Resistance (interlude)

You might have noticed that we have drifted far from the old “if-you-can’t-sing-it-you-can’t-play-it” attitude. Pirro’s organological research is not a matter of making instruments that rival the familiarity of one’s own body, of making the perfect tool for the job of self-expression. As Aden Evens points out, the relation between this tool and this job is much more of a two-way street. The instrument does not just become invisible in the act of music making. It “offers to the musician a resistance; it pushes back […] [T]he instrument cooperates by resisting.”1

Pirro built instruments that were new to him, and he learned to play them while making new music. This accentuated their resistance. His new designs determined what he played as much as the other way around. For example, the knob-synthesizer configuration resulted in a particular kind of musical language. That language exploited the continuously stretching and compressing of spectra with great depth.

However, it did not allow for notes outside of the pitch aggregates that constitute these deformed spectra. Pirro felt he lost too many of his creative tools. His years of more “traditional” jazz practice pushed back and begot a redesign of the instrument. That instrument in turn came with its own unique resistance. A new keyboard and microtonal intonation forced a different kind of playing: one devoid of fast runs, and carefully nestled in the liminal space between melody and harmony.

And this brings us to that “foreign body” of spectral theory, which put up its own form of resistance. It clearly resisted the traditional keyboard and was the impetus for organological redesign. But it also “cooperated by resisting” the jazz practice Pirro was familiar with. His idiolect was changed by the effort it took to internalize spectral harmonies and to microtonally intonate their constituent pitches. It was also changed by new regions that opened for exploration; and by losing familiar methods and tools. Of course some tools and methods are too precious too lose, like playing “outside” notes. They in their turn require changes to existing frameworks of spectral composition.

Pirro’s organological designs and composition process are therefore a constant mediation between at least three entities: his musical practice, his electronic lutherie, and spectral theory. Mediation means that it does not belong primarily to any of these elements but is located somewhere in the space between them. And so another familiar maxim disappears out of sight: How can you “play who you are”, if you don’t know where your agency ends and that of your instruments or theoretical frameworks begins?