In Absentia
Concert for Double Bass in Absentia, or a reverse live-stream concert. On the stage: a lonely double bass held upright by a stand; small devices attached to its front, with cables extending into the recesses of the room. An instrument suspended in animation, with all its aesthetic and historical implications lingering in the air. The performer is in another part of the building, alone in a room, waiting for a signal. The audience observes the abandoned instrument, hidden behind their own temporary veils, keeping a socially accepted distance. The signal comes, and the performer begins his process, manipulating the chosen tool of sound production, another double bass, in unconventional ways. Bow hairs, metal pipes, clips, brushes, and a whole variety of other objects are attached, clipped, and scratched in ways that give life to fleeting moments of sound. In the other room, the abandoned instrument comes to life. Transducers attached to its front begin transmitting vibrations. The instrument implies its source but stands resolute in its mission to conceal it. The audience is left to grapple with this absence, their minds finding creative ways to negotiate the ensuing frustrations. Finally, a series of interviews—an attempt at piecing together the whole from its individual parts.
With the stage now set, we can return to the beginning of the project, one that emerged from a perfect alignment of needs, ideas, and life circumstances.
The previous research process revealed a need for a format in which the work with preparations could be presented without revealing the source of the sound. The idea for this presentation format emerged from an unexpected connection between an old jazz legend and an even older Greek one. What kind of link exists between New Orleans jazz and early Greek philosophy? A shared tendency to obscure certain aspects of their performances: a handkerchief in the case of Freddie Keppard, and a veil in the case of Pythagoras. Keppard used the handkerchief to conceal his trumpet fingerings, preserving the distinctiveness of his highly personalized style (Williams 1967, p. 21). Pythagoras, for his part, was said to have taught from behind a veil in order to heighten his students’ concentration. From Pythagoras, we inherit the term acousmatic (ἀκουσματικοί), which was later adapted by Pierre Schaeffer to describe a sound whose source is not visible—acousmatic music hides behind a veil of loudspeakers (Schaeffer 2017, p. 64). This lineage offered just the right amount of mythological obfuscation to serve the purposes of the project. By removing the visible source of the sound, I could provide the audience with a more focused experience of the subtle details revealed through the work with preparations, while also keeping a few secrets from the innumerable and inevitable copycats that populate the experimental scene.
Another interesting byproduct of removing the source of sound production from a live setting is that it allows us to question the notion of liveness itself. The perception of liveness in this specific performance arises from its setting: the context implies that the performance is happening in real time, although there is no concrete evidence that the musical material is not prerecorded.
Thoughts and observations on the issue of liveness in freely improvised music date back as far as the art form itself. One of the earliest examples comes from a documentary on the improvisational group Nuova Consonanza (Gallehr 1967), which perfectly encapsulates both the enthusiasm and the chaos of those early experiments with free improvisation. At one point in the film, Gallehr describes a key element of listening to an improvised performance: the tension of expectation. This involves waiting to see whether one’s expectation will be fulfilled, or whether another instrument will intervene, breaking the expectation and returning us to the beginning, introducing a new anticipation of a possible resolution. Participating in an improvised performance as a listener thus becomes an active act of engagement—listening as playing. As with the rest of the film, no final agreement emerges from the discussion, but an important point is raised: listening to improvised music outside the context of live performance fundamentally changes our relationship to expectation.
In Borgo (2022, p. 48), we can find a series of quotes from accomplished improvisers on this topic:
Tom Nunn (1998, p. 154) argues that “much of the unknown-about-to-be-known is lost in recordings. The image of the musicians playing together, communicating, collectively creating in the moment is impossible to capture on tape.” Cornelius Cardew (1971, p. xvii) felt that “documents such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of time and place ... what you hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing, but divorced from its natural context.” And David Roberts (1977-8, p. 39) argued that “for musics not predicated upon the dissociation of form and performance, recording can, and often does, spell the kiss of death.”
The performance placed the audience in a peculiar position. There was no musician to observe; the liveness of the event was implied only by its time and place. Although the performer was absent, audience members who were questioned after the performance did not doubt its liveness. This notion was mentioned in several interviews, often translated through the metaphor of energy—an energy created by the collective focus directed toward the performance. The most poetic interpretation came from an interviewee who remarked that it reminded them of funeral music: the absent performer in the role of the dearly departed, with all the audience members holding them in collective memory.
From my perspective, alone in a separate room, I was aware of both the liveness of the situation and the attentiveness of the audience. The act of playing differed markedly from my individual practice at home. In a way, both perspectives depended on a certain level of trust: that the material was indeed being performed live, and that an audience was present in the concert space. In that sense, the audience and I successfully formed what Berliner (1994, p. 459) calls a “communication loop” in which the “[…] the actions of each continuously affect the other.”
The act of removing the body of the performer provoked the most interesting responses from the interviewed audience members. This absence triggered a kind of mental negotiation, as if the framework of space, music, performer, and context were so deeply formalized that the mind was compelled to fill the void in any way possible. Some imagined my body in the space; others, the bodies of famous bass players. Some attempted to reconstruct the gestures that led to particular sonic results, while others wondered what objects, techniques, or interventions produced the soundscape.
What all participants agreed on was that the novelty of the situation gradually allowed for heightened attention to the listening experience, one in which analytical processes gave way to a more receptive state of listening. Pythagoras’s approach to teaching found itself justified once again.