for that moment to exist.
The problem – and opportunity – of percussion
As I speculated on this historical wisdom, I thought of my own practice, which is complicated and diverse. Richard Goode's performance only increased my astonishment that something so exquisite could be wrangled from a big cabinet full of strings. A percussionist’s life consists of the tension between the demands of craft and the imaginative possibilities of many different instruments.
We see ourselves not just as practitioners, but also as curators. Our studios are like museums of sound, junk, and technology. In addition to the habitus of playing our instruments with taste and proficiency, we must cultivate a flexible approach to each new circumstance. We cultivate the meta-skill of knowing how to start a new habitus almost from scratch when a novel new instrument combination or setup comes our way.
Last year David Lang wrote a concerto for my quartet So Percussion to play with orchestra. The second movement requires us to play tuned wine bottles. Characteristically for David, the material is quite complex, and even more characteristically, we have to play it in unison throughout. The wine bottles are set up in a straight line moving outwards from the performer, so that all of our motions between them are a matter of bringing our sticks closer or moving them further from the center of our bodies:
Further complications arise from the nature of the scale that is used: G, A, Bb, C, C#, D, G. As the diagram shows, the 7 bottles are spaced out evenly in front of the performer’s body. If you take a look at the music, it seems to consist of straightforward notation: they are the same notes and rhythms that we’ve been using for years. But in this case, the physical relationship to the spacing of the notes is completely out of whack. Whole steps and half steps are meaningful aurally, but meaningless physically. The closest intervallic relationships between physically adjacent bottlesare the half steps of A-Bb, C-C#, and C#-D, but the largest is the fourth from D-G! On any standard piano keyboard – which is identical to the way most tuned percussion instruments are grouped – these intervals would correspond to a physical space on the keyboard that corresponds to the aural space of the intervals and the visual space on the notation.
Not so in David’s piece. When I was first confronted with this setup, I was no more of a virtuoso with the instrument than would be anybody off the street. I had to develop a brand new habitus from the ground up, and a huge chunk of the learning curve would consist of training my hands and my brain to reconcile the cognitive dissonances of these new relationships.
It’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that I didn’t have any advantages in learning the bottle instrument. In a sense that’s true: my first attempts at playing this material were agonizingly slow and rudimentary. But there are other aspects of the percussionist’s habitus that compressed the learning curve for me.
To start, any time we play music with two sticks, we articulate in some binary combination of right and left -- you’ll notice the R’s and L’s in my Lang score. This drumming habit is one of the oldest and most important skills we practice. It is the very first thing I cover with undergraduate percussionists, in the form of George Stone’s primer Stick Control.
The students must learn how to execute these permutations of stick combinations with perfect fluidity, at different tempi and dynamic levels. I use the snare drum as the basic instrument for these exercises, but you could whack on almost anything to practice them. When I learned the bottle music from Lang’s piece, the facility in executing these combinations was already ingrained. One major element is already crossed off the list of skills that must be incorporated into the new habitus.
At the Bard Conservatory, each of the four members of So Percussion teaches a semester of fundamental skills to the first and second year students. Although we’ve all acquired the basic knowledge to teach these skills, we’ve gravitated toward particular areas. I teach the snare drum semester. Josh works on basic timpani, which involves perfecting extremely simple exercises while placing the focus on producing a good sound. Eric teaches the elements of playing keyboard instruments such as marimba, which consists of focusing on the shifting mechanics of moving around the instrument. Jason’s semester fascinates me, because it’s like nothing I ever had: he works on the drumset, but rarely teaches anybody how to play a particular style of music. Instead, he applies a creative and permutational approach to 4-limb coordination, where the student may have to learn how to play Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood” split up among their limbs, or read through many patterns in exercise books while shifting between hands and feet on the kit.
The purpose of this unified approach may seem esoteric to a student who is in the thick of the curriculum. After all, they are not yet really learning any music that will help them win an audition or impress their parents. But the ever-shifting and complex demands of percussion playing require that there be a baseline habitus in place in the future, that any new situation can be met with a confident set of skills that will provide a jumpstart in adapting to the specific needs of the situation.
Another established habitus that helped me work my bottle music up to speed is simply how often I’ve put myself through this process with different organum. Gauvin’s definition is sufficiently broad for me to think of each unique, curated setup of instruments as a whole. As such, although I have probably played each individual instrument within the setup before, the organum that is specific to each piece is its own new entity.
Constantly throwing yourself into new situations like this is a habit. I know how long it will take my hands and brain to begin to adapt, and how much extra time is needed to build basic fluidity as compared with marimba or another familiar instrument. I know that it’s going to be slow and painful for awhile, then get better. I know that I won’t be able to read the music with fluidity at first, but that I must keep plowing ahead.
Outside of the case of Lang’s piece, my group has our own collective habits that help us adapt together to new situations. Two of the most crucial are cueing and singing. Student percussionists are sometimes surprised at how much we insist on these tools, but they are actually lifelines that help us deal with the diversity of a repertoire where almost every single piece of music requires different physical movements. A string quartet, for all of its unique challenges, never even has to think about this. For us, singing has provided a way for us to utilize the same instrument in the preparation of almost every piece. We are able to check ourselves on where the greatest challenges of the music lie by having this baseline.
Cueing is another habit that glues us together. When I've looked over at Jason while performing together over the last twelve years, he’s been behind a different combination of instruments practically every time, but his body language and our unspoken communication have evolved a consistent familiarity. I can’t depend on him to always be in the same place on stage, nor to be making the same sounds. But I always know how he’ll show where the time is, or indicate that it’s time to move on from a looping pattern, or end a phrase.
Habitus in composition
Below is the video for the epic work that the composer Dan Trueman wrote for So Percussion called “neither Anvil nor Pulley.” You can chill out and watch the entire thing, or skip around to get a sense of what’s going on. The piece combines two of Dan’s primary areas of activity: fiddle playing (especially the Norwegian Hardangar fiddle), and building new instruments that involved computers.
Since the piece is a percussion quartet, there is no actual live fiddle playing. But movements 1, 3, and 5 are all fiddle tunes, orchestrated and composed out for our strange little percussion band. Movements 2 and 4 incorporate new instruments that rely on computers to manipulate and transform their sounds.
It struck me that in both cases, the practice of the specific instruments was essential in generating the musical material. The laptops respond dynamically to what the performers are doing, and their feedback suggests new ideas. The fiddle tunes have the contour and character of Dan’s fiddle playing…it’s unlikely that abstract structural planning would have created the same melodies.
When I say “abstract structural planning,” that is of course its own habitus in anima and it is usually developed through an intellectual organum such as serialism or sonata form. For the purposes of this article, however, I’m most interested in how the quirks of physical practice reveal knowledge.
I asked Dan - who is now a colleague at Princeton in addition to being a collaborator - to comment upon this way of thinking and working:
“This past year I’ve been giving a talk in various contexts (integrated humanities PhD program at Princeton, the national academy of engineering, others) called “Scordatura: on Re-mapping the Body to Sound (and vice-versa).” I begin by looking at scordatura on the violin, and how it subverts a deeply embodied hard-earned system that links ear, eye, and body. When highly trained, we hear a G, and our 2nd finger goes down on the E-string, or when we see a G on the page, our 2nd finger goes down on the E-string, etc. We have all sorts of patterns built into our fingers, and again expectations for how those patterns correspond to sound, or how they can respond to what we hear or see on a page. Once you re-tune the instrument, all of that gets subverted. For some like me (I learned to read music when I was 4, before I learned to read English) and many others, this might seem like a bad thing, but it is a fantastic tactic for opening up creative spaces.
That very system can be a bit of a prison: we just know it too well, and there is no room for surprise: re-tune, and BAM, all of sudden these familiar embodied patterns yield unexpected sounds, and we can explore. I do this *all* the time, and when I do I try to be sensitive to what I discover while exploring. I rarely come in with much of a preconceived idea about what I’m after (I might know i’m wanting something fast, something slow, something dark, something melodic, but maybe not even that), and rather just let my fingers roam and see what emerges. It really is part of a creative practice, in that I’m always playing, always listening, always trying to be on the top of my game (and often not succeeding), so that when I’m exploring a creative space like this I’m in the best possible position to find things that are inspiring to me.
The next thing I talk about is the prepared piano, and how Cage’s approach achieves a similar thing for the piano, subverting a well understood feedback loop and making new creative space where we can leverage our hard earned physical knowledge (and even our music reading skills, whether or not the notes on the page correspond to pitches we hear; this is similar to scordatura notation that Bach, Biber, and others - including me - use). My own prepared digital piano (well-prepared digiklavier?) is similar, except that instead of bolts and rubber, I’ve dropped simple algorithms between the strings that respond to our playing in different ways. It’s a different preparation but a similar subversion, though in this case the preparations have consequences in time as well as in the immediacy of the sound we get back when we press a key; we play something, and then the instrument continues to respond over time, providing further resistance for us to wrestle with. Again, with this I build preparations, sometimes with an ear for a rough idea of what I’m after musically, or what I’m interested in exploring musically (dynamic tuning, asymmetrical grooves, etc…), and then I explore. I’m not a very good pianist, so I don’t have the same kind of embodied abilities as I do with the violin, but it is still an incredibly rich creative space to explore, one that led to some new etudes for digital prepared piano called "Nostalgic Synchronic," and one that I’m continuing to use for pieces I’m working on now and will in the future.
You (Adam) asked if it was a leap in my compositional evolution to this bodily way of thinking. I think it was way back when i was getting started, and it came through the Hardanger fiddle primarily, since that tradition is full of scordatura. I think it was absolutely crucial to my development as a composer; whatever good work I have done is undoubtedly due in large part to having started working that way. Those ideas have extended to everything that I do as a musician, whether it be writing a string quartet, building a digital instrument for a group of percussion virtuosi, or working on a fiddle tune.
Steve Mackey has this great quote where he parodies Groucho Marx: "I refuse to accept any idea I can think of." I’ve always thought this is great, and resonates with how I’ve felt for a long time. Basically, we want to engage everything we can in the creative process, and our bodies are at the center of that. I’m usually most successful when I don’t quite know what I’m doing. I may figure it out later, but if I’ve got it all worked out while doing it, I’m usually bored with what I come up with!”
When I emailed Dan to ask him to contribute some thoughts, I knew he'd have something interesting to say, but I couldn't have imagined how well it would correspond to the topic of this essay. Dan imposes an unfamiliar habitus on himself practically every time he composes, a sort of creative kick in the butt to make sure new ideas are available to him.
Final Thoughts
I believe we as musicians could benefit from seeing the world of our practice in a larger context. We are not only cogs in an industrialized wheel of music production.
We are creators ourselves, seekers of knowledge. Rather than only practicing towards a known goal – concrete goals are important, don’t mistake me - what if we saw ourselves as striking out into the unknown? Like Galileo, what if the main purpose of practice upon our instruments was to doggedly apply a useful habitus to an open-ended process? This process may entail composition and improvisation, or it may be the crucial element in collaborating with a composer. It may even be the process of constantly revisiting great old music to see what new knowledge accumulates from the generations of performers who are dedicated to it. I enjoy reading about the weird contraptions, hare-brained ideas, and creative gall of the early 17th century. I feel that we are, or could be, in a similar era for music-making.
But their example implies that we as artists must not only live inside the confined space of "practicing." We must have a practice, a habitus that is intellectually and creatively engaged, mining our bodily insights towards new knowledge.
Gauvin, Jean-Francois. 2011. "Instruments of Knowledge." In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson. 315-37. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
