1. Marko Ciciliani, “Music in the Expanded Field—On Recent Approaches to Interdisciplinary Composition,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, no. 24 (2017): 24.
"Planet Dysphoria" by Josh Spear. Performed at Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London, 22/2/2017. Filmed by the artist.
2. Jennifer Walshe, “The New Discipline,” MILKER CORPORATION, accessed 7 January 2021, http://milker.org/the-new-discipline.
4. Trond Reinholdtsen, "The Spectacular and Surprising Transformation of the Composer's Role on Stage in my Works 2002-2016," Seismograph, 31 May, 2017, https://seismograf.org/node/9211.
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- Études for the beginning of an online practice
Bastard Assignments is a group that has gradually evolved from organising and curating experimental music and performance nights in alternative, quirky venues in London in 2013 to creating work itself. The members are Tim Cape, Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley, and myself.
We work in what Marko Ciciliani describes as “Music in the Expanded Field” where a great many practices have come to be summarised under the category of music that are scarcely recognisable as music as it is traditionally understood. He mentions composers like Jennifer Walshe who “are expanding into different practices without abandoning the idea that they are actually composing music. Here is another quote by Jennifer Walshe that supports this: ‘I want to call this music, rather than interdisciplinary, and for us to discuss it as music.’ The artists I am referring to are thus not attempting to turn them-selves deliberately into artists of another additional discipline; rather, they are working from the understanding that sound alone is no longer sufficient to express their musical ideas."1
As a group, we identify as composer-performers. That is, composers who create work for themselves to perform in. What we understand from the traditional binary is that the composer writes the music in score form and the performer or musician interprets the score for an audience.
As a composer-performer, I quickly discovered my skills, strengths, interests, and likes and I created accordingly. In this sense, the practice is reflexive; the composing informs the performing and vice versa. As an example, I will mention a piece of mine from 2016 called "Planet Dysphoria", a live video piece I made for myself where I lipsync and move to an enormous collage of sounds and sources that I composed mostly from westerns, political speeches, songs, and superhero films, all in front of camera.
I love to lipsync and so am content to be consumed by perfecting it and spending the practice-time on it that it requires. I’m happy to spend many hours listening, filming, watching, and practicing with just myself. I generated the audio track first and then had to “stage” it. Ideas for certain characters, how they move, where they look and when, and how to flip between characters came to me early on in this compositional time of generating the track. As I rehearsed and watched myself practice, different roles were clarified and sedimented, and through my physical exploration the compositional idea of distinct characters became fortified. Only through doing was I able to fulfil on my initial concept of many roles, or voices, of polyphony.
The idea to synchronise particular chords and sounds within the track with winking came during the rehearsal period. The breath of certain characters, particularly "Catwoman", was not present for me whilst composing the track; instead I discovered that emphasising it in performance gave her a strong identity. Within the Whitney Houston song at the end of the piece, I found that I needed to add chords into the silences so that I wouldn’t be late to the next sound—silences are the hardest thing to deal with in lipsync, and using cues from other sounds which are perhaps background is a strategy to arrive on time to the next movement. Silence has no events to mark the passing of time; it is like flying over cloud or sea with nothing else in view to offer a hint of scale or distance.
Most of these things would be cumbersome to notate, full of inaccuracy, and lacking nuance. Whilst it could be said that the video documentation of a performance is itself a score, a way to transfer the piece to another performer to prepare and reproduce, would there not have to already be a score to have performed the piece so to acquire video documentation? The limitation of the frame is of course inherent when using a camera. I decided to do this piece as a live video piece because of the focus and detail that is achievable. During rehearsals, I was able to explore my compositional ideas more three-dimensionally, realising what happens dramatically when I leave the frame and how to work effectively within it with great accuracy.
I wanted to use makeup from the very beginning of the compositional process, however each time I perform this piece the makeup is completely different. I have also performed it without makeup. I learned and practiced how to do this too. This is an element that has also arisen through doing and preparing several times for this piece and has become compositional.
I describe this aspect of the practice, this play between a composition and performance-preparation (for that composition) as reflexive: I would say that much of the preparation for the performance of this work was compositional in the same way that much of the compositional thought was clarified through the preparation for its performance(s).
I gained a lot of confidence from Jennifer Walshe’s “The New Discipline,” a compositional manifesto also written in 2016. It gave me the push I needed to persevere and to just keep working until I found that I was improving at lipsyncing or applying makeup, for example.
“The New Discipline is a way of working, both in terms of composing and preparing pieces for performance. It isn’t a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draw on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy. In the rehearsal room the composer functions as a director or choreographer, perhaps most completely as an auteur. The composer doesn’t have aspirations to start a theatre group—they simply need to bring the tools of the director or choreographer to bear on compositional problems, on problems of musical performance. This is the discipline—the rigour of finding, learning and developing new compositional and performative tools.”2
A composer performing in their own work is not a new idea if we look at the history of classical music, although its resurgence is a recent trend. Bach, Schubert, Berlioz, and Mahler, to name a few, were all musically active in the performance of their work and that of others. Trond Reinholdtsen explains his own presence in many of his works as related to the patriarchal presence of the omnipotent conductor or mixer whilst adding a dash of irony, stating that, for him, the conductor’s baton has been replaced by the microphone.3 For him, being able to tell the audience what the piece is actually about was important and for this he assumes a lecturer role. Reinholdtsen also suggests that composers unavoidably contribute trashy and amateur elements that he describes as “exotic surplus.”4
I myself have received a variety of feedback for performing in my own work such as “composers should not perform in their own pieces” from a “Rough for opera” event in London 2015—an event at which feedback is handwritten anonymously.5 Often a composer performing in their own work embraces the amateurish roughness that they bring into the limelight, whilst others opt for a more rigorous approach, realising that they might receive as much scrutiny as a professional performer who has years of performance experience under their belt.
A big advantage to working like this, creating work for myself, is that I can work faster without needing to manage and react to another person’s feelings or change material to suit them. It is important for me that my collaborators are happy with the work I am giving them and that they have an affinity for it.
With Bastard Assignments, I gradually found a way to work that harnessed the abilities of the group. These abilities are hard to define and are more present during the making process than in the performance. It has meant abandoning making scores in favour of memorisation—a feature of my work that I had not acknowledged until we were forced to work remotely during lockdown. Because orally transmitting ideas and instructions or demonstrating them myself seemed suddenly much harder and more approximate online, it called me to work in a different way with my colleagues. It shone a light on how our practice as a group coupled with my trust in them to help create and memorise the work was something that I have taken for granted for several years.
Bastard Assignments as an environment and process was the start of a road that has led me to my artistic research fellowship in Oslo. It has provided me with a basis, a lab, a family, in which to explore my experience of collaboration as compositional method.
My current approach aims to erase myself from the solitary genius role of the classical composer, favours the group choices and suggestions, and enjoys a period of group workshopping where material is taken for a walk by the people I’m working with. I setup a creative space for the group to enter and establish some limitations and a goal before slinking back into the herd myself to also partake in the tasks.
I resist hand-holding or getting from point A to point B as fast as possible because the group will throw up interesting questions and ideas along the way. In the last two to three years, we have enjoyed working timelines that more closely resemble those of theatre rather than music—often a new commission for the London Sinfonietta, for example, will receive one rehearsal on the day it is to be premiered.