This is a report on research supported by the lectorate ‘Music, Education and Society’, research group ‘Making in Music’, at the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague. The present text and the accompanying audio component constitute a documentation of just over one year’s activity by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble, an improvising group I set up in 2009 in which I perform together with Conservatoire students, ex-students, faculty members and guests. A primary purpose of the research has been to address the question of how this activity might inform a more general approach to free improvisation in the context of this conservatoire and others, especially where combinations of electronic and acoustic instruments are featured, and how this might inform the learning trajectories of students of instrumental playing, composition, electronic music and other areas. This question is addressed principally through reflections on the workshops and performances undertaken with the ensemble between October 2018 and December 2019, which amount to around four hours of recorded material.

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Richard Barrett

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF THE SONOLOGY ELECTROACOUSTIC ENSEMBLE

Research report January 2020

Supported by the lectorate ‘Music, Education and Society’, research group ‘Making in Music’, Royal Conservatoire The Hague

background

In September 2017 I submitted my doctoral thesis Music of Possibility to the University of Leeds, and was awarded the degree in January 2018. In the meantime the thesis has been revised and expanded for publication, under the same title.^[1] The principal question of my research was to define and analyse what I think of as four central innovations in twentieth century music – systematic composition procedures, electronic/digital technology, free improvisation, and the awareness of the geographical and historical context of musical creation – and to explore ways of unifying and radicalising them for the present and future, with illustrations drawn from my own work as a creative musician during the period (2013-17) when I was working on the thesis.

The ideas presented in the thesis already had their origins in the annual series of lectures I give at the Institute of Sonology, and their realisation plays a significant role in the work I’ve been doing since 2009 with the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble. This group brings together students, ex-students and staff from the Institute of Sonology and other departments, and occasionally also outside guests (such as trumpeter Peter Evans, guitarist Han-earl Park and synthesizer player Richard Scott). The ensemble’s work is focused on a collaborative investigation into combining traditional and electronic instruments in an improvisational context, bringing together participants with many different backgrounds and approaches. I try to encourage a situation where all members of the group - including myself and any other faculty members who may participate - have an equal creative input into the music we make, which is presented in between four and six public performances each year, plus an annual five-day intensive workshop which I usually teach alongside my long-term collaborator and fellow electronic musician Paul Obermayer, my partner in the duo FURT since 1986. These workshops involve participants from all three of the KC’s “creative departments” (Composition, Art Science and Sonology), and have also included several Erasmus exchange students.

The ensemble has participated in developing several specific research projects by Sonology Masters students, but, apart from this, it embodies a way of conducting research in diverse areas: sound design, amplification and spatialisation, improvisation as a method of composition particularly suited to the electronic/digital domain, the development of electronic instruments towards a comparable degree of fluency to traditional acoustic instruments, and many others. At the same time, although the membership of the ensemble naturally varies from year to year, its evolution over the years of its existence forms a deepening basis for participants to draw upon. Recordings of many of the ensemble’s performances since 2010 may be consulted at the following playlist on my Soundcloud page:

https://soundcloud.com/r-barrett/sets/see

The purpose of the present project, then, is firstly to document the current state of this evolution, and secondly to trace its continuation over the course of a year, beginning slightly before the workshop held in late October/early November 2018 and extending slightly past the following one which was held a year later, in order to obtain an overview of both the cyclical development of the group’s work over the course of a year and the similarities and differences between two successive workshop sessions with completely different personnel. Issues that form the context of my analyses and discussions include:

– musical heritage and its role in the present and future, and innovation in finding ways of combining the traditional instrumentarium with the digital world, since the ensemble always involves a different combination of acoustic and electronic/digital instruments

– a close relationship between pedagogical and creative work, and a regular opportunity for public performance – emphasising my conviction that improvisation is best thought of as a method of composition with different but no less sophisticated and valuable possibilities compared to other methods

– integration within the curriculum, for example in complementing Johan van Kreij’s Sonology classes in live electronic performance, which concentrate more on working with smaller groups and deal with digital performance technology in more detail, and giving electroacoustic improvisation a central place within Sonology (almost everyone currently in the faculty who is at all involved in live performance has performed with the ensemble at least once)

- creating in each new academic year a “collective creative personality” out of a mixture of old and new members from many different musical-aesthetic backgrounds, but without falling into superficially “eclectic” approaches

The results of these activities have fed directly into my own compositional work, particularly in the context of my codex series of scores for improvisational performers, in which since 2000 I’ve written 22 pieces, some of which are for one-off occasions while others have been performed many times around the world by diverse ensembles, some with more and some with less (or no) connection to “classical” traditions. (This series of works is fully documented in Music of Possibility.)^[2]

The present text is intended to constitute a modest body of knowledge concerning this kind of composer-performer ensemble, serving not only to give an extra momentum to the work the ensemble is already doing within the KC, and a basis for its continuation in the future, but also to communicate the insights deriving from this work to people in our institution, and elsewhere, who might be wishing to initiate or further develop the realisation of related ideas.

My belief is that while musical innovation in the twentieth century concentrated on new musical sounds, forms, expressive means, influences, technical procedures, and so on, a new direction for innovation might be found in the way music is made: for example how it’s composed (using improvisation, technology, notation, or some combination of these), and by whom it’s composed, that is to say whether involving a single composer or some kind of collective, with parallel and/or complementary roles. These are issues that most of my own work over the last 15 years at least has been dedicated to exploring. My doctoral thesis in its published version comprises a first step towards making the knowledge derived from those explorations more widely available. This research project is intended to form a second step, with a different kind of integration and balance between theory, practice and documentation, and of course drawing and building (in a way the doctoral project couldn’t) on what amounts by now to several decades of work in diverse contexts as performer and composer, using improvisational, technological and notational methods, many different degrees and forms of collaboration, and in many different pedagogical and professional contexts. In Derek Bailey’s words:

Improvisation has no need of argument and justification. It exists because it meets the creative appetite that is a natural part of being a performing musician and because it invites complete involvement, to a degree otherwise unobtainable, in the act of music-making. (Bailey (1992), p. 142)

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improvisation in the conservatoire: why?

No doubt many people have considered this question and have their own responses, and such responses might have a certain amount or even a great deal in common, but the reason I’m asking it explicitly now is that an attempt to answer it from various different angles can help us to outline some practical and specific ways in which working with free improvisation in such contexts might be approached. When I use the term “free improvisation” I’m talking about a method of creating music whose style and structure, as well as its material, is brought into being collectively and/or individually at the moment of performance. (I return to this definition in chapter 6.)

In this first part of this section I discuss the aforementioned question under a number of headings which more or less reflect the division of a conservatoire into departments, together with some remarks about how the method of musical creation under discussion is something that can actually bridge these divisions, which I think we can all agree set up boundaries between people as well as administrative departments, between ways of thinking musically, boundaries that serve bureaucratic aims more than they do musical creativity and potential. A thought that I try to bear in mind when framing this discussion is that improvisation is in a sense the most “complete” form of music-making since it in fact contains all the others. The headings are:

(1) improvisation for composers (in the broadest sense)

(2) improvisation for classical vocalists and instrumentalists (including specialists in particular historical periods)

(3) improvisation for music educators

(4) improvisation for improvisers

Let’s look first at improvisation for composers. Anyone who knows anything about what I do will know that my activity in free improvisation is an integrated part of my practice as a creative musician (I use that term as being at the same time more general and more precise than “composer”). But it’s important to point out here that this integration isn’t just a matter of making music which involves diverse kinds of fusion between notation, spontaneity, fixed-media and interactive electronics, for example, but of something that takes place on a deeper level. This is something I’ve discussed in some detail in Music of Possibility, but suffice it to say here that I think of even the most systematic “post-serial” compositional framework as being a way of “building an instrument” (with its own temporal as well as sonorous structure) as a context for more or less spontaneous actions and reactions, or as being a way of creating an analogous kind of “dialogue” between system and spontaneity to that which might come into being between the people taking part in a group improvisation.

This idea has its origins in a situation I would often find myself in some years ago, and in which many composition students I talk to find themselves in too, of getting to a certain point in a compositional process, even at or near its very beginning, and not knowing how to proceed. I would tell myself: “but if you were sitting in front of an audience with your instrument, about to begin an improvisational piece, this problem would never occur!” So the question was then how to make use of that sense of just launching oneself into the music, when not sitting on stage ready to perform. I’ve found that to be a greatly inspiring idea, and it’s contributed strongly to the way my compositional productivity has increased in recent years, and, needless to say, it’s something one needs to be able to feel as a result of regular and committed activity in musical improvisation. There are many other ways in which this practice can feed into other methods of composition: for example, a conception of composing as not necessarily something done by single individuals, since improvisation will often produce sounds and forms which it would be difficult or impossible to imagine emerging from any context but a collaborative one. Understanding the possible relationships between oneself and one’s fellow composer-performers in improvisation leads I think to a greater openness to the potential of collective composition without anyone’s creativity or individuality being compromised.

Free improvisation also depends crucially on developing ways of making interconnections between sounds that aren’t based on traditional categories, particularly when electronic instruments are involved, and indeed developing these ways afresh for each instrumentation, perhaps for each performance. (This issue is implicit in all the analytical comments to the recordings in the following chapters.) I would say that as a composer I’ve never really felt restricted to traditional ways of doing things, but then perhaps that’s because improvisation has been part of my musical activity since before I began to write anything down.

My second heading involves “classically trained” performers, in which context I’m not making a distinction between those specialising in 19th or 20th century music and those specialising in 14th century music or any period in between. There are two issues I want to mention here.

Firstly, of course, performers involved in contemporary music will often find themselves faced with a score that involves improvisation in some way, and this often leads to unsatisfactory results because players are simply expected to be able to handle it even though their education hasn’t prepared them for this in any way, and certainly not to the extent where they might involve themselves voluntarily in improvisation outside what some score or other asks them to do. Composers are often not much help in such situations, by giving performers instructions that equate more or less to “make a generic noise here”, or hedge around their “improvisatory freedom” so much with specific instructions as to what to do and what not to do that the performers’ imaginations wouldn’t have much room to take flight even if they were in a position to do so. A personal anecdote might suffice for now: in the process of preparing for the premiere of a large-scale work with the Musikfabrik ensemble in Cologne, I had the opportunity to spend half a day with the whole group in which I went through a shortened version of the workshop process I will describe in chapter 1 below, and I was surprised to hear that nobody had ever done such a thing with them before. I need hardly add that this experience led to fruitful results when the actual performance came up.

Secondly, and less quantifiably, experience with free improvisation can serve to widen a performer’s relationship with his/her instrument, in a way that might encourage them for example to think more about creating their own music, or to enter into a wider range of collaborative situations with composers, or simply to broaden their interpretative potential even in music that doesn’t involve improvisation as such. Derek Bailey writes in Improvisation, its nature and practice in music:

There is no generalised technique for playing any musical instrument. However one learns to play an instrument it is always for a specific task. (…) The standard European instrumental education thinks of itself as being an exception to this rule. It is of course a very good example of it. It equips a musician with the ability to perform the standard European repertoire and its derivatives, and perhaps more than any other discipline it limits its adherents’ ability to perform in other musical areas.

Although some improvisers employ a high level of technical skill in their playing, to speak of “mastering” the instrument in improvisation is misleading. The instrument is not just a tool but an ally. It is not only a means to an end, it is a source of material. (Bailey (1992) p. 99)

Bailey also remarks that “the only places where, to my knowledge, improvisation is successfully taught in the classroom is in those classes conducted by practising improvisers.” (p. 118) So I think that if the improvisational method is going to form part of a more general musical education, which I think it should – hence my heading “improvisation for music educators” -- those doing the educating should be more involved in it, and, once more, out of choice and desire rather than just professional duty, which means that those of us who are already involved in it need to have ways of sharing what’s behind the choices and desires than we feel ourselves, which is a principal purpose of my ongoing research project – to eventually add to the rather small literature on the subject a practically oriented text which can have a wider application than the specific situation I’m working in at the Royal Conservatoire.

Lastly, my heading “improvisation for improvisers” is intended to express the idea that making music in this way is a fulfilling, meaningful and communicative musical activity in itself, rather than just a means towards widening and improving one’s abilities in non-improvisational forms of music-making. I would hope that as many people as possible “qualify” from their experience of improvisation in an educational context with a desire to continue with it and make it a part of their musical lives, which might even have wider implications outside music – as Marcel Cobussen puts it, “[i]mprovisation in music – not simply as a spontaneous action, but as an interactive event between humans with multiple perspectives – thus contributes to provide us not only with alternative ideas on ethics and morality but also with concrete suggestions for ethical and moral behavior.” (Cobussen (2017), p. 177)

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prelude: SEE performance, 17 October 2018

This performance took place at the first Sonology Discussion Concert of the 2018-19 academic year. The lineup was:

Justin Bennett (analogue synthesizer) – Sonology faculty member

Lauge Dideriksen (violin) – fourth year Bachelor in Composition

Mauricio Galeano (electric guitar) – guest

Cindy Giron (electronics) – second year Master in Composition

Yannis Patoukas (electric guitar) – second year Master in Sonology

Volkan Turgut (euphonium) – third year Bachelor in Sonology

RB (computer/keyboard)

Marko Uzunovski (live mixing) – KC technical staff (Sonology Bachelor graduate and since 2019 graduate of the KC’s “Aus LICHT” Master programme)

I assembled the personnel for this performance to feature participants in the ensemble from previous versions of the ensemble, one of my Sonology colleagues who has also taken part in previous SEE performances, and the Uruguayan guitarist Mauricio Galeano, who was visiting the Netherlands to work with me on one of my compositions and was interested in taking part. As usual I chose a more or less equal division between electronic and acoustic instruments, here with the two electric guitars forming a link between the fully electronic side of the ensemble and the two more traditional instruments on the other. The durations of SEE performances are generally contingent on the amount of space in the Sonology concert programmes, which is why most of them tend to be around 15 or 20 minutes in length. I include Marko Uzunovski in the personnel since his role (which has evolved over several years of working with SEE) encompasses a great deal more than being “just” a sound engineer. His responsibility for creating a dynamic balance between the participants in a performance like this involves responding to constantly changing musical circumstances by making creative decisions of his own, which might well then cause the musicians on stage to alter their individual and/or collective direction(s).

The ensemble setup has varied widely over the development of the SEE, from using a multichannel surround system running specialised spatialisation software on one hand to using compact local amplification of the electronic instruments and no amplification of the acoustic ones on the other. For most purposes, though, performances have settled on a layout which involves the performers being placed in a semicircle on stage, with a semicircle of up to 8 loudspeakers behind them on stands. The advantage of this system is that no separate onstage monitors are necessary, and the sound image for the audience is spread across the stage in a way that realistically reflects the positions of the players, also when players are using stereo outputs which can then be fed to a suitable pair of speakers within the array. If other loudspeakers are available, which they generally are in Sonology concerts, Marko will often bring these also into play, either as a general feature of the whole performance or for particular purposes. However, the stereo mix of this and all the other recordings accompanying the present text was made by myself on the basis of the “dry” signals being sent to the FOH mixer (taking into account, of course, the relative positions of the players), so that Marko’s contribution is somewhat obscured; nevertheless it should be stressed that this contribution is always crucial for creating the music you hear in the recording, subtle though its influence might be. In order to emphasise the way the music consists of interweaving between acoustic, electric and digital instruments we generally alternate between computer-based instruments and others along the semicircular line. This has the added advantage that the stereo outputs of those instruments which have them can be spread out over the loudspeaker system without having to interlock more than is necessary.

My stereo mixes arise from a wish to extract what I think is a clear and balanced “view” of what happens in the music, which might deviate to a greater or lesser extent from what the audience heard, since for one thing I don’t refer to the latter – usually there are parallel recordings made with a stereo microphone setup but I’ve never paid very much attention to these, since the sound-image recorded from microphones which are “listening” principally to loudspeakers tends to be somewhat flat and unfocused. Working from the multitrack recordings enables me to hear and assess each performer’s contribution to the whole, sometimes to bring to the surface musical elements which might have been more submerged in the live situation, sometimes to pull back sudden jumps in volume which in most cases will have been inadvertent. Having said all that, I intervene as little as possible in the recordings, and certainly no editing has been carried out. While the official purpose of the present project is documentation and analysis, I am concerned to produce the recordings in such a way that they sound as attractive as possible, as a totality and in terms of each individual participant. In general, the overall mixes have been processed using EQ (Cockos ReaFir), mastering compression (Waves H-Comp), limiting (Waves L2 Ultramaximizer) and reverb (Waves TrueVerb, using a slightly modified version of the “Studio A” preset). The individual tracks have been set at a default level for each piece, which might then be altered at specific moments; occasionally they might also be treated with compression and/or EQ as necessary.

It has often been suggested that recording improvised music is in principle inappropriate. Obviously this is not my view: I don’t see improvisation as being any different from any other method of composition in this regard. While it might be thought that there’s a contradiction involved in preserving a spontaneous and ephemeral musical event in this form, I think the truth of the matter is that the recording presents us with a different kind of experience, that there are some spontaneous moments in musical creation where something particularly memorable and intense takes place that somehow transcends its evanescence, as for example in all those “classic” jazz albums which were generally recorded over a short period when the group was working at “white heat”. While, as previously mentioned, it wouldn’t have been appropriate to edit the recordings under discussion here, I would normally have no hesitation in doing so if I thought this would enhance the musical qualities of the material, an attitude which has its precedent in Teo Macero’s production work with Miles Davis, and which has led in the context of FURT’s recordings to such results as a piece edited together by alternating almost 30 times between two performances that took place almost a year apart in different countries.^[3]

While no doubt a certain consistent aesthetic attitude will be apparent when listening to the recordings, this will be even more the case when reading my brief analyses of the recorded music. My intention is not to produce exhaustive or objective accounts of the music but in general to draw the listener’s attention to features I find particularly interesting and which serve as examples of the way I hear and understand this music, both as a participant and as a listener after the fact, particularly in terms of what were its more or less successful, more or less highly developed aspects. I focus particularly on how the music develops and transforms itself as a whole, how its structural progression is articulated by means of discrete sections and/or gradual processes, which factors lend a particular piece a strong and memorable identity (or not), the presence of particularly “inspired” moments and whether their potential is realised or not fully appreciated at the time, and other aspects which no doubt add up to some kind of picture of how I myself hear and understand improvisation (and by extension other modes of composition). I would never express this, however, as a set of defined criteria regarding what makes a good improviser or a good improvisation. Any such formula could be superseded or contradicted at any moment. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for the pedagogy of improvisation, since any “curriculum” relating to the kind of practice-based work discussed here must itself involve improvisation at every level.

It’s particularly apparent, I think, that the music produced in the workshops generally has a provisional quality, an air of potential rather than realisation, compared with the music of the concert performances, even when these have involved the same people and took place only a few weeks after the workshop. Partly for this reason, I wanted to begin the audio documentation of this research project with a performance by a more “experienced” group rather than with the workshop. All of the participants apart from Mauricio had taken part in several previous SEE performances.

This piece is characterised more than most SEE performances by a relatively clear division into sections which often succeed one another quite abruptly (and which generally last between 2 and 3 minutes apart from the last one), and by a greater amount than usual of solo/accompaniment activity. The following brief analysis draws particular attention to this feature. (Succeeding analyses are intended to draw the reader/listener’s attention to other relevant features of the music.)

Section 1 (0’00") A violin solo with slow, initially low-pitched accompaniment, varies in density as different layers are added and subtracted. the accompaniment eventually expands to submerge the violin around 2’10", then thins out into a new shadowy texture from which individual voices intermittently rise to the surface and are reabsorbed.

Section 2 (3’09") An aggressively distorted electric guitar solo interrupts the preceding calm; as it disintegrates into shards, it leaves behind it a disjointed texture, much more active than that of section 1. Sustained sounds reappear intermittently but this section is characterised by a rate of change very different from that of section 1. As at the end of that section though, this activity dissolves into a sparse and restrained texture which is abruptly terminated by a soloistic entry.

Section 3 (6’13") – this time by the euphonium. This shorter section is characterised by longer entries than in the previous one, but these are now typically more internally complex, like the guitar entry at 6’54" or the electronics at 7’45", and interspersed and/or overlapped by more static sound-forms, the last of which forms the next section.

Section 4 (8’24") In this section almost no soloistic material appears, but instead most of the activity seems to be oriented towards blending together into a single multilayered structure.

Section 5 (10’30") Here the previous texture seems to dissipate spontaneously to be succeeded by more or less unpitched and indistinct, more or less percussive material, sometimes thinning out to almost nothing, with clear pitches making occasional appearances.

Section 6 (13’16") A clock-like ticking begins at this point, and forms a “textural centre” around which other materials gradually accumulate; once the ticking stops, another tangle of linear forms like those of section 3 has emerged, which eventually winds down to silence.

Section 7 (15’41") is initiated rather hesitantly by one of the electric guitars, and seems under constant threat of falling back into silence. At 16’57", radio voices are heard in the background, emphasising the random collisions between sounds that characterise this section.

Section 8 (17’45" approximately) The voices seem to play a principal role in triggering a crescendo into an opaque coagulation of sound from the entire ensemble which fulfils a “climactic” function, remaining at a high density and intensity for some considerable time. Eventually however it does collapse in on itself and fades gently to silence.

I wonder whether the somewhat similar section-durations are more the result of what’s actually in the music, or more the result of the way I listen to it (or the way I listened to it on this particular occasion). When composing notated or fixed-media music I’m always highly concerned with durational proportions, which are always precisely calculated according to more or less systematic schemes, often on several structural levels simultaneously, as can be seen in the analyses contained in part 3 of Music of Possibility. I suppose therefore it’s no wonder that I would be sensitive to durational consistencies in a piece like the one under discussion, having trained myself through my compositional practice to perceive “rhythms” on the scale of minutes or more, and to attempt to share that perception through the way my compositions articulate themselves in time. In the course of creating music through free improvisation, thinking in terms of proportions probably requires some kind of precomposition, since improvising, inextricably linked as it is to the evolving moment, is subject to all the same divergences between experiential and clock time as in the process of listening, so that something that might “feel” as if it has a particular duration might not actually have it at all. Learning to appreciate and work with these divergences is, I think, an important aspect of developing one’s abilities in free improvisation – although, like many such skills described here in the context of improvisation, in the end it’s closely related to skills required for other methods of composition. Seeing compositional phenomena through the prism of improvisation, as it were, has been a centrally important factor in the development of my own notated and fixed-media music, and I believe that improvisation as a “composition teacher” could have considerable value for others also.

SEE performance 17 October 2018

Download uncompressed audio file here

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chapter 1: the 2018 workshop

Since 2016, the work of SEE in each academic year has begun in earnest with a five-day workshop forming part of the KC’s workshop-week system, in which four weeks of each academic year are reserved for students of all three “creative departments” to take part in a wide selection of intensive sessions, many of which are led by guest teachers from outside the school. The number of participants in the SEE workshop has varied between 10 and 16 students – normally I open 14 places in the expectation that a few would drop out between the call for applications and the workshop itself. In 2018 there were 11 participants:

Rafaele Andrade (cello/computer) – Erasmus student at Sonology

Timo Carbone (accordion) – first year Master in Art Science

Georgia Denham (voice/computer) – Erasmus student at Composition

Marlene Fally (voice/computer) – first year Bachelor in Sonology

Raphael Fischer-Dieskau (electric cello) – first year Bachelor in Art Science

Andrea García (piano) – one-year Sonology Course

Mehrnaz Khorrami (violin) – first year Bachelor in Sonology

Marco Manconi (modular synthesizer) – first year Bachelor in Sonology

Myrtó Nizami (piano) – first year Masters in Composition

Sebastian Scholz (analogue electronics) – Erasmus student at Sonology

Hilde Wollenstein (clarinet) – first year Bachelor in Sonology

plus Paul Obermayer and myself on computers and keyboards. Paul and I also led the 2016 workshop together, while in 2017 I led it in alternation with vocalist and composer (ex-Sonology Masters student and current DocARTES researcher) Marie Guilleray, who had been a regular member of the ensemble during and after her Sonology studies.

Paul Obermayer’s participation in the workshops is primarily as a performer, and he tends to leave most of the talking and “directing” to me, although, being less concentrated than I am on shaping the structural progress of the sessions, he’s often in a better position to make decisive and insightful comments about what has just been played, what might be explored next, and other matters more immediately concerned with being “in the music”. Between us, therefore, we have a quite comprehensive overview of what is happening in the workshop and how its music is developing, and of course we also discuss and make decisions on the structure of the workshop in between the sessions themselves. Our comments on the music played as the workshop continues should also act as possible examples of how to think about, discuss and assess a way of making music whose defining characteristic is a freedom from preordained restrictions. Apart from this, our participation in all of the music played after the first day of the workshop is intended to act as a demonstration of some of the possibilities of electroacoustic group improvisation, bringing to bear our more than thirty years of experience of playing together and refining our approach to the technical resources we use for performance, individually and as a duo.^[4] I wouldn’t wish to be regarded as a theoretician of free improvisation or of any other method of composition, but as a practitioner for whom formulating and expressing whatever understanding of the music I’m able to develop not only feeds back fruitfully into my own practice but also might conceivably be found helpful and enlightening to others.

It can be seen from the lineup listed above that the workshop featured a great diversity of instrumental resources, from traditional instruments, through instruments and voices enhanced one way and another through electronic/digital means, to completely electronic instruments, in some cases capable of functioning either as standalone devices or as processors for external sources like other players. This diversity played an important role in the way the ensemble would be gradually split into smaller subunits, as we shall see, but the initial priority is always to find a shared starting point from which the ensemble’s music can begin to evolve and take on a composite “compositional personality”. Since this will almost always be the starting point in such workshops, whether in the KC Workshop Week context or elsewhere, I’ve evolved a set of ideas and techniques which I almost always begin with, after which the way the sessions are led becomes increasingly “improvisational” (responding to the people and the situation rather than imposing external ideas on these) and indeed decreasingly like “leading”, although I will always try to ensure that certain things happen, for example that each day and/or each half-day session ends at a point where further possibilities seem to present themselves, rather than at a point when the ensemble seems to have exhausted its capabilities for that session, that is to end in a state of openness rather than of conclusiveness. (There are obvious implications here also for how an individual improvisational piece might come to an end!)

I find it important to make clear at the outset where free improvisation originated, around the beginning of the 1960s in various places and from traditions ranging from jazz to notated composition – crucially, at a point in music history where the idea had emerged that any sound may be combined with any other in a musical context, without any necessary dependence on received ideas of which sounds fit with others, as in traditional harmonic and rhythmical thinking, so that free encounters between sounds become possible, with the structural framework that provides their context and connections evolving also in real time rather than being agreed or assumed in advance.

While it should be understood that neither received harmonic/rhythmical ideas, nor anything else, should be thought of as “forbidden” in free improvisation, it will always be clear from the makeup of such a group as the SEE that these will necessarily function more as “special cases” within a more generalised view of musical structures and relationships than as privileged points of reference. Some of the instruments present, for example, like modular synthesizers or no-input mixers or signal processing setups, might not be capable of producing pitches or rhythms in a predictable way, and these instruments will need to be seen as occupying an equal place in the ensemble’s music with any of the others – with, of course, necessary implications for the way traditional instruments might be used in such an ensemble. None of this should be seen as imposing “restrictions” on what the ensemble can do, but on the other hand implying certain kinds of musical relationship which can encompass all the participants and which can act as points of departure for an unlimited range of possibilities. Therefore I begin the workshop by concentrating on two of those kinds of relationship in particular, emphasising to participants all the time that the purpose of these initial exercises is not necessarily to make music but to create the conditions for music to be made – I say this in order to minimise any tendencies towards thinking that what the ensemble does needs to be interesting to listen to (at this stage!), which might lead the more confident participants to do “too much” and others "too little’.

Before anything like that could happen, though, the ensemble needed to be set up. The Varèsezaal is one of the most suitable rooms at the KC for a project like this because it can accommodate all the players and their equipment without becoming cramped, and because its installed sound system enables four different stereo pairs of speakers to be used simultaneously (front, back and either side), which is crucial in allowing the electronic and amplified instruments to be identified during playing by the spatial position or spread of their sound. Generally, the participants requiring tables will be set up around the edge of the room, with (amplified) acoustic instruments in the centre.

The Varèsezaal only has one (upright) piano, so that for any additional keyboard players one or more electronic pianos will be required. Setting all of the gear up and giving my introductory talk generally takes up the first morning session of the workshop, so that after a lunchbreak everyone is ready to begin playing.

As mentioned earlier, I then begin with two “archetypal” kinds of musical relationship, the first of which I explain to the players as follows:

(1) Play a quiet, continuous sound (instruments not capable of this should use iterated sounds that blend as far as possible into being perceived as a continuous texture), chosen initially at random and then changed only in dynamic level, so that you never hear yourself above the general level of the overall texture but rather are submerged within it. As soon as you become consciously aware of the sound you are making, make it quieter.^[5]

I allow this texture to “settle in” over a minute or two before signalling an end, and pointing out that my signalling is intended only as a way of making the workshop sessions more efficient in terms of time! The exercise is then repeated with every player asked to choose a sound as different as possible from the first one, and one of the possibilities then is to continue with these varied repeats for a while, especially if I feel the central concept of the exercise hasn’t been completely grasped by everyone. One thing I try never to do is tell any individual in the group “you’re getting it wrong”. I think it’s obviously preferable for people to learn more from the context and from what their fellow participants are doing than from what I’m saying to them – or at least to feel that they’re doing so.

Once this first idea can be put across by participants with confidence, I add something further to it which is, after a little while of the texture being played, to make a slow hands-raising gesture so that the overall dynamic of the texture gradually increases from quiet to loud, while each individual still keeps his/her sound beneath the surface and not individually perceptible, as far as possible. And then this “vertical” approach to relating sounds is set aside temporarily, so that the second, “horizontal”, approach can be explored.

(2) Play short sounds, with a few seconds of silence between each one, making sure that each sound is as different as possible from all the others in timbre, dynamic, articulation and pitch, as applicable.

This time the intention is that sounds relate to one another as a sequence in time, where each brief sound forms part of a constantly renewed chain of events, whose model is the “molecular” kind of group improvisation, a music based on points of sound, as exemplified by groups such as the Music Improvisation Company, Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Nuova Consonanza, and pioneering players such as Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and John Stevens. As with the “laminar” model explored previously, organising the workshop in this way enables me to introduce in a natural way a historical context for free improvisation, something which I think is often missing from workshops of this kind. Just as with any other method of musical creation, the practice of improvisation brings up issues that can be fruitfully addressed by exploring that context.

Usually this exercise also needs to be run through a few times, in order to achieve the right kind of density (for the aforementioned kind of structure to be audible), by perhaps being more specific about the possible range of silent durations between successive sounds – for a group of a dozen or so players. Another problem that usually occurs at the outset is that people interpret “short sounds” too loosely, for example as groups of sounds or even as more or less sustained ones, so that usually I have to insist that we begin from a position of disciplining ourselves to stay within the specified parameters, rather than trying to make something that sounds like what we think music should sound like.

A problem that often arises in both of these exercises with some electronic instruments is that the players often haven’t thought much about being able to make rapid and/or controllable dynamic changes (for which a volume pedal is often a simple and effective solution), in order to be able to combine their sounds fluently with those of acoustic instruments, which is one reason I place such emphasis on dynamics.

At this point we have become comfortable and fluent with two ways in which the diverse sounds of this ensemble can be meaningfully combined and related to one another, and the next stage is to begin to combine the “vertical” and the “horizontal” in different ways so as to expand the range of possible relationships and give the ensemble a coherent basis from which to develop further and to which to be able to refer back whenever necessary. The concepts introduced over the course of the workshop are intended to build gradually into a structural vocabulary which can be interpreted in different ways by each individual. Each stage in the process becomes as it were the background for the following one. The first two kinds of texture are first combined as follows:

(3) Begin with a long quiet sound. Individually, when you think this first sound has gone on for long enough, stop or fade out, and play a short generally louder sound, followed by a silence. If you are still playing a long sound when the first short sound takes place, use that as a trigger to either suddenly stop or change the long sound. Subsequently, only start or stop or change your long sounds in immediate response to someone else’s short sound.

It usually takes a few attempts to get this exercise working properly, so that an outside observer (like myself, since I haven’t played yet) can hear and follow how the sounds are triggering each other and how thus each contribution by each individual to the overall sound becomes part of something else – each individual is not only playing but also so to speak “being played”, other players’ instruments become components of one’s own instrument, and vice versa. Another way of looking at this is that it emphasises group improvisation as a compositional activity – “com-posing” (placing together, putting in contact) sounds into a collective structure – and indeed as involving a form of orchestration. But at this stage I am still emphasising that we are working on preparatory exercises and not necessarily yet on music. A certain visual awareness between players will also begin to emerge, as people might be waiting in silence, or within a long sound, for an opportunity to begin or to change, or to stop and think about timing the next short sound, and will be looking around for a triggering event so that they can act more or less simultaneously with it, rather than with a delay, which is one possibility but one which can rapidly become predictable and prosaic.

Depending on how time is going by, different variations on (3) can be tried out, like splitting the group into two equal halves and assigning one group to short sounds and the other to long ones (and then swapping the functions of the two groups). This is a strategy I used to use regularly, although nowadays I would prefer not to delimit the “function” of different subgroups of the ensemble in such an inflexible way. Although perhaps the “condition of music” hasn’t yet been reached at this stage, I prefer to keep the situation as non-hierarchical as possible.

By now the first workshop day will be drawing gradually to a close, and at this point I suggest that we continue by playing a freely improvised piece of around 10-15 minutes’ duration where there are no “rules” to follow, but where on the other hand everything that’s been done up until this point in terms of relating sounds, creating textures, triggering starts and stops and changes, and so on, is constantly borne in mind as a background to the music played, as a sort of “history” which the music is building on. I introduce two more concepts at this point. Firstly, given the number of participants, everyone should be disciplined about spending approximately equal amounts of time playing and not playing, bearing in mind the fact that the more players that are active simultaneously, the more an “entropic” situation can ensue where anything that happens sounds more or less equivalent to anything else. In this way, not playing becomes as important a contribution as playing, since it opens up structural and textural possibilities difficult or impossible to achieve by a dozen players active simultaneously. Finding the right place to stop (for example in response to some “short sound” one hears) can also be a more striking and memorable contribution to make than any amount of attention-grabbing activity.

I point out that time often seems to go by at greatly different rates depending on whether one is playing or not, periods of not playing seeming to the individual to be much longer than they are and periods of playing much shorter. In the latter case it’s important to bear in mind that the overall sound-form of the ensemble should be a more important factor than whether any individual has developed whatever they’re doing to the extent that seems from an individualistic viewpoint to be appropriate – one has to be prepared to “let go” of such concerns at any moment, even before making the decision to begin a contribution. Secondly, in order that players begin to develop an intuitive feeling for duration, I give a signal one or two minutes before the music is supposed to end, so that players can start thinking about how this is going to happen. I emphasise that finding an end for a piece will involve everyone at some point deciding to stop playing, which may seem obvious, but with inexperienced players there’s often a tendency to think that their next sound would make the perfect ending. (This is a bit like people thinking they have the perfect last word in an online discussion!) But it should also be clear that the signal doesn’t mean “everyone stop playing now”. I also participate in these free improvisations, as does Paul (who also participates in the preceding exercises, to provide an exemplary contribution).

It can happen that the first piece we play seems to me successful - not only or even principally from a personal point of view, but also taking into account what I perceive to be the feeling “in the room” from the other participants. If this isn’t the case I suggest that we play another one, bearing the same things in mind and thinking about making it as different as possible a composition from the first one. Playing several pieces also has the advantage of demonstrating different possibilities for beginning a piece, ending it, and structuring time more generally.

The first day of a workshop generally goes according to the plan outlined above, and the 2018 workshop was no exception. Apart from acting as a point of departure for the players, the first day also serves to give Paul and myself an idea of what subsequent direction(s) the workshop might take. In advance of the workshop week we had established a fairly systematic plan for continuing from the first day, involving a discussion and demonstration of our duo music on the second day, followed by a process of splitting the group up into two, then three, then four subgroups and finally into duos, each of which would play separately and the results discussed by the others, as well as playing pieces in which one or more of the subgroups would function as a “focus”, interacting principally among themselves while other players would “accompany” them in different ways, bringing in the concept of what it might mean to explicitly support another player’s contribution over a more or less extended stretch of time. These kinds of relationship would then also enter the group’s interactional vocabulary without necessarily being specified in any kind of score for performance, since the aim of the workshop is to work as intensively as possible towards a situation where no prior agreements or prearranged structures would be necessary. I’m not against including these if they do turn out to be necessary, or in other situations where a pre-composed structure might be desirable for various reasons.

A few words might be appropriate on the subject of “soloistic” and “accompanimental” activity, since I tend to use these terms in a somewhat specialised way in a free-improvisation context. A “solo” doesn’t necessarily imply that the activity in question is in the foreground of the music, or particularly virtuosic, or anything like that: instead it’s defined in terms of the soloist’s relationship to the rest of the music, namely that he/she plays without conscious reference to the ongoing musical environment. The reason for this formulation is to outline the possibility of a music comprising layers of activity which are not perceptually related to one another, assuming that this is in itself a potentially desirable musical situation, emobodying an expansion of the vocabulary of possible relationships within an evolving improvisation. An “accompaniment” then is a type of activity which is directed towards one or more simultaneous strands of activity, such as a “solo”, by supporting it, parallelling it, interrupting it and so on. What I’m describing here is actually one possible formulation of certain aspects of my own practice which might or might not be consciously applied in performance, for example conceiving a contribution as (in this sense) “accompanying” two or more other ongoing activities simultaneously, although that contribution might then be conceived by yet others as “soloistic” and treated accordingly. The principal purpose behind splitting a larger group into subgroups, each of which then functions as a “soloist” in the sense described here, is to give the members of such a subgroup greater focus in thinking about which aspects of the ongoing sonic environment to interact with, so that (for example) a trio can be conceived as self-sufficient, its components mutually complementary and independent of its surroundings. With more experienced players and ensembles phenomena like this will tend to emerge spontaneously: by specifying them in a workshop I hope to encourage players to be open to such possibilities because of the way they expand the musical potential of a large group, particularly in terms of its structural flexibility, its capability to make rapid and radical changes in its texture and activity.

The framework of splitting the group into successively smaller subgroups was adhered to in broad terms, although other ideas were injected into the process as necessary, like for example playing a sequence of (tutti) pieces where everyone would begin together and I would give the signal to end after a very short time, to encourage different possibilities for bringing the music to an end, since at a certain point this issue appeared to be problematic. On the other hand we didn’t get as far as splitting the group down as far as duos. One reason for this was that the attendance of some participants was somewhat erratic and unpredictable, which is far from an ideal working situation!

Nevertheless, by halfway through day 4 something like a coherent programme for the performance had come into being. One of the subgroups we had explored during the week consisted of three players of acoustic instruments (Mehrnaz, Raphael and Hilde) each paired with a player who would perform live processing on their sound (Georgia, Sebastian and Marlene respectively), so this ensemble was included as the fourth of five pieces in the programme. A logical counterpart to this grouping would be everyone who didn’t take part in it: Myrtó, Timo, Rafaele, Marco and Andrea, plus Paul and myself, and this was the instrumentation of the second piece. Between these was placed a duo for me and Paul. The programme was completed by two tutti pieces: one, at the opening, involving four specified subgroups (see below), and the other, at the end, being a free improvisation (though obviously informed in various ways by the preceding four pieces):

1 tutti (4 subgroups)

2 septet

3 FURT duo

4 live processing sextet

5 tutti (free)

The opening piece was therefore the most “pre-composed” of the five, in order to create a context for the rest and a foothold in the terrain of live improvisation for those with little or no experience in this area. Three of the four subgroups had been arrived at during the workshops when each played two pieces on its own, with discussion in between, so that each had a certain shared experience to bring to the concert. I had constituted each trio so as to combine acoustic and electronic instruments, as well as keeping the two cellists and the two keyboard players separate from one another for the sake of each trio being as heterogeneous in sound as possible, so that each would have to find a common ground rather than having it provided by the instrumentation. Two of the participants were absent during the work with the trios, so they were incorporated together with Paul and myself into a fourth group. The form of the piece was conceived so as to be as simple and clear as possible, so as not to restrict players’ imaginations by their having to concentrate too closely on following a score, but instead to provide a context where they would interact in ways that might not occur spontaneously. Its form was as follows:

The duration of each section was thus the responsibility of whichever group was about to begin the following one, although my suggestion of about five minutes per section didn’t survive into the concert, in which the whole piece only took seven and a half minutes to play, instead of 20! This suggests that the next workshop (and further rehearsals with the current group) could usefully spend some time and effort on increasing the group’s individual and collective sensitivity to duration, which is certainly something that becomes second nature to experienced improvisers. In the scheme, each subgroup is also silent before its “solo” entry, so that its “signal” to other players can be exclusively aural rather than involving any kind of visible cueing.

The final day of the workshop was principally concerned with moving the ensemble to the Schönbergzaal and rehearsing the programme in the necessarily different onstage configuration. I hardly need to underline the importance of incorporating a public performance into a workshop like this, not just as a point of culmination of the work done over the preceding days and a way of emphasising that free improvisation is a social phenomenon whose embrace is wider than just the performing participants, but also to incorporate the discipline of setting up in a different venue from rehearsals, becoming rapidly accustomed to these new technical and acoustic circumstances, and retaining the intimacy of working together in a studio while projecting it outwards from a stage to a concert hall.

The order of performers in the semicircle on stage (see the “prelude” section of this text) was based on various priorities: the way the ensemble would be divided into two unequal halves, the pairing of inputs and processors in the fourth piece, the separation of electronic instruments by interspersing them with the acoustic ones, and the clearest separation of the acoustic instruments themselves (two pianos at opposite ends of the semicircle, for example), resulting in the following order from left to right (viewed from the audience):

The first piece begins with Georgia’s voice/delay system,^[6] soon joined by her trio partners Myrtó (on electronic keyboard) and Raphael, with a mostly subtly supportive accompaniment until Raphael suddenly moves from intermittent noises to more assertive, “virtuosic” activity, at which point I join him with cello-derived sounds. Around 2’10" Hilde decides that it’s time for the second trio to enter (together with Sebastian and Andrea), which sets the scene for the somewhat accelerated form of this piece compared to the rehearsals: the third trio (Mehrnaz, Marlene and Marco) have definitively entered by 3’45" which clearly came as a surprise to me, Paul, Rafaele and Timo who take a while to withdraw into our tacet before reentering at 5’40" or so. In the succeeding passage, strong accents from Timo’s accordion act as triggers for discrete bursts of activity which then coagulate into a tutti whose end is itself triggered by a piano-interior sound played by me. I found the truncated duration of this piece rather disappointing, especially in view of the fact that the individual sections seemed to me to have the potential for greater extension, in terms both of duration and of their influence spreading through the ensemble through greater participation in accompanimental activity. One way of addressing this issue might have been for FURT to begin the improvisation, and for the others then to emerge (perhaps with greater confidence) from a musical situation that had already been set in motion. But creating musical contexts is something that the workshop is intended to encourage in participants, for example by playing sequences of short pieces each of which requires players to respond rapidly to a more or less arbitrary starting point in order to give it shape and character. Providing a “safe” point of departure would perhaps not encourage that kind of creativity, creating rather a dependency on the “leader(s)” of the workshop which goes against what the latter is intended to achieve.

The character of the following six-minute septet was crucially influenced by the presence of both pianos, and initially inhabits a mysterious world oscillating between pitch and noise which establishes a textural identity which is broadly preserved through the entire piece, although it does fall into more or less distinct sections, mostly initiated by a single player who becomes a temporary “solo” voice. For example, we hear a discreet but decisive entry of the accordion at around the two-minute mark, which interrupts the relatively point-like texture which has prevailed until that time and initiates a gradual increase in density and activity, until it cuts off just before 4 minutes, when the music again assembles itself from disconnected fragments, this time with cello glissandi taking the lead, finally dissipating once more into a mostly indistinct last minute.

I won’t comment here on the FURT piece except to mention that it forms part of the duo’s album FUNCTION, along with a studio composition, a live performance from the 2016 workshop, and a further performance made in the Varèsezaal after the workshop session on day 4, all of these pieces having in common a set of sound materials based on improvisations on various acoustic instruments (zithers, percussion, mbiras and other instrumental and non-instrumental objects) earlier in 2016.

The live-processing sextet (8’23") has an impressive coherence, the result of its sound sources (clarinet, violin and electric cello) often drifting in and out of each other’s musical territories, in a way which could be compared to the way that some of the electronic processing remains perceptibly dependent on its source while elsewhere departing from it into quite different realms, as at 3’40" when a delay loop suddenly transforms into a distorted pulsation, which itself then acquires imitative “echoes” from Hilde and Raphael. It’s always important to bear in mind that the processing outputs aren’t just “special effects” superimposed on their instrumental sources but constitute instrumental activity in themselves, with just as much potential to shape the course of the music as the input sounds that gave rise to them. At 5’50" a baby crying in the audience becomes part of the music too, as it’s taken up imitatively by Raphael at a point when the music seems to have entered a “holding pattern”, awaiting an injection of new energy. This fortuitous change of direction eventually devolves into sprays of cello harmonics, forming a centre around which other sounds come and go in preparation for silence.

The final improvised tutti piece (10’51") seems to me the most successful performance by the workshop ensemble, although I think this is largely the result of players’ confidence having grown through the experience of playing the preceding ones. Disjointed electronic iterations at the outset are multiplied into repetitive sounds at various tempi, pitches, timbres and degrees of regularity that spread through the ensemble to create a clear musical identity over the first minute or so, at which point Raphael begins to use this structure as a basis for soloistic activity (not dissimilarly to his similarly-placed intervention in the first piece), causing most of the rest of the ensemble to move towards a more sustained texture punctuated by diverse percussive and glancing events. Iterated sounds emerge once more around 3’30", this time leading to an increase in density and activity until once more congealing into a more static texture around 5’00". The rest of the piece continues what seems to remain a series of variations on combinations and successions of sustained and repeated sound-events, until about a minute before the end, when the ongoing texture disintegrates into fragments.

My overall impression of the four ensemble pieces is that there’s no shortage of invention in the ensemble, but something which at this stage was less developed was a certain awareness of the potential of that inventiveness, leading (most spectacularly in the first piece!) to a certain structural shortwindedness. In other words having an idea isn’t yet enough – one should also be able to understand what it is and what it might become; which once more is an issue common to all methods of musical composition. There was already some considerable progress towards addressing this issue in the following SEE performance, as will be clear from the next chapter.

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Richard Barrett - A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF THE SONOLOGY ELECTROACOUSTIC ENSEMBLE - 2022

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