Introduction
“If you can’t sing it, you can’t play it” is a common adage amongst jazz musicians.1 It implies that musical expression must be “internalized.” Improvisations should flow forth from the most intimate spheres of consciousness, and the instrument—like the voice—must realize them with the transparent immediacy of one’s own body. A close cousin to this maxim is “Play who you are”2 or the call of jazz for the expression of one’s unique individuality. Together, these sayings conjure up the image of a musician who has mastered instrument and idiom to the point that they stand in full service of pure and immediate self-expression.
With this exposition, we share the creative process that led to the composition and performance of Stretch, of which you can find a recording by pianist Piergiorgio Pirro’s quartet on this opening page. Stretch—and the work that preceded it—was an experiment in resisting exactly the kind of mastery that the adages above imply. The catalyst for its resistance is the introduction of theoretical models and paradigms from spectralism, an avant garde tendency in classical music, into the extemporaneous music making of a jazz quartet.3
We will show that introducing this “foreign body” into the workings of a small jazz band creates a ripple effect that illuminates a complex network of factors at play in the band’s music making. It leads to a thorough reconfiguration in which new instruments get built and played, old habits need to be unlearnt, uncommon interactions emerge, theoretical frameworks clash in practice… In short, a whole multitude of new connections is established between human and non-human agents, and all of it happens in plain view.
Stretch
Stretch developed through a process that corresponds to some degree with the “iterative cyclic web” model theorized by Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean.4 Like this model, the process is a larger practice-research cycle that consists of a number of “subcycles”, or what we prefer to call “activities.” These activities form a web, implying that any of them can be an entry point to the cycle, and that the artist-researcher can move freely between them. Smith and Dean lay them out along a circle according to their affinity to practice-led research, research-led practice, or academic research.5
Different kinds of research did intertwine in the making of Stretch. The creative process of Piergiorgio Pirro and his collaborators included five activities, which each take their own position between the three poles of research that Smith and Dean suggest. However, for our purposes we did not find it particularly useful to present them as a circle.
Below, we provide hyperlinks to each activity, a reflective interlude, and some concluding thoughts. Grey lines between the hyperlinks suggest a linear path for the reader, though in reality the activities continuously intermingled and interpolated each other. It was therefore impossible to completely tease them apart in our description. Common themes and concerns inevitably stretch out across the whole process.
