where (we) live

People in the drama and theater world talk all the time about process.  I never knew exactly how important that was until Sō Percussion started putting together our own evening-length productions.  We have had two big ones so far: Music for Trains, a site-specific performance in Southern Vermont's train stations, and Imaginary City, an exploration of the universal in city life.  

For our newest project - slated to premiere in fall of 2012 - process is all. Tentatively titled where (we) live, this work is in its gestation period, "in-progress" in the truest sense.  

One of the stated goals is to fling open the doors of creative possibility. 

In order to do that, we have to question our assumptions, to be ready for a "Yoda" moment (unlearn what you have learned, young Jedi).  Does a single author always create the best work?  Can improvisation freely mix with written-down music?  Can we introduce a wide variety of external inputs and still make something cohesive?  

Initially, we are interested in how where (we) live can celebrate the personal and idiosyncratic.   We've started asking our friends to make video of themselves doing something interesting and sending it to us.  The instructions are that there are no instructions.  So far, we've gotten dance improv, a man brushing his teeth, an improvisation with running water in the bathtub, and Jason's infant nephew gleefully playing with objects as they are put in front of him.  

One of our favorites so far is this video by the dancer and choreographer Emily Johnson.  She calls it a "smile dance for two."

We met Emily through Sara Coffey, who runs the wonderful Vermont Performance Lab in Southern Vermont.  Sara produced Music for Trains, and is a frequent sponsor of Emily's work as well.  

We've started putting music to all of them, sometimes setting music to the action, sometimes letting compositions just collide with the video.  In many cases, we find that the listener/observer constructs far more fascinating narratives when we do not dictate one to them.     

Below is a description of where (we) live as it currently stands:  half-baked, but full of exciting possibilities.  In order to keep our juices flowing, I came up with a series of opposite concepts, a creative "choose your own adventure" which will hopefully spark new ideas.  This list is a wholesale rip-off of Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies," which I highly recommend to anybody who is ever feeling stuck about what to do next:


Online version of the Oblique Strategies

where (we) live

on January 6, 2011

We live not only in physical places, but also in symbolic ones.  The members of Sō Percussion identify ourselves with many different communities: North Brooklyn, where we are based; the greater New York experimental music scene; a worldwide network of percussionists; an even broader community of music lovers.  Often the values of those symbolic places become our own. 

Rooms, buildings, and ideas enclose and define those spaces, often in very personal ways.   

In our many collaborations with other artists, we have sometimes been surprised at what they have to teach us: The members of the electronic duo Matmos, for instance,  are fantastically intuitive musicians who compel us to think differently.  


For where (we) live, Sō Percussion is exploring the idea of using artists from different mediums as outside inputs to our creative process.  We will ask them to improvise, dance, make video, or whatever else they can think of, and we will attempt to both fit them into our artistic world and adjust to fit into theirs.  These artists may be a virtual "5th" performer, represented by video and audio onstage with us.  


We are currently choosing a small group of key collaborators to each inhabit his or her own space, to show us what's inside:

Martin Schmidt of Matmos takes us on a video journey of his house: a fantasia with toy instruments in the basement, a bathtub improvisation, and the minimalistic drone of his partner Drew (the other half of Matmos) brushing his teeth in the mirror.

Choreographer and Dancer Emily Johnson explores body and identity.  Her "smile dance" videos fixate on the smallest changes of expression.  Her work is extremely process-oriented, providing us with instructions to create in an entirely different way.


Our responses to this input vary from the loosest improvisations to the most rigidly structured compositions -- from narrative play-along to abstract co-existence.  Some music will bear the strong imprint of one author, some will come out of the hazy evolution of groupthink.  

We have started a list of "creative oppositions," decision points to act as yet another external input to our process.  This list is inspired by Brian Eno's "oblique strategies."

Narrative : Abstraction

Composed structure : Spontaneous structure

Theatricality  :  Self-effacement

More Sound (noise) :  Less Sound (silence)

Movement : Stasis

Vertical (harmony) : Horizontal (melody)

Control : Autonomy

Intention : Chance

Engagement : Avoidance

Organic : Technological

Intuition : Process

Homogeneous : Heterogeneous

Smooth : Angular

Regimented : Anarchic

Aware : Naïve

Group : Individual

Complexity : Simplicity 

Stable : Unstable

John Cage's "Some Rules for Teachers and Students"

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student - pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher - pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: be self-disciplined - this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: "We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities." (John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything - it might come in handy later.


© John Cage Trust

Memory and Conversation in Music

As the new year approaches, I've been feeling a musical re-orientation creep up on me and on my group.  Once you've been doing something for awhile, you realize that a few things are never going to change:  So Percussion is always going to play difficult pieces written by other people.   And why not, when it's so fun?

It's been nagging at me for many years that I've been so focused on that very thing.  The tradition of writing down music as text and passing it along to trained performers is so well established that you can spend your whole life devoted to it.  Again, why not?

Every musician improvises: it is impossible not to, if you were ever curious about exploring what your instrument could do.  I had a conversation the other day with Fred Frith - a wonderful composer and improviser who has just finished a piece for So - where he told me that his Masters program in improvisation at Mills College is the only non-jazz degree program in improvisation in the country.  I thought this was kind of astonishing.

Since then, I've been questioning my assumptions about all of these cubby holes that we inhabit:  composer, improviser, interpreter,  etc.  I'm fixated on the analogy of language, where a written-down piece stores information in a collective memory, and conversation is a type of improvisation. The two flow into each other: a score or text is often the working-out of spontaneous ideas, and conversations can be highly structured and directional.

Think of how language functions in contemporary society: we must form thoughts and communicate spontaneously every day, and we must also be able to read and write.

The rock stars of classical music  (Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc.), were not really specialists in any one of these dimensions.  They simply made music.  We idolize them for what our collective memory still has of their legacy: the written (and lucratively published) scores.  By all accounts, most of them were also phenomenal performers and improvisers, free and willing to change elements of his own music from performance to performance.

Regarding jazz, perhaps it's just a younger art form.  Walking around Jazz at Lincoln Center, you can already see the classicizing impulse taking shape.  The walls are lined with posters promoting shows that recreate the exact set lists of old Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis sessions.  From what I understand, there is also a very strong pull in many jazz programs towards learning and adopting the tools and aesthetics of these specific periods as well.  This comes almost exactly on schedule, if you compare it to the Romantic Bach revival of the early 1800's, which elevated a marginalized composer to cult status almost exactly 100 years after his peak.

Since I'm a history dork, I can't help but digress into these topics.  But the truth is,  I simply realized that a healthy part of my musical life was underdeveloped.

As So Percussion wades into our next big project of original music, we find that the lines between dictation, inspiration, and communication blur when you work with the same people over a long period of time.  Jason frequently starts rehearsing his pieces with a few sketches on napkins, but we all understand his shorthand.  People say that this is working like a "band," but it's actually quite ancient, I'm sure.

So I find myself starting from square one...standing in front of some instruments, having ideas about stuff.  Some of these ideas are good, so I keep messing around with them.  But I try to keep inventing them, and slowly my creative terror is ebbing away.  

In the meantime, we have formalized the idea of Memory and Conversation as a theme for our next Summer Institute.  I'm looking forward to exploring it with some other folks.