On Personal Virtuosity
In the beginning, there are the "confines of a limited material universe" (Peters 2009, p. 11). The instrument itself, with all the historical and cultural connotations it embodies, provides a framework—a starting point on which we can build. The first steps of my research involved expanding my perception of the information embedded in the instrument. Because of various factors—the structure of the institutions in which I have studied music, the cities I have lived in and their accompanying scenes, and the musical language I have been exposed to—I ultimately had to realize that I possessed several “blind spots” in the developments of the contemporary double bass, a lineage that I perceive to be formed by Fernando Grillo and Stefano Scodanibbio in Europe, and Bertram Turetzky and Mark Dresser in the US, with various international proponents such as Joëlle Léandre, Håkon Thelin, and Barry Guy (just to name a few) filling in the picture. Many of these wonderful artists have left traces of their developments in the form of compositions, elaborate performance descriptions, and complete methods that aim to encompass all the technical particularities of their era (Robert 1995; Thelin 2011; Turetzky 1974).
Working through these resources, I not only expanded my perception of the possibilities of the instrument but also experienced a fundamental shift in my understanding of materiality, musical idioms, and the expansion of the sonic possibilities of an object. My perception of the act of playing evolved into a process of materials interacting with each other. If we think about the basic techniques of playing the bass, this usually boils down to the following:
One way to expand this vocabulary is by the usage of extended techniques—approaches to playing the instrument in non-standard, non-traditional ways. In my perception, we can break this down even further into extended techniques that rely on the interaction of the bow, the fingers, and the string, and techniques that expand the instrument through the use of preparations.
What is the instrument preparing for—or being prepared for? New timbral possibilities, methods of expression, poetic landscapes, and implications. Preparing means altering the sound of the instrument by placing various objects in and around its body, strings, and at the sound-producing elements of the bow and hands. The entire system of bow, hand, and string gets altered by different materialities, each possessing specific sonic capabilities.
This system becomes expanded by taking advantage of the various ways in which atoms interact and bring forth our material world. We can potentially prepare our string, bow, and hand triad with all the materials known to humankind (at least the ones that are safe to handle). Each material interacts with the system in a different way, giving us almost infinite timbral variations of the source material.
We can combine our understanding of how materials interact with the ways in which we can act upon the bow-hand-string system: attaching objects to the strings, placing objects between strings, threading objects below and above the strings, attaching objects to the body of the instrument, attaching objects to the bow, and using objects as a bow.
Finally, this arrangement can be described with the equation:
Further developments of this thought process have led to these forms of artistic output: Concert for Double Bass in Absentia, Sound, Sound 2, Recontextualized Sound.
The first approach uses a simple reconfiguration of the bow—instead of playing with the hair, we rotate the bow and use the wood of the stick, either to pull out a sound or to strike the instrument in a percussive manner.
The second approach uses the nails of our hands, allowing for a distinct percussive attack on the metal of the string.
When horsehair or human skin comes into contact with the string's metal, it activates specific changes in the sonic structure, affecting timbre, overtones, and oscillations. All techniques involving these two approaches take advantage of this underlying structure and manipulate it in various ways. The positioning, weight, speed, and surface area of the bow or the hand influence the resulting sound, offering vast inherent possibilities for the improviser. By using the bow or our hands, we can identify two distinct ways to interact with the string through different materials.
* Certain objects, when threaded, allow for a unique form of activation. An initial impulse from the right hand causes the object to keep bouncing due to the combined tension and flexibility of the strings, which function like a spring. This phenomenon is shape-dependent rather than material-dependent, and it applies to various objects—from pencils and chopsticks to large metal rods and grates.
