Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body [1 ed.] 9781443863841, 9781443852319

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Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body

Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body

Edited by

Marilyn Wyers and Osvaldo Glieca

Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body, Edited by Marilyn Wyers and Osvaldo Glieca This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Marilyn Wyers, Osvaldo Glieca and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5231-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5231-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii List of Tables .............................................................................................. ix Foreword .................................................................................................... xi Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii Introduction ............................................................................................... xv Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Sound Production as Theatrical Action Jeremy Peyton Jones Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 Devising Music, Devising Musicians and their Audience Michael Picknett Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 19 Composing in the Dance Studio Mark Wraith Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 27 Soundpainting: The Use of Space in Creating Music-Dance Pieces Helen Julia Minors Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 35 Continuous Movement, Fluid Music, and the Expressive Immersive Interactive Technology: The Sound and Touch of Ether’s Flux Joshua B. Mailman and Sofia Paraskeva Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 53 Materializing Metaphors, Reflections from a Movement Workshop Magnus Andersson

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Table of Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 59 Shaping Music, Shaping You: Optimising Music Performance Potential through Body Movement/Dance Marilyn Wyers Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 71 Benefits of Interdisciplinary Creative Collective Practices Osvaldo Glieca Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 79 The Orpheus Myth in the Romanian Contemporary Ballet: Links between Musical Suggestion and Moving Expression Tatiana Oltean Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 85 Inside/Outside: Towards an Expanded Notion of Musical Gesture NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy and Stefan Östersjö Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 95 Two Bee Kelvin Thomson Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 109 Can You See Me? The Effects of Visual Contact on Musicians’ Movement in Performance Robert Fulford and Jane Ginsborg Concluding Comments ............................................................................ 119 Contributors ............................................................................................. 121 Editors ..................................................................................................... 125

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 3-1: Composer Harrison Birtwistle and choreographer Japp Flier in discussion during rehearsal of Pulse Field ...................................... 23 Fig. 5-1: Xbox Kinect infrared video camera ............................................ 38 Fig. 5-2: Joshua Mailman and Sofia Paraskeva demonstrating the sensor gloves ................................................................................................... 39 Fig. 5-3: Viscous vs. fluid texture controlled by height ............................ 40 Fig. 5-4: Circle of 5ths based harmonic space ............................................ 40 Fig. 5-5: Filling in (populating) the circle of 5ths harmonic space by moving forward............................................................................... 41 Fig. 5-6: Pitch class transposition through lateral movement .................... 43 Fig. 5-7: Varying degrees of continuity from lateral motion ..................... 45 Fig. 5-8: Rhythmic control based on the left hand wrist flexing ............... 46 Fig. 5-9: Various interface control moves ................................................. 47 Fig. 7-1: Diversions: opening bars ............................................................ 65 Fig. 7-2: Diversions: Soundbites C and D ................................................. 66 Fig. 7-3: Diversion: Soundbites A and B ................................................... 68 Fig. 9-1: Orpheus and his Lyre by Tudor Feraru ....................................... 81 Fig. 9-2: Orpheus’ Death by ùerban Marcu .............................................. 82 Fig. 10-1: NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy photo during the recording session for the Vietnamese National Academy of Music ................................. 91

LIST OF TABLES

Table 9-1: Orpheus Episodes comparison of The Lyre of Orpheus by Tudor Feraru and Orfeuridice by ùerban Marcu ............................. 81 Table 11-1: Applying a human version of music technology “reverse sampling” technique........................................................................... 100 Table 11-2: Applying “Beatboxing” technique ....................................... 100 Table 11-3: Nomos part 6: Sphragis ........................................................ 101 Table 11-4: Rhythm grid of 11 subdivisions of 11 beats ......................... 101 Table 11-5: Table of 12 emotions............................................................ 102 Table 11-6: List of 12 gestures ................................................................ 102 Table 11-7: Two Bee structure ................................................................. 106 Table 12-1: Conditions matrix ................................................................. 112 Table 12-2: Durations in seconds of coded movement and looking behaviour by players and condition ................................................... 114

FOREWORD

Recent years have seen a rise in collaborative and interdisciplinary artistic endeavours sometimes motivated rather more by fashion and economic considerations than real artistic necessity and exploration. All too often such work is undertaken superficially, rather than on a deeper level of research. Although for many years, dating back to the 60s and 70s, the nature of performance has been challenged and redefined resulting in some very interesting innovations, it has taken some time for the real implications of such developments to take shape in terms of a theoretical practice-based research, often leaving external observers to undertake much of the theorising retrospectively. It is only after such a period of investigation and questioning that the true potential of this research in terms of the physicality of performance, the relationship between improvised or devised and notated elements, the interaction between the physical, the visual and the sonic, seen more specifically as a means of engendering new forms of material, can be realised. What does it mean to collaborate? What are the fundamental differences, similarities and appropriations fundamental to the process of bringing different artistic disciplines together, which might serve to forge new artistic grammars? Frequently, collaboration results in one art form being subservient to another, as a form of accompaniment, rather than a deeper exploration of language. New forms of categorization have become necessary as musicians, artists, dancers and actors, sometimes working on the fringe, question and redefine their respective craft incorporating and exploiting previously neglected elements, perhaps traditionally seen as peripheral or irrelevant to the main practice. Frequently they absorb techniques informed more by the practice of another discipline, such as aspects of improvisation or devising for example, further challenging the received ideas informed more by habits of thought than the true spirit of research. What are the implications of working in the margins? How do we start to codify elements, which seem to lie beyond traditional forms of codification? Music is fundamentally physical by nature, both in terms of its means of production (performance) and transmission (airwaves). There are forms of musical notation, which focus on the physical movements of the player rather than the specific sounds to be produced; just as there are aspects of

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Foreword

improvised music which rely on the physical nature of playing the instrument rather than anything that could be notated. What are the limits of notation, or the role of the score in creative discourse? The very act of notation often defines boundaries, which delimit or restrict the nature of musical material and seek to define the process of creation. How do we access those aspects of material, which lie beyond this process? Could the movements of a dancer serve as a musical score? The Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body conference convened by Marilyn Wyers documented in this book, provided a vital forum for such explorations which aims to address such issues confronting traditional boundaries of thought in relation to the nature of collaboration. Professor Roger Redgate Goldsmiths, University of London

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our special thanks to conference technicians, Brian Rodgers and Kremena Velinova whose energy and technological skills greatly facilitated the Composer, Choreographer and Performer Collaboration Conference of Contemporary Music and Dance 2012. The conference also relied on the Institute of Musical Research’s administrative staff and we would like to extend particular thanks to the Director, Dr Paul Archibold for his support from the first moments the idea for the conference arose and the Institute Manger, Valerie James for her help and advice from the outset through to the day of the conference. We thank Dr Michael Young, former Head of the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London; Kim Mulhall, the Senior Departmental Administrator and Ian Cook, IT Advisor for their backing, encouragement and advice. Additionally, we thank the volunteer music students from Goldsmiths who kindly made a video recording of the conference and took photographs during the event. We would also like to thank all those who gave their time to rehearse and perform as part of the conference and everyone who attended the conference and helped make it such as unforgettable event. The Editors

INTRODUCTION

This book is a result of the Composer, Choreographer and Performer Collaboration Conference of Contemporary Music and Dance 2012, which was hosted by the Institute of Musical Research at the University of London. The theme of the conference: Sound, Music and the MovingThinking Body had a global reach and attracted a high number of firstclass international proposals addressing the meaning and significance of interdisciplinary relationships and collaborative processes involved in creating and performing new music and dance/movement. Thus the opportunity for scholarly dialogue that might embrace the relationships between sound, music and movement was timely, generating wide-ranging interest and lively debate of current research and practice. This publication brings together some of the diverse discussions, thoughts, reflections and considerations. Although the book is not organised into sections, a clear thread runs through the volume and, despite the broad spectrum of topics, resonances between chapters are abundant including such varied themes as sound production as theatrical action; collaborative creation; generative computer/electronic music through body movement; music, movement and metaphor; applying body movement/dance to music performance practice; choreographic perspectives in contemporary opera; functions of gesture as compositional parameters and effects of visual contact on musicians’ movements in performance. That these resonating themes have arisen attest to their general significance and contemporaneity and it is hoped that the book will serve as a research tool for further scholarly study and as a practical reference for those engaged in making music and/or dance. In the first chapter, Jeremy Peyton Jones considers the debate regarding the significance of musical performance. He draws on Nicholas Cook’s discussion about the role of the performer to explore the extremes of the debate which range from the subjugation of the performer to the text/score, to one in which the performer can take the opportunity to fully interpret the work. Peyton Jones argues that it is the relationship between process and product that defines performance and that interdisciplinary performance theory, particularly theatre studies, can offer a structure for examining the performative aspects of music. By focusing on the theatrical, visual and physical aspects of music performance Peyton Jones

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Introduction

broadens the debate by taking into account the ways adventurous music theatre is looking to experimental theatre and performance arts for inspiration claiming that some of the most innovative theatrical ideas of the last 75 years have enormous potential and use in devising and performing music. Michael Picknett takes up the theme of devising music drawing on a simple definition developed by Heddon and Milling (2006). Presenting his research he outlines an interest in breaking down the classical distinctions between creation and performance as separate entities before proposing a more inclusive practice using performance as a creative tool. Homing in on creation as an aspect of performance he reveals his desire to explore why we perform rather than what we perform, taking into account inquiry about the role of the audience, as well as the performer, in his compositional practice. Mark Wraith looks at Harrison Birtwistle’s dance theatre piece Frames, Pulse and Interruptions which was later renamed Pulse Field (1977), a work made for Ballet Rambert in collaboration with choreographer Jaap Flier. Relating his involvement in the creation of the piece as one of the dancers, Wraith considers why the piece did not remain in the repertoire and was regarded, at the time, as an apparent failure. In pursuit of insight into these questions, he traces its performance history and Birtwistle’s use of experimental instrumentation and intimate involvement with the theatrical environment. By providing an inside story, Wraith reveals a new understanding of this piece of music/dance theatre and allows a unique glimpse into the spontaneous musical and choreographic decision making collaborative process which, one may term as in-the-moment. The process of creating music/dance pieces in-the-moment is also considered by Helen Minors. Focusing on the use of signed coded gestures by a Soundpainter (the creator), Minors explores the ways in which Soundpainting uses different concepts of space to foster music-dance interaction before suggesting that the practice merits experimentation, testing and reflection to reassess and raise new questions about the use of space within this creative method. Aspiring to illustrate how music-dance relationships are fostered via the spatial parameter within the Soundpainting language, she addresses three of these fundamental questions and unravels her response to the role of spatial conditions within the practice. Experimenting with novel means of generating sound through the movement of the body, Joshua B. Mailman and Sofia Paraskeva explain how they utilise technology to develop their own interactive system to generate expressive computer music. By embracing the ability of sensors

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to respond to mood shifts through motions of the body, Mailman and Paraskeva broaden the possibilities of interaction between dance/movement and sonic composition. The authors draw on an embodied interactive music generating system called Fluxations and describe how the system senses the musician’s/dancer’s movements from spatial positions and orientation of the whole body and its individual parts rather than by interpreting individual expressive gestures before going on to explain the complexities of the system more fully. Aside from computer technology Magnus Andersson tackles the recurring theme of many debates regarding the connection of music and movement by considering the metaphoric perception that music is movement. Exploring the implications of this perception from an experiential perspective, based upon extensive practical experience, as a tango dancer and music educator, Andersson explains some of the exercises that he gives his students and discusses the benefits that musicians may reap from embracing a corporeal way of understanding music-making. The experiential perspective of music as movement is echoed in my chapter, which uses Neil March’s Diversions (2009) to investigate the use of body movement/dance in music performance practice. Considering connections between physically shaping phrase through movement/dance and shaping phrase in music performance I explore how music performers can accomplish a greater sense of control over musical intention and desired outcome in the use of expressive parameters, such as dynamics, tempo, emphasis and pitch. My central aim is to investigate how soundrelated movement knowledge can influence a musical interpretation and to draw attention to debate regarding the role of dance/movement-based approaches in music performance practice, especially in regard to preparing and performing contemporary classical repertoire. Prior to outlining the experience of participating in sound-related dance/movement tasks I draw on March’s explanatory comments regarding the background to Diversions and the compositional processes of the work to provide insight into the collaborative relationship that has emerged between himself as a composer and me as a performer. (Note: this presentation was given at the CMPCP Conference, University of Cambridge in July 2011 and has been included here because, due to lack of time, the planned presentation had to be considerably abbreviated). Continuing on an interdisciplinary theme Osvaldo Glieca argues that music and dance/movement can be seen as two interdependent forms of art and as such can be tied to interdisciplinary experiences. He suggests that the arts are over-filled with concepts and theories and that this over-

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Introduction

abundance, which offers countless combinations, renders the isolation of one art form from another unthinkable nowadays. Before continuing to discuss the range of frameworks for collaborative activities that explore the connections between the arts, Glieca approaches the challenge facing music and dance practitioners and university arts departments to renovate the interdependent relationship between disciplines and encourage interprofessional dialogue. Further discussion of the notion of the interdependency of music and dance/movement follows in the chapter by Tatiana Oltean, who analyses the choreographic perspectives of Melinda Jakab in the staging of two recently composed Romanian operas based loosely on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Adducing data from the two scores, one written by ‫܇‬erban Marcu and the other by Tudor Feraru, Oltean proposes that certain compositional devices such as instrumentation, imitation and mirrored superimposition act as clues to Jakab’s use of symbols and messages in the music and how they link to her choreographic vision and the composers’ intentions. Considering the compositional process, Kelvin Thomson investigates his occupation as a composer. He explores his musical intentions and creative practice through an edited collage of his Bee works before revealing frameworks for recycling his music which recognise and celebrate the multiplicity of opportunities and outcomes of collaboration. One opportunity identified by Thomson warranting further examination concerns the development of ideas regarding the relationship between music, gesture, movement and performance, which is the very topic addressed in NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy and Stefan Österjö’s chapter. Noting that Rolf Riehm’s Toccata Orpheus (1990) utilises the bodily action of the performer as an intentional compositional parameter, Thanh Thӫy and Österjö describe and reflect on the experience of including the bodily movement of musicians as part of a musical installation. They use the theories of Rolf Inge Godøy (2006) as well as more recent investigations to demonstrate that performed music has the potential to represent forms of movement and they go on to suggest that this potential can be fostered to develop artistic strategies that allow music creating and choreography to coalesce giving rise to new modes of expression. Through exploring this expanded notion they make a contribution to the development of terminology and theory in the study of musical gesture and, in particular, to the investigation of musical gesture and expression of gender. Robert Fulford and Jane Ginsborg take a more pragmatic approach to the use of musicians’ movements in performance. Whereas Thanh Thӫy

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and Östersjö cast musicians’ movements as an expressive musical parameter, Fulford and Ginsborg observe that movement can also be used as a visual cue enabling performer interaction during performance. Exploring the use of visual feedback during performance, Fulford and Ginsborg examine the movement and looking behaviour of four violinists. As a result of considering the outcome of this observational study they extend current knowledge about how movements are visually perceived and used by musicians and the value of visually-perceived information in music performance. As this overview suggests, the twelve chapters unite speculative enquiry with empirical case studies, many of which refer to live music/dance performances, video and audio recordings and in some cases to the authors own compositions and performances. The focus on music and dance/movement practice from the end of the 20th to the 21st centuries inspire discussion on a narrow range of relevant research and practice. However, this restriction is balanced by a wide range of pertinent topics. By raising issues of concern to composers, choreographers and performers alike, this work has the potential to speak to anyone involved in making music and/or dance, as well as to musicologists and music/dance enthusiasts. Indeed, it is hoped that for all readers Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body will shed new light on the diverse topics researchers and practitioners across the sector are exploring and the issues concerning collaborative aspects of creating and performing new work. Marilyn Wyers London, July 2013

Bibliography Birtwistle, Harrison. Frames, Pulse and Interruptions. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1977. Godøy, Rolf Inge. “Gestural-Sonorous Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer’s Conceptual Apparatus. Organised sound, 11(2), (2006): 149-57. Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling. Devising Performance: a Critical History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. March, Neil. Diversions: Piano Solo. Hornetmusiq Press, 2009. Riehm, Rolf. Toccata Orpheus. Munich: Ricordi, 1990.

CHAPTER ONE SOUND PRODUCTION AS THEATRICAL ACTION JEREMY PEYTON JONES

In his 2001 essay Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance1 Nicholas Cook included two particularly thought-provoking quotes from opposite ends of a debate about the significance of musical performance. The first is attributed to Schoenberg and goes like this: The performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print.2

The second is by the drama and performance theorist Baz Kershaw and goes like this: It is a fundamental tenet of performance theory . . . that no item in the environment of performance can be discounted as irrelevant to its impact.3

Here we range from an approach in which the performer is encouraged to entirely subjugate him or herself and not impinge on the primacy of the “text” (i.e. a text to be reproduced rather than an opportunity for interpretation by the performer or performers), to one in which it would seem utterly imperative to take into consideration every aspect of a performance: aural, visual, social and contextual. Cook’s essay examines how the “text-based orientation of traditional musicology and theory 1 Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product.” Music Theory Online, Vol. 7, No. 2, April 2001. Available for reading at the following address: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook_frames.html 2 Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, (1938-76) New York: Pendragon Press, (1980): 164. 3 Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge, (1992): 22.

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Chapter One

hampers thinking about music as a performance art” and how it is that the relationship between process and product defines “performance” in the western “art” tradition. What is interesting is that he turns to interdisciplinary performance theory particularly citing theatre studies, poetry reading, and ethnomusicology in order to examine the performance aspects of music, and moves towards a consideration of scores as scripts rather than texts. In the conclusion to his essay Cook refers to the problematic aspects of Adorno’s claim that music: Presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws… the problem disappears if instead of seeing musical works as texts within which social structures are encoded we see them as scripts in response to which social relationships are enacted.4

I was fortunate to see Nicholas Cook as keynote speaker at the Music and Gesture Conference at the University of East Anglia in 2003 where he gave a very interesting presentation on musical performance and gesture focusing on Jimi Hendrix. 5 His summary encompassed something of a truism, but anyone involved in the combination of music and dance and/or performance, either as audience or practitioner, would no doubt agree with him when he said that “there is more to music than what you hear” and “what we see is as much a part of the music as what we hear”. These last two thoughts provide a very useful stepping off point when considering the untapped potential of the theatrical or visual or physical aspects of musical performance. Cook’s summary struck a chord for me in relation to a short feature I wrote for Newnotes ten years ago on the future of music theatre and opera in which I lamented the fact that much mainstream contemporary opera, despite a few notable exceptions such as Glass and Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (which is not really an opera), had largely ignored recent developments in theatre and performance and maintained the conventions of the 19th century scenic illusion; characters singing naturalistic dialogue, all lines delivered by operatic voices, lavish sets, separation of theatrical action and musical accompaniment which is usually hidden. At the same time, many more adventurous approaches to music theatre, largely outside the mainstream, looked to experimental theatre and performance arts for their inspiration, as noted by Nick Till in his round table position statement at the same UEA conference: 4

Ibid. International Conference of Music and Gesture, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 28-31 August 2003. 5

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3

It is characteristic of the overcoming of boundaries in twentieth-century art that most forms of experimental music theatre seem more akin to experimental theatre and happening and performance art than traditional opera…Instead of treating music as an acoustic backdrop to theatrical action as in traditional opera, music theatre tends to develop kinesis out of music-making itself, or conversely, present sound production as theatrical action. In many ways, then, music theatre tries to rediscover the wholeness of musical experience with its sense of ritual and spectacle which has been suppressed in Western classical music (the closed eyes of the intentlylistening music lover pointing to a rigid separation between what is essential to the music itself and what is an external distraction: its making).6

At the time, it still remained something of a mystery to me why more opera and music theatre directors did not go down this route. Some of the most innovative theatrical ideas of the last 75 years (from Artaud’s theatre of cruelty to Growtowski’s physical theatre), which have been developed so impressively by theatre practitioners all over the world, have enormous potential for the use of music. This is because of the simple fact that they have toppled the primary position of text and narrative in favour of an equal expression through physical action, image, sound, light as well as text. So directors and companies such as Peter Brook, Pina Bausch and Jan Fabre in Europe, The Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, or Robert Wilson in United States, or the People Show, Pip Simmons, Impact Theatre, Lumiere and Son or Forced Entertainment in the UK, (not to mention several dance/theatre companies such as DV8) have created a theatrical style in which music can and does have a powerful role to play. All of them use image, sound and music as major elements of their theatre on an equal footing with, or sometimes even replacing text and narrative. Some of their collaborations with composers have been enormously impressive forays into a new style of music theatre. Music is by its nature entirely abstract, and several musicians involved with this work have wholeheartedly taken on the implications of this more abstract theatrical language. To put it another way: the multimedia combination of the aural and the visual, as found in music theatre, would seem to provide the ideal opportunity to combine music, which is quintessentially abstract in its means of communication, with image, text and physical gesture in a way which breaks the bounds of realism, naturalistic representation or narrative 6

Nick Till: Position statement for Beyond Opera: Gesture in Music Theatre, round table. International Conference of Music and Gesture, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 28-31 August 2003.

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Chapter One

structure. Given that many theatre makers and live artists have moved well beyond the primary reliance on text and narrative towards the creation of total theatre, one feels it should also be possible to introduce the sensual and visceral possibilities of real performance into the sensual and visceral sound world of, say, dramatic opera or music theatre or for that matter any combination of music and action. Linked to this is the issue of realism and naturalism in performance: Our modern sensibilities, thoroughly saturated as they are in film and television, are now so steeped in this audio-visual culture that we will, naturally, have a different response to staged theatrical performance than to the ubiquity of this hyper-real narrative world. Film and TV can effortlessly recreate the real and even when the result is utterly fantastic or implausible, we are carried along by it. This new cultural situation we find ourselves in is reflected in contemporary developments in theatre, performance, live art and dance/theatre. Many of those making theatre since the advent of film and more recently television, having decided that it is fairly futile to compete in terms of realism and conventional narrative, have found this to be a profoundly liberating experience. They have found great mileage in the eliciting of an emotional depth and multi-faceted and multi-layered meaning through non-naturalistic devices, whether it is dream-like image, surrealism, sound-scape, visual and physical performance or similar devices. In this place, unlike in most naturalistic genres where text or dialogue is dominant, all elements, from sound to image to text to lighting to gesture and physical expression can take on an equal significance. Part of this effect is achieved by giving up acting and instead simply performing. As is illustrated by the contemporary reaction to melodrama, the greater the intensity of the acting, the more distanced contemporary audiences become unless we can suspend disbelief and are swept up and enveloped by the spectacle. Screen actors, assisted by the camera; whether it is cinema verité or the latest Hollywood blockbuster, can easily do this because they are in a quasi-real setting. Although they are very often super or hyper-real we are seduced into thinking them real, just like versions of you and me in real situations and we readily suspend our disbelief. Opera is at a distinct disadvantage in this respect, in that the characters are singing instead of speaking and usually singing at full throttle with full vibrato, so any sense of them being characters with an outward semblance of normal human behaviour and interaction becomes more difficult. Traditionally opera has overcome this disadvantage by sweeping us up in the emotional intensity of the music and the sheer spectacle of the staging. Many 19th and early 20th century operas are full of overwhelming musical moments, which, if you let yourself go with the flow, can steadily

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accumulate. Western art music has now developed its musical language and range of expression to such an extent that its effect is perhaps more subtle and less direct than the music of, for example, Mozart, Puccini, or Verdi, or popular forms such as musical theatre. Since the loosening of the bonds of tonality in the early 20th century we are, quite naturally, exploring a musical language which is aesthetically more diverse, richer and often more ambiguous. This can work particularly well when the setting in which it is presented is equally indirect, where performers characters and narrative structures are not naturalistic. It is however utterly at odds with naturalism. The exploration of a far wider range of musical expression combined with the non-narrative combination of image and performance would seem to offer the possibility of regaining such intensity of sensual experience. In much contemporary performance and experimental theatre the performers tend to “do” actions rather than “act” them in any sense of naturalistic representation. Alternatively they might purposefully undermine any attempt to invite the audience to suspend disbelief by announcing the fact that they are acting, or commenting on their own performance while performing. Performers in the Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment often carry cardboard signs telling us who they are or simply telling us that they are acting, so the audience witnesses a real event, rather than having to interpret a pretend event. This concept of doing rather than acting is a crucial aspect of any consideration of the potential of the performance aspects of music. Tim Etchells, writer and director of Forced Entertainment, comments: The thing that attracts us to performance is this idea of something really happening in the space now–so we get attracted to things like exhaustion and to real physical things that are happening to the performers rather than pretended things–so performers that are very tired, performers that are covered in water, performers that have physical things to do that are difficult in some way.7

The key phrase here in relation to musical performance is: “Something really happening in the space now”. This is an aspect of musical performance which is often ignored or downplayed. The somewhat formulaic conventions of the concert hall can serve to neutralise the performers and put them in the background and we can lose sight of the fact that they are exerting themselves physically in order to make the 7 For a discussion of these practices and Tim Etchells approaches see: How We Work, http://www.forcedentertainment.com/page/3010/How-we-work

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Chapter One

music. In a similar way, Jan Fabre’s or Pina Bausch’s performers exhaust themselves through relentlessly repeated actions and the audience cannot help but react to the reality of such intense physical exertion. The performance of music might not entail the same levels of physical exertion or lead to such extreme exhaustion in performance but there is something about the relentlessness, not to mention stamina, required for the performance of much music, which, in a similar way, affects both the performer(s) and the audience. This is particularly true of much repetitive music in which during live performance, the tension mounts because the listener cannot quite believe the performers are carrying out this relentless repetition without faltering. Examples of contemporary music practice which focus on these aspects, although not common, can readily be found as soon as you move away from the mainstream. It is no coincidence that the three examples I use here to illustrate the more integrated use of performance, all involve improvisation either in performance or in the devising process and that at least two of these examples were clearly prepared and rehearsed over a long devising period with the composer working closely with the performers. The Dutch free-jazz drummer Han Bennink, has always been a theatrical performer and his performance at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam on April 21, 2007 was no exception. Here he performed a duo with tap dancer Marije Nie and the direct connection made between drummer and dancer served to emphasise the physicality of his performance. Starting seated at his drum kit, Bennink’s initial solo becomes more and more loosely connected with the kit, sometimes incorporating other parts of his body to supplement the drumsticks or alter the drum sound and finally breaking free from the kit altogether and moving across the stage (drumming all the while) to the dancer’s platform. He ends up performing an intricate duet, firstly sitting on the floor in front of the dancer, then lying prostrate on the floor, feet towards her. Drumming already has a tendency towards the theatrical, largely due to its palpable physicality, but Bennink is clearly a drummer who has realised the potential of exploring the physical and theatrical aspects of his musical performance to the full.8 It is clear from virtually any performance by Meredith Monk with her company of singers/dancers that she has spent some time with them devising the performance, and Turtle Dreams (1981) is no exception. The four singers (two male, two female including Monk herself) perform simple steps and gestures in a tightly formal construction, while singing 8 Han Bennink’s 65th birthday at the Bim. Solo and duo with tap dancer Marije Nie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crrKIZfwyL4&feature=related

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interlocking vocal phrases over the repeating electric organ ostinato in triple meter. Monk explains that the devising process involved working closely with the performers, trying out ideas, rejecting this and using that, until the structure was fixed and formalised. Even then there is a looseness in performance allowing for spontaneous elements to emerge: Once I have the structure I like to stay with it, but there’s always room for the performers to play... even with a form that’s very set it’s so amazing how one performance is so different from another. A performance is such a live art: it’s always changing.9

The choreography is simple but effective, perfectly matching the musical style and subtly implying a narrative focusing on the individual, but through repetition and duplication, simultaneously making the message more universal: I had this idea of just going forward and back…and then we started working with that and we realised that there were a million variations. You know, you said are these people four types from America and I would say it is more like four kind of types from contemporary life.10

Heiner Goebbels’ Black on White is a landmark of contemporary music theatre made by composer and theatre director Goebbels in collaboration with the Ensemble Modern in 1996. Well known for its ground breaking relationship between instrumental performance and dramatic gesture and acclaimed for its fresh and innovative presentation of musical performance as theatre, much of the critical response has concentrated on the actions, gestures and speech undertaken by the musicians at the same time as playing a demanding musical score. It brings together all the points I have raised, being essentially a piece of music in which the theatrical, gestural, visual, textual and social interaction aspects of the performance have been considered on an equal footing with the sound. The players sometimes form groups, sitting or standing, but otherwise are constantly on the move across the stage, playing and/or singing while walking, crouching, or while marching up and down stage changing instruments as they go. Close analysis of the performance reveals an interesting relationship not only between dramatic gesture, stage picture and music but also between incidental sound (noise), performed music and the overall 9

Meredith Monk interviewed in the documentary film Four American Composers directed by Peter Greenaway, 1983. 10 Ibid.

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rhythmic periodicity of the work. Every surface and object of the stage is amplified for sound and every gesture, touch, movement and interaction with the set and various objects on it becomes part of the sound score seamlessly integrating with the performed music much as in a carefully constructed soundtrack for a film. Thus the sounds of a scratchy pen on paper, tennis balls thrown at a metal sheet, dice thrown onto a makeshift chequerboard, brass mutes scraped and rolled along the floor become vital elements of the sound-scape, carefully controlled as sound objects. Goebbels has commented: When I compose I feel sometimes more like a theatre director (respecting and directing the biographical elements of the musicians or the different musical styles as a language), and when I direct my pieces on stage I feel more like a composer (being interested in the sounds of language and the rhythm of the performance and the musical use of the space).11

Although the piece is presented as a finished structure with space for improvised material, it is clear from watching it that it was devised through improvisation, a point confirmed by Goebbels when describing his working methods. He undertook extended periods of exploratory work with the performers, trying out ideas and drawing out the particular possibilities offered by those performers, followed by a period of gestation and development of material, followed by an extended rehearsal period. Such logistics of production have significant financial implications and are rarely available even to large-scale opera houses, so it is perhaps not surprising that such integration of music and physical theatre is rare.12 Ten years ago I identified three things which I felt were instrumental in preventing this rich area of performance from being exploited more fully. The first concerned education: that few musicians are trained in aspects of performance and dramaturgy and vice versa, few theatre and performance students gain an understanding of how music works. The second concerned the conventions of rehearsal, noting the sharp contrast between the small amounts of time allocated to the rehearsal of a new piece of music, and the comparatively generous amounts of time allocated for the devising process in contemporary theatre. Professional musicians are victims here of their own proficiency, in that their technical skills in sightreading and performance allow new works to be rehearsed in a relatively 11

Heiner Goebbels quoted in programme note for the London premiere of Black on White. Barbican Centre, London, UK, 2000. 12 Heiner Goebbels personal website: http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/37

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small amount of time. However, there is no doubt that the more generous amounts of time available in the devising process allow far greater possibilities of experimentation, play and the development of ideas. The third was the lamentable fact that, despite notable exceptions such as those described above, the physical performance aspects of music are often either ignored or neglected. Returning to my initial point and asking the question how we might move away from considering the performer merely an interpreter or reproducer of a text, I can briefly summarise my conclusions as follows: x x x

You carefully consider all aspects of a performance even if they have no obvious specific meaning. You focus on the doing of it, as much as the interpretation of it. You work in a way which blurs the boundaries between composing, devising and performing.

Bibliography Cook, Nicholas. Between Process and Product Music Theory Online Volume 7, Number 2, April 2001 Etchells, Tim. How we work, http://www.forcedentertainment.com/page/3010/How-we-work Accessed 19 April 2012 Greenaway, Peter. (dir) Four American Composers (1983, Trans-Atlantic Films). DVD Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention London: Routledge, 1992 Newlin, Dika. Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (193876) New York: Pendragon Press, 1980 Till, Nicholas. Position statement Beyond Opera: Gesture in Music Theatre round table. International Conference of Music and Gesture, School of Music, University East Anglia, 2003. Han Bennink’s 65th birthday at the Bim. Solo and duo with tap dancer Marije Nie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crrKIZfwyL4&feature=related Heiner Goebbels personal website http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/37

CHAPTER TWO DEVISING MUSIC, DEVISING MUSICIANS AND THEIR AUDIENCE MICHAEL PICKNETT

Let me begin by outlining my situation; I am a composer whose practice-led research began by exploring ways in which the approach to collaborative creation (known in theatre and dance as devising) could be applied to the composition of music. This exploration has developed into a creative practice that asks fundamental questions of my compositional approach and my assumptions about the performance of music. There are many excellent authors, practitioners and scholars who have approached the question of defining devising. 1 Unfortunately, I do not have space to compare and contrast these insightful discourses into the subject, but to suggest that they are well worth seeking out for the interested reader. In my work, I have used a simple definition developed from that given by Heddon and Milling (2006), whereby a work is devised if: x x x x

It has no pre-made score/script. It is created collaboratively with the performers through improvised responses to questions, exercises or tasks. The improvisations go through a process of investigation and refinement. That process leads to performance.

Through my research into devising, I have begun to break down the classical distinction between creation and performance as separate practices. My devising practice uses performance as a creative tool and 1 Such as: Oddey, A. 1994, Heddon, D. and J. Milling 2006, Govan, E., H. Nicholson and K. Normington 2007, and Mermikides, A. and J. Smart 2010.

Chapter Two

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creation as an aspect of performance. My principle artistic concern now is to explore why we perform and to present this as performance. Why we perform is a central question at the heart of devising; the performers are as much a part of the piece as the notes and silences. Finally I have been confronting the role of the audience and the performers in my compositional practice. This paper will discuss these central themes of my work through three sections: x x x

A comparative analysis of devising and notated composition. A description of the “fields of possibility” performance principle. An exploration of risk, investment and ownership as pertains to devising processes.

Comparative Analysis At this stage in my research I have found it pertinent and instructive to compare the basic differences between my previous notated practice and my current devising one, in order to highlight the effect on the performance of work where the performers are a central compositional aspect. The notated music paradigm that I previously used was conventional and typical for the western classical tradition. In order to explore the greatest differences between these two models I will approach both practices from the point of view of the performers and use these findings to reflect upon the role of the composer. In the notated model the performers are first confronted with what they must perform in the form of notation. This notation will give them a series of parameters and events that must in some way be part of the performance. The second stage is for the performer to work out how they are going to create music from these parameters. This is the process of learning the piece and can be achieved through many effective techniques. Finally, the performer discovers or imposes what the performer would like to personally communicate through their performance of the work. This final aspect can be fixed and repeated or discovered anew with each performance. It could be developed through rehearsal or discussion such as in chamber music or imposed on the performer such as when the performer is accompanying or playing in a large ensemble. The devising model broadly reverses this ordering: Beginning with the personal, then moving through the interpretative phase, and finally discovering the performance. The performer begins with an impulse, usually a question or a task to which they respond. This response does not have to take a musical form at this stage. In my practice this is referred to

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as the “intention” of the piece or of the moment within the piece. The second stage I refer to as the “process” wherein the performers and composer-director search for different ways of expressing the intention(s) through improvisations and discussions. This is often realised in the form of answering questions that are generated from the original intention. For instance the original intention question could be what does live performance mean to you? To which subsidiary process questions could be, how can my performance change with different audiences present? Or how can I use my presence to change my performance? During this process we all know that there are no single, universal or fixed answers to these questions and everything we find is subject to the context of the moment and of ourselves in the moment. The process is a method of research whereby the performers and composer-director explore their reaction to the intention. Gradually during the process the improvisations become fixed and ordered into a coherent piece which is then polished and prepared for performance. The final stage of the devising process is the performance. This is known as the “outcome” in my practice. The outcome is a presentation of the process through the medium of a performance. The performance does not have to communicate a specific meaning to the audience, but it does have to have a meaning for the performers. The presence of meaning between performer and material becomes meaningful in itself for the audience.

The Fields of Possibility If the intention and process stages are fixed, defined, explored and familiar enough to the performers, then the outcome, the performance, can be flexible. In any section of the piece a range of possible performances is available to the performer, each a variation on the material used for that moment. This variation in performance is held in place by a structure to which all the performers are working, that makes a predictable landscape of events and conclusions to the events. This predictability allows the performers freedom to explore a moment through a range of expressions. Variability in performance has many names, but I prefer the term fields of possibility. The nature and range of the fields of possibility is investigated during the creative process where each performer develops, as a process of developing their musical part, an understanding of their role in that moment and the different ways this role can be achieved. To understand their role the performer must equally understand any other roles being performed in the same moment.

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The ability to vary and explore the performance in the moment is directly correlated to the performer’s ability to reflect their situation. This is an essential part of the devising performance. The changing patterns within the fields of possibility can give each performance a unique connection to the immediate context of the piece, the performers and the audience. The idea of fields of possibility in performance implies a flexibility of execution akin to that of improvisation. Indeed, many devising companies are comfortable with having their work described as improvised or as structurally defined improvisation. However, this description does not take into account the level of foreknowledge the performers have about the piece. In truth devising walks a line between interpretation and improvisation and could be convincingly considered to be either or both.

Risk, Investment and Ownership The theatre director Jerzy Grotowski summed up the principle concern of a generation of performing artists when he wrote: No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television.2

Grotowski’s solution was to focus on creating what Heddon and Milling describe as “an encounter between actor and audience.”3 If this encounter relied on a human social interaction between the specific audience and performers present, then the moment would become unique and unrepeatable. In my practice I call this interaction “the presence of the performance.” The effects of the presence of the performance can be generated through the ritual of concert-going behaviour. However, devising suggests a more flexible approach that does not necessitate a pre-determined performance ritual. Cathy Naden of Forced Entertainment recently used the elegant phrase “negotiated relationship” to describe the company’s attitude towards the audience.4 In this context she intimated that the company negotiates an original relationship with every new audience. The term negotiation implying that the company adapts to the audience, as the audience adapts to the 2

Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, New York: Routledge, (1968): 19. Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling. Devising Performance: a Critical History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, (2006): 48. 4 The author in conversation with Cathy Naden at the Battersea Arts Centre, London, UK, June 20, 2012. 3

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company. The flexibility to adapt to the audience is given through the devising process, the fields of possibility and through the personal risk and investment of the performers in the project. In order to negotiate this relationship with the audience, the performers must be intimately familiar with their fields of possibility and with the intention-research of the project. To fully utilise this aspect of performance, the performers must take ownership of both the process and the performance. This ownership gives the performers a basis to create the work socially with the director and to risk elements of themselves in the process. This could be a childhood memory such as was often used by Pina Bausch,5 or their impressions of their urban environment such as used by Forced Entertainment in Nights in This City (1995).6 This risking of their personal moments forces the performers to invest emotionally in the project. The investment changes the relationship between performer and material and is central to the idea of devising. As Tim Etchells notes: At a recent event someone asked the performer what was going on in a certain part of the piece he was in, the performer replied “I don’t know about that, ask the writer” …that answer should not be allowed7 (Etchells 1999, 48).

It is the aim of the process of devising to redefine the relationship between the performer and the part they play. If, in traditionally notated western classical music the performer uses their part as a tool of expression for conveying their emotive content though the structure of the music, then the devising performer finds their part through the emotions and materials they invest in the process. The fixed and pre-determined relationship between different parts in the notated model becomes negotiated and to some extent fluid, in the process and performance of the devising model. The negotiation alters the state of the performance for the performers by removing the fixed nature of the relationships within the group and replacing this with a negotiated one. This causes the presence of the performance to become an inescapable compositional element of the piece. How these relationships are negotiated and the structure of these negotiations can be worked out and planned in rehearsal, but the fact of a 5 Fernandes, Ciane. Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre: The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation, New York: Peter Lang, (2002): 113. 6 Tim Etchells. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, Arbington: Routledge, (1999): 80. 7 Ibid.

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genuine negotiation happening between the parts within a performance will cause the presence of the performers as people to become foreground in the audience’s perception, as the performers are inextricably their parts. Tim Etchells paraphrases Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group as describing “her job as being to build the frame around the performers’ lives” (Etchells 1999, 55).

Conclusions Devising as a creative approach offers a way of changing the relationship between devising performers, devised music and the audience. By changing the relationship between performer and material, the performers can begin their project afresh with each new audience. The process can give the performers the security to adapt and negotiate the performance with the audience and with each other in the moment of playing; to discover what the piece means to them in the particular personal, social and spatial context with which they are presented. For the composer-director, the control of both the structural elements and the core intentions of the piece can be guided through the devising process. In leading and guiding the workshop-rehearsals the composerdirector can ensure that the piece and the performers’ conception of the piece, is as clear and defined as is required. Control over the fine details and interactions within a piece is negotiated with the performers through the description of the tasks and exercises that initiated the first improvisations of the process, through the process of refining the improvisations into material and through the definition given to the limits of the fields of possibility. The devising composer must trust in and place responsibility on the performers in order that they may find performances that are both expressive of their thoughts and feelings on the piece and are in keeping with the nature and aesthetics of the performance, performing company, and of the composer-director. However, this should not present a significant risk to the composerdirector if the performers are well chosen and have invested in the project. Devising in itself does not necessitate a high level of interpretation and improvisation in performance, as any devised piece can be set. However, the devising approach does lend itself to accentuating the interpretive aspect of performance. The workshop process requires a level of investment from the performers that naturally develops into the sense of risk-taking and ownership that is essential to presenting the liveness of a performance as inherent to the experience of encountering that performance. Through utilising this facility, devising can find a way of

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confronting Grotowski’s call for a performance practice that differentiates between the live and the recorded audience experience in an exciting and practical way.

Bibliography Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, Arbington: Routledge, 1999. Fernandes, Ciane. Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre: The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation, New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Govan, Emma, Nicholson, Helene, and Katie Normington. Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Arbingdon: Routledge, 2007. Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling. Devising Performance: a Critical History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Mermikides, Alex, and Jackie Smart. Devising in Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Oddey, Alison. Devising Theatre: a Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London: Routledge, 1994.

CHAPTER THREE COMPOSING IN THE DANCE STUDIO MARK WRAITH

In 1977 Harrison Birtwistle created a work called Frames, Pulse, and Interruptions. Later he called it Pulse Field. While the work is discussed in all the main secondary sources, there have been no performances since the initial production, and the piece has never been available in a recorded format. The publisher (Universal Edition) do have the score, yet one can neither hire nor purchase it. Despite finding it in the publisher’s catalogue, when I tried to order it I was told: It is not a score that is in a finished, usable, format. However, what there is can be borrowed with no charge except for postage.1

Since access to the notation is the usual prerequisite for both scholarly understanding and the creation of performance, one might speculate as to how the Birtwistle scholars could discuss a piece whose score is unusable. The work was made for Ballet Rambert in collaboration with the choreographer Jaap Flier, founder member of Nederlands Dans Theater, and noted choreographer of works for companies in Europe and Australia. Having been involved in the creation of the piece as one of fifteen musicians and dancers, I had always wondered why it had not remained in the Rambert repertoire. Apart from the publisher, other institutions surrounded the genesis of the work. Considering these might suggest reasons for the apparent failure. The funding body might be thought to have had some influence on the music; at the time the Arts Council policy was concerned with the freedom to experiment, to make mistakes, to fail, to shock –– clearly a helpful approach for new music.2 But when applying 1

The author in a telephone conversation with the Universal Music Publisher at London offices, May 2011. 2 Art funding polices of the Arts Council of England. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/history-arts-council/1960s/

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for the funding, the director of Rambert was told, “you will never get it on time.” 3 This proved untrue, as Birtwistle delivered the work within the rehearsal period as planned. The world première of Pulse Field was planned for the Aldeburgh Festival. It would seem that this particular festival would provide the ideal context for a new work from one of the generation of composers following on from Benjamin Britten. But the director of Rambert at the time has rather humbly said: The Aldeburgh Festival was my mistake, it did not provide the ideal audience for highly experimental contemporary music.4

Birtwistle’s instrumentation was formed by three bass trombones across the back of the stage, an amplified double bass on either side and four percussion kits that might suggest a challenging sound to some. It could also be argued that the lack of on-going performances resulted from the expense and availability of having such a unique ensemble for little over thirty minutes of the programme. According to James Kennedy of The Guardian the refined acoustic and general atmosphere was graced with no more than “a dull and noisy spectacle.”5 Pulse Field was certainly noisy at times. A few performances were given at the London Roundhouse, which proved to be a better building. Even with the poorer acoustic much improved since then, its large and unusual space attracted people more used to noise, experiment and spectacle. The Aldeburgh Festival might seem responsible for the work’s failure to survive yet not everyone disliked the show. John Percival of The Times found Pulse Field to be “a thoroughly rewarding creation.”6 It is clear that investigating these buildings, as performance environments offers up little that is illuminating about the work itself. It is over thirty years since Pulse Field was commissioned and Rambert policy on both music and dance remains largely unchanged. The current music director, Paul Hoskins states that: Commissioning, and touring, with live music invigorates the repertoire, challenges choreographers and honours the legacy.7

(last accessed: May 30, 2011). 3 The author in a personal communication with John Cheshworth, Director of Rambert between 1976 and 1981. May 5, 2011. 4 Ibid. 5 James Kennedy, “Aldeburgh,” The Guardian. No date available, 1977. 6 John Percival, “Frames Pulse and Interruptions,” The Times June 27, 1977. 7 Paul Hoskins, http://www.rambert.org.uk/music (last access May 30, 2011).

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Madam Rambert was involved with Diaghilev, so this legacy might include his drawing many of the century’s great composers into the dance theatre. When I went back to the Rambert building I found a warren of offices and technical departments: marketing, funding, sound, wardrobe, technical workshop. There was, however, not a single person left from the time of the production. Moreover my own recollection would be insufficient, although I recalled Birtwistle’s having the workshop produce a metal anvil to add to his percussion. The anvil, used to freeze the action on stage, is evidence of the composer’s full involvement with this particular theatrical environment. He stated: I am interested in working in a theatrical situation, which is like a workshop–working on the floor of a theatre (Birtwistle 1977, 17).8

Birtwistle’s usual working space was his workshop at the foot of his garden, but at this time he decided to compose within the dancers’ environment.9 It would be the rehearsal studio that would provide the key to understanding this piece of music. Uniquely, Birtwistle made the musical decisions in the studio, at the same time as Jaap Flier made the choreographic decisions. Notations of both sounds and movements were also made in the studio by assistants Glyn Perrin and Dora Frankl. Birtwistle did not speak of composing music for dance, but of setting up “an acoustical situation.” It is clear that he was deliberately avoiding writing music that could have a life of its own away from the theatre. Taking this yet further he wrote: In this new work I hope that if the dance is taken out of it then the music doesn't exist as a piece of music.10

This might seem radical for a modernist composer. While Birtwistle’s oeuvre includes several compositions developing the idea of pulse, the introduction of an alternative title seems to emphasise the work’s environmental aspect over the purely musical and structural frames and interruptions, Field implies an area of operation that of the “moving8 Harrison Birtwistle and Jaap Flier, “Composer, Choreographer, Collaboration,” Dance and Dancers. July, 1977, p.17-18. 9 Stuart Jeffries, “Up the garden path,” The Guardian, Nov 28, 2003. Also online http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2003/nov/28/classicalmusicandopera (last access May 30, 2011). 10 Noel Goodwin, “Rambert commissions: Birtwistle and Harvey.” Music and Musicians, June 1977, 28.

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thinking body” of both sound production and dance. It is not surprising that the score alone does not help us understand Pulse Field let alone recreate it in performance. An investigation of sources other than the score is essential to bring the work back to life. Fortunately, the required primary source material remains in the Rambert archive. There is evidence of what actually happened in the rehearsal space: photographs, documents, memos and video recordings. This is comprehensive evidence of the composer’s intentions, including the musical notation in its unusable format. Unfortunately most commentators seem to have focused purely on musical matters, such as the relationship between pulse and chronometric time.11 Even less helpfully, Michael Hall and Jonathan Cross focus on the socalled dispute between composer and choreographer initially reported in Timeout. While this sort of thing produces gossipy magazine interest, it does not help musical investigation. The implication is that the project failed because the composer and the choreographer did not get along. Some years later Debra Craine of The Times takes this further: “Birtwistle and dance are not natural partners.”12 Then Cross adjusts this, suggesting that it is in fact “Birtwistle and choreographers who are not natural partners,” following on from this sort of scholarly confirmation, the view finds its way into theses and beyond.13 This is how erroneous views are built up. In my recollection the process was engaged, relaxed, and productive. It was amongst the most successful collaborations I have experienced. The photographs shown in figure 3-1, taken by Alan Cunliffe during rehearsals can support this. What is important for our understanding of the music is that the interactions between the performers in the space are built into the work. The simplicity of some of Birtwistle’s indications in the score (L-shaped note stems marked merely slow, medium or fast), seems to be deliberately in deference to the complexity of the interacting, sounding while watching, listening while moving. When Birtwistle notes in the score that the “percussionists have material to inject... cued by the dance material,” we see that both the music and the dance work in response to each other. It is 11

For more understanding on these matters see Michael Hall, Robert Adlington and Jonathan Cross in the bibliography. 12 Jonathan Cross, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music. London: Faber and Faber, (2000): 193. 13 Robert Coleridge, Music and Dance in the Twentieth Century: Issues and Analyses, 2005. (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Southampton). Available at the British Library electronic theses online service: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.427714

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this integration of music and dance that makes investigating the environment around the music essential for an understanding of the work.

Fig. 3-1: The composer clearly engrossed while perched on the ballet barre (left). Harrison Birtwistle and choreographer Jaap Flier (right) keenly discussing the emerging process as the dancers relax at their feet.

Of all the commentators, scholars and critics, I find that Noel Goodwin produces the most illuminating points about Pulse Field. This is because he reflected on the process. Goodwin observed Pulse Field during rehearsal in the studio environment. In Music and Musicians he described the work as a “sequence of slow pulses variously filled in visually and aurally.” He took account of the notation, as well as the event as it unfolded before his eyes. Most tellingly, he pointed out that some of the musicians confined their interest to either their staves or their newspapers. Rather diplomatically Goodwin does not identify the brass players, but I remember clearly the expulsion of various sorts of bodily air for purposes other than musical. I also remember the problem transferring to the stage. It is critical to understand that Birtwistle had created a ritual, dependent on the interaction of its participants. Ritual is delicate. The total involvement of all is essential in order to generate the power that ritual can convey. Hans Keller was also aware of this with Birtwistle’s ritual pieces, emphasising the “importance we attach to the visual component of the total experience” (Keller 1981, 251). Audiences attune to the whole experience and are acutely aware of the lack of engagement of musicians,

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or of anyone present on the stage. The important point here is that Pulse Field is designed to be observed, as much as heard. All distraction needs to be abolished in favour of a compelling performance. The music of Pulse Field was created “on the floor of a theatre” and can only be understood through the interactions which occur in this theatrical space. The score was not unfinished, it was just that it does not represent the whole story. Scores are always insufficient in some way or other. But when Birtwistle wrote: “I hope the music would cease to exist should the dance be taken out of it” (Goodwin 1977, 28). What could a publisher do? An explanatory foreword and the inclusion of the Benesh movement notation would produce a score that is in a usable format. Pulse Field provided a thrilling performance experience. It was a musical movement game of great intensity, fifteen moving-thinking bodies operating in a highly engaged sound environment. And all of the essential understanding for performing Pulse Field still exists. When the Rambert Dance Company moves to the Southbank later this year, the actual “floor” that Birtwistle worked on will be gone, but the archive will contain all of the information needed to understand the look, the sound, and most importantly the workings of Pulse Field. There is no reason why this valuable, innovative work, could not be fully understood, and brought back to life in performance.

Bibliography Adlington, Robert. The Music of Harrison Birtwistle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Birtwistle, Harrison. Frames, Pulse and Interruptions. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1977. —. Ballet Rambert at the Round House, (Composer Programme Notes) July 1977. Birtwistle, Harrison and Jaap Flier, “Composer Choreographer Collaboration,” Dance and Dancers. July, 1977. Cross, Jonathan. Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Flier, Jaap. Ballet Rambert at the Round House, (Choreographer Programme Note) July 1977. Frankel, Dan. Frames, Pulses and Interruptions. London: Institute of Choreology, 1977. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hall, Michael. Harrison Birtwistle, London: Robson Books Limited, 1984.

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Keller, Hans. “Metrical Rhythms” Listener, 3 September 1981. Murray, Jan. Dance Now, Harmondsworth: Kestrel Books, 1979. Pritchard, Jane. Rambert a Celebration: A Survey of the Company’s First Seventy Years. London: Rambert Dance Company, 1996.

CHAPTER FOUR SOUNDPAINTING: THE USE OF SPACE IN CREATING MUSIC-DANCE PIECES HELEN JULIA MINORS

Soundpainting is a creative practice whereby music-dance works are created in the moment by the use of signed coded gestures. A Soundpainter, the creator, positions him/herself at the front of the group and acts as a living, malleable score, offering signed directions, to which the group responds. The work is then developed by the Soundpainter whose responsibility it is to make the choices as to what happens next. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the ways in which Soundpainting uses different concepts of space to foster music and dance interaction, with reference to a couple of specific gestures and to a recorded commercially available example, Pexo, composed and choreographed by the creator of the Soundpainting language Walter Thompson.1 I claim that Soundpainting is a spatial practice, in that it is an active process which orientates the performers, ascribes specific roles to performers, and constructs the work in the moment, via a signed process which relies on our physical, conceptual, metaphorical and relational understanding of space. The connotations that practice brings to the discussion bear out an active forum for experimentation, testing and reflection, which reside at the heart of the Soundpainting creative process. I refer to this philosophical notion, raised by Michel de Certeau, not to explore philosophical literature, but to reassess and raise new questions on the use of space within this specific creative method.2 1

Pexo, Walter Thompson Orchestra, directed by Joshua Taylor, produced by Marine Capalbo (Dane Recordings, 2004), DVD. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, (1984): 115.

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I aspire to illustrate how music-dance relationships are fostered via the spatial parameter within the Soundpainting language. What are the conditions of space within this real-time compositional sign language? In what way does Soundpainting use these spatial conditions to foster creativity in the moment? How are music-dance interactions propagated via the spatial emphasis within Soundpainting?3

Defining the Spatial Condition Artistic space in Soundpainting is understood to be the realm in which creation and artistic dialogue takes place. Everyone and everything exists in a space, in a broad sense, but the importance regarding the artistic creative space resides in the relationships that are set up by the artists. Although there is inevitably a physical space within which the performance takes place, and within which the performers work, there are other all-important spaces. The physical space of the performers, within the performance space, sets out a distance and embodied location in relation to everyone and everything in the performance. The physicality of the performers is innate to Soundpainting, as dancers, actors and musicians are all required to move and to consider their physical and aural spatial context. The conceptual space is the inner personal and group dimension where we, as artists, combine the audio-visual parameters of a work in order to understand and perceive them as one whole product. Conceptual integration networks have explored ways in which this process might function, specifically the ways in which different media are mapped into a blended space (Zbikowski 2011, 83). The metaphorical space is both a part of the conceptual space and the creative language. Practicing artists and theorists talk about music and dance frequently via metaphor, expressing our creative intentions, ideas and solutions via well-established metaphors for example, pitch often equates to height and rhythmicdynamic movement often equates to weight. The metaphors need to reside alongside our conceptual experience because we cannot say that music and dance are the same; they might be similar or different, but they are produced via different media, utilizing the different senses: The blending of those senses, in mapping sight onto sound, and vice versa, highlights a limited vocabulary and a need to express ideas via example to

3

The Soundpainting language uses specific gesture names: to iterate and emphasize these clearly, and distinguish them from the prose, I place them in italics.

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lived experiences, hence the use of spatial and conduit metaphors becomes central (Minors 2012, 87).

Moreover, the relational space provides a context for the performers: it is a composite of the former categories where an active invitation is offered by the Soundpainter to the performers to explore the different forms of music-dance relationships. Space is clearly not vacuous or empty: it is active, but it is also reflective, reactive, and so continually adaptive. To phrase this in Soundpainting terms, the Soundpainter signs a phrase (a series of signs) to which the ensemble responds via music-movement. The Soundpainter must then consider How to work with what has been offered, she/he needs to reflect on what one could Develop, Change or end, Off. The reason there is so much reflection at this point is because the signs can request aleatoric material, chance elements, and rarely, if ever, direct a phrase as precise as giving exact pitches, rhythms and melodies. More often a Soundpainter is searching the group for an offering under a stylistic label or a relational category. For example, one might request Minimalism, but without detailing How this is to be performed. Or, one might ask one performer to relate to another, but how they relate to another performer is not dictated by the Soundpainter, rather it is open to the performer to choose the nature of the connection. As such, and as Thompson notes in a recent interview I conducted, the process is much like a conversation. 4 The Soundpainter and performers constantly adapt what they are requesting and offering in order to develop the piece in the moment. The creative space, born out in Soundpainting especially, is an active place, an interactive, dialogic interface in which different media exchange content. As Certeau posits: Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programmes or contractual proximities… In contradistinction to the place, space has thus none of the univocality or stability of a proper place. In short, space is a practiced place (Certeau 1984, 117).

The temporal, malleable nature of such a space is essential to allowing a multimedia music-dance work to be created in the moment. It allows, as I

4 Walter Thompson in discussion with the author at the Jazz Musicians Union in Paris. June 25, 2011.

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detail elsewhere, the opportunity to foster music-dance dialogue between the performers without predetermining every aspect of the work.5 Henri Lefebvre refers also to space, in relation to the production and development of society, as an active social location where questions are posed, debated and answered. He notes that space is an area in which creation can take place, but importantly refers to a level of control within it. Who, or what, is in control in Soundpainting? What questions are posed? How do the different media utilize this space to foster a dialogue between the audio-visual dimensions? Although the Soundpainter ultimately guides the creation of the piece, everyone in the ensemble poses questions and challenges by attempting to relate to each other when signed, or by moving and sounding chance material.

Soundpainting Faders The Soundpainting language is formed from over two thousand gestures, which fall into specific categories, signed in a specific order: x Who (whole group) x What (pointillistic movement) x How (tempo fader: slow) x When (slowly enter) Within these categories there are families of gestures: the faders are a set of gestures that allow: x Tempo (tempo fader) x Volume (volume fader) x The use of the stage space (use the whole space) x Duration (duration fader) x Density (density fader) x Detailed content (complexity fader) x Gravity (gravity fader), to be adapted by making more or less of the content requested. The above faders rely on and necessitate an active use of the four dimensions of space outlined so far. One might request a performer to play loudly (Brass One, long tone, Volume fader: loud, play) and then reduce the volume. Or the amount of music-dance activity within the texture might be adapted by reducing the density of what is offered (Density fader 5

Ibid.

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a busy texture which moves toward an emptier still texture, with up to five seconds of silences and absence of content. Like many faders it requires a relational perspective, where the content of what is being performed at the time the fader is signed provides the context for how to employ the fader). Likewise Place can be signed, locations can be determined, and specific location-spaces can be assigned specific qualities, referred to via a Field gesture. For example, back stage right may be assigned a low Level movement and Hits (punctuated musical material) whereas front stage left may be assigned arabesque movements and a quiet (Volume Fader) vocal (Voice Melody). All the faders use space to equate to content, and many things that are not physical. The spatial parameters in Soundpainting are multifaceted: beyond the metaphorical basis of the gestural language, the gestures are able to specify and use the full space of the performance venue (Directions Fader). Whatever discipline, the practitioner may be called upon to use their body in some way and to move in the space. Integral to how gestures are performed (when the Soundpainter dictates how something should be played, i.e. fast), resides acknowledgement of where the material is produced. Signing How therefore means something different to the English word, as in Soundpainting the audio-visual dimensions are mapped and constantly considered. In telling the performer How to present a movement, the Soundpainter invites the performers to ask: How do I deal with this material? Where do I place it in the context of the ensemble? Faders are significant because the performers’ first need to be ascribed a role in a physical, aural and conceptual context, before active changes can be signed. Certain controls need also be imposed. Before a performance begins, in using Soundpainting as a choreographiccompositional tool, the Soundpainter must set Defaults and Neutrals: the Defaults is where the performer is positioned on the stage, Neutrals establish how the performers are positioned.6 The syntax logically presents directions, as such Where must be presented in the How gestures, in order to sign “dancer one” (Who), “improvise” (What), Direction Fader (How: in this case use the whole space), “slowly enter” (When). Thompson’s emphasis on an audio-visual embodied experience in the moment bears affinity to gesture discourse. Robert Hatten defines musical gesture via the recognition of significance. 7 For Lidov music is significant when a 6

Walter Thompson, Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3, 2012. Walter Thompson Soundpainting Orchestra, Dance Recordings, forthcoming 2013. 7 Robert Hatten, “Lecture 1: Toward a Characterization of Gesture in Music: An Introduction to the Issues.” Musical Gesture, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/hat1.html (accessed June 7, 2011).

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performer “identifies perceived sonorous motion with somatic experience.”8 Pexo (2004), a commercially released Soundpainting by Thompson, utilises the space of the studio, directing musicians, dancers and actors around the rectangular location to create an “abstracted sound vision of a visit to a television recording studio.”9 Again, Thompson maps the audio-visual in his description of Soundpainting, corresponding with many recent dance scholars who have explored hearing the dance and seeing the music.10 An example of mapping sound and movement is the Volume Fader. The Soundpainter asks the performer to conceptually map the audio-visual in one gesture to both artists. It may require the practitioner to find an equivalent, equating musical dynamics to dance dynamics, namely muscle intensity, or even the amount (volume) of space used. 11 Note here the crossover of language: dynamics exist in both audio and visual art forms but mean very different things. The spatial metaphor requires decoding for a dancer works in reverse from musicians reading the More Space Fader, who may equate the physical space to a rhythmic change of tempo alteration. Pexo integrates movement as a central part of the work.12 At 9: 55 minutes two Soundpainters are situated to the left of the studio with musicians in pairs forming two lines facing one Soundpainter, while dancers are stood at the other side of the studio facing the other Soundpainter. The dancers’ eyes are directed toward Thompson. At 10:45 minutes Thompson signs Minimalism, which is interrupted with short repeated restricted movements, demonstrating that gesture names which extend from a musical style can be read metaphorically across media. At 11:35 minutes the performers’ physical and locational space begins to be controlled using More Space Fader (placing two fists one above the other the hands are pulled apart or moved closer together in a vertical direction, as though stretching an elastic band), and Density Fader placing hands either side of the head and expanding outwards. The dancers/actors respond by moving closer together or further apart. They are aware of their location and elation to the other performers. They are also decoding the musically named gestures to produce three or more dimensional results. 8

David Lidov, “Mind and Body in Music.” Semiotica, Vol. 66, No. 1/3, (1987): 70-97. 9 Walter Thompson Orchestra, http://www.wtosp.org/pexo_cd.html (last access June 7, 2011). 10 Further reading, see Stephanie Jordan, Moving Music: Dialogues With Music in Twentieth Century Ballet, London: Dance Books, 2000. 11 Media equivalences were listed by Jacques Dalcroze, listed by Stephanie Jordan, Ibid. 12 Extracts from Pexo are available at: http://www.youtube.com/user/climbersax

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Therefore in dealing with notions of space Thompson chooses whether to control specific features of them or to invite the performers to experiment with them. He may guide the proximity to the other performers but does not guide exact positioning; he articulates the amount of stage space that each performer assumes, but does not specify how close they are to each other. These few examples outline what the conditions of space within this real-time compositional sign language might be: namely the physical, locational, metaphorical, conceptual and creative dimensions within an audio-visual dialogue. The Fader gesture types demonstrate how the language modifies and changes the dimension of space, and also, they illustrate the importance of space as a “practiced place.” The spatial emphasis in Soundpainting begins with the physical embodied nature of the Soundpainter who acts as musical score, dance notation, conductor, director and producer — it resides in its very name. The language seeks to advance how performers’ might develop a dialogue in the moment, and that dialogue is inherent, and only possible, within a space: an active exchange between the audio-visual dimensions, in the moment, within a live performance.

Acknowledgements As a Soundpainter, directing a multidisciplinary Soundpainting ensemble, I owe thanks to the Kingston University Soundpainting Ensemble for their dedication, enthusiasm and willingness to experiment. Particular note should go to two of my Soundpainting tutees on whom I have acted as mentor, teacher and performer to their direction: Claudio Somigli and Lucy Ryding.

Bibliography Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Chapin, Keith and, Lawrence Kramer. Musical Meaning and Human Values, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Jensenius, Alexander Refsum, Marcello M. Wanderley, Rolf Inge Godøy, and Marc Leman. “Musical Gestures: Concepts and Methods in Research.” In Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, ed. Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman, New York: Routledge, (2010), 1235.

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Jordan, Stephanie. Moving Music: Dialogues With Music in Twentieth Century Ballet, London: Dance Books, 2000. Larson, Steve. “Musical Gestures and Musical Forces: Evidence from Music-Theoretical Misunderstandings.” In Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, Aldershot, Ashgate, (2006): 61-74. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). Minors, Helen Julia. “In Collaboration: Toward a Gesture Analysis of Music and Dance.” In Bewegungen zwischen Horen und Sehen: Denkbewegungen uber Bewegungskunste, ed. Stephanie Schroedter, Königshausen & Neumann (2012): 163-80. Minors, Helen Julia. “Music and Movement in Dialogue: Exploring Gesture in Soundpainting,” Les Cahiers de la Societe Quebecoise de Recherche en Musique, 13, (2012): 87-96. Nancy, Jean-Luc and Charlotte Mandell. Listening, New York: Fordham University. 2007. Thompson, Walter. Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 1, New York: Walter Thompson Orchestra, 2006, DVD. ––. Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 2, New York: Walter Thompson Orchestra. 2009, DVD. ––. Taran’s Free Jazz Hour, “Walter Thompson Interview: 9 July 2009” http://taransfreejazzhour.com/podcast/walter-thompson-interview11-july-09.html (last access 3 March 2011). ––. Questionnaire, written and conducted by Helen Julia Minors, Kingston University, London, (2010). ––. Soundpainting Passion Play, Walter Thompson Orchestra 4 May 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cMpxV0jVZQ (accessed 7 June 2011). Zbikowski, Lawrence. “Conceptual Models and Cross-Domain Mapping: New Perspectives on Theories of Music and Hierarchy,” Journal of Music Theory 41/2, (1997): 193–225. —. “Musical Gesture and Musical Grammar: A Cognitive Approach.” In New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King. Farnham: Ashgate, (2011): 83-98.

CHAPTER FIVE CONTINUOUS MOVEMENT, FLUID MUSIC AND EXPRESSIVE IMMERSIVE INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY: THE SOUND AND TOUCH OF ETHER’S FLUX JOSHUA B. MAILMAN AND SOFIA PARASKEVA

The synaesthesia of Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky still fascinate, despite the intricately coordinated musicality of Balanchine’s, Kilian’s and Morris’s dance choreographies and the startling visuality of the musical dance theatre works of Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais. It’s an old but potent dream to interrelate music, dance and visual art. Yet simple mappings between them always pale in the face of the affective complexity experienced within any of them. To succeed, mappings must forge affective complexity that is needed for art to be aesthetically compelling. Our starting point has been to use recent technologies to develop our own interactive system to generate computer music through movement of the body; such movement is channelled through various quantitative mappings that physically, physiologically and psychically suggest imaginary worlds to experience as observer or participant. What is generated is a non-repeating stream of music that is expressive in that it enables mood shifts by allowing nuanced but audible emergent qualities to be spontaneously steered through motions of the body. We hope to spur a synergy between spontaneous movement, computation and sound, thus initiating a technology-fuelled fusion of dance and music, which in turn will prompt new cross-fertilizations between choreographic and sonic composition and improvisation. Because these interactions steer fluctuating emergent qualities through continuous motion in space, they suggest tantalising syntheses between organisms in motion and the continuous flux of their environment.

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The Fluxations Approach to Embodied Interactive Music Generation Our Fluxations is one of many interactive systems developed in recent years. Fluxations is distinct in intention and result primarily because of the way it negotiates the discrepancies between music and dance performance. As Schacher explains: The fundamental issue of combining dance with interaction and music is that the experience, training and perception of the performers in the domains of dance and music do not cover the same emphasis of performing music or gesture.

Fluxations addresses this primarily by circumventing the issue of gesture. This permits the dance to have gestures without demanding that the spectator recognise them as such in order to sense a correlation with the generated music. So bodily gestures relate almost incidentally to the dance-music interaction, which instead derives from spatial positions and orientations of the whole body and its individual parts. The advantage emerges when distinguishing two potentials of interactive systems. An interactive system is immersive to the extent that every noticeable bodily movement produces a change in the generated music. It is expressive to the extent that the performer can anticipate the change in the generated music that will be produced by a movement and to the extent that a variety of musical changes are thus accessible at the performer’s discretion. The complexity arising in immersive interactive systems often comes at the expense of expression. Rokeby’s Very Nervous System presents an immersive environment in which a change of bodily position initiates or perpetuates a complex of musical sounds but, by design, the manner of this generation evolves as the system runs, resulting in a fascinating long range unpredictability, thus “a complex and resonant relationship between the interactor and the system” (Rokeby 1983, Salter 2010). In this sense, Very Nervous System (VNS) pushes the instrumentality of expression beyond reach of the dancer-improviser’s volition. While VNS is immersive but not optimally expressive, other systems are expressive but not immersive. These act as instruments of expression– either by generating individual sounds (or a collection of sounds) directly in response to discrete gestures or by using gestures to manipulate

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playback of sounds sampled from outside the system.1 The metaphors of driving and flying have also been suggested (Wessel and Wright 2002), but have not been actually implemented to any significant extent. On the contrary, often in interactive dance systems, much technical sophistication and nuanced understanding is put to the task of parsing a dancer’s movement into discrete expressive gestures (Schacher 2010). Such detected bodily gestures are then “mapped” (one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one) to discrete musical gestures as a means of expression. Much literature on interactivity focuses on gesture-to-gesture mapping. This interpretation of bodily movement is somewhat artificial considering the situation our bodies are normally immersed in: continuous space, in which only a miniscule fraction of bodily motions are recognised as gestural. There is the wave, the handshake, the salute, the bow and certain memorable poses noticed in a dance such as the plié and arabesque. Though these stand out as symbolic, one is equally aware of the infinity of other motion preceding and following these, especially when movement is one’s focus, as when watching dance. To the dance spectator, the continuity of movement often overwhelms any sense that the dance is presenting a series of discrete gestures. By establishing a non-gestural but spatially driven interaction, Fluxations generates music with the complexity of immersive systems but with the transparency of expressive instruments. This is because the complexity in the music is algorithmically achieved instead of having to be derived from complexity of dance movement. This allows the dance to focus on clarity of expression, which, in a top-down manner, steers the qualities of the generated musical complexity. The complexity emerges from stochastic procedures (controlled randomness) in the music algorithm. The stochastic aspects of the algorithm create detail that is complex but yet neutral (statistically uniform) in relation to the emergent properties whose flux is expressively manipulated by the dancerimproviser. Thus it is observed how the user-improviser wilfully sculpts the characteristics of complexity in real-time, exemplifying a cybernetics of cybernetics (2nd order cybernetics).2 Thus our technology is immersive but also expressive.

1

Hunt and Wanderley 2002, Tanaka 2009, Tanaka 2010, Wessel and Wright 2002. Pask and Foerster describe second-order cybernetics as the cybernetics of observing systems making a distinction between two orders of analysis. One in which the observer enters the system by stipulating the system’s purpose… and a second order in which… the observer enters the system by stipulating his own purpose. (Foerster 1979, 283-86). 2

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Fluxations was initially developed by the first author as a MaxMSP patch and as an iPhone app (Mailman 2012a, 2012b). The app is played by tilting and twisting the iPhone smoothly with the wrist (and by moving sliders on its face), thus enabling only two or three of the music generating algorithm’s dozen or so input parameters to be affected simultaneously. In the Fluxations paradigm, the ability to spontaneously manipulate more input parameters translates into greater musical expression. For this, The Sound and Touch of Ether’s Flux constitutes the first phase of the Fluxations Human Body Interface. 3 With this we exploit interactive technology to address the relation of complexity to perception. So far it has been demonstrated in New Jersey, London and New York (Mailman and Paraskeva 2012ab, 2012b). A second phase of the human body interface involves spontaneously controlled animated computer graphics and was presented in Montreal and San Diego (Mailman 2012c). It extends the same motivations, systematic principles, and technology of interaction discussed here.

Interactive Technology Design for the Dancing-Thinking Body The system works by tracking absolute and relative positions of parts of the body as they move through space. Though not all the music generating parameters are continuous (discrete pitches are used), the movement space is treated as continuous, just as we normally experience it. So too, though composed of discrete pitch events, the music is generated as a continuous stream.

Fig. 5-1: Xbox Kinect infrared video camera.

3 The authors thank Harvestworks and the Columbia Computer Music Center (CCMC) for use of their space to prototype the motion tracking interface.

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Fig. 5-2: Joshua B. Mailman (right) demonstrating right and left hand sensor gloves designed, built and programmed by Sofia Paraskeva (left). Cornell University, May 2012. Photo by Evan Cortens.

Emergent qualities of the stream remain stable when the dancer is still but shift as the dancer moves. Complete technical details of the Fluxations system are beyond the scope of this essay, but here is an overview: An infrared video camera (Kinect), shown in figure 5-1, sends a stream of 3D point data converted to OSCeleton data through OpenNI and PrimeSense’s NITE middleware. In this way, absolute positions X (horizontal), Y (vertical), and Z (depth) of parts of the human body (head, hands, feet, shoulders and torso) are continuously fed into a MaxMSP patch running on a MacBook Pro. For some of these (hands, feet and shoulders), additional data points are computed, such as maximums and differences. Additionally, as in figure 5-2, the dancer-improviser wears two sensor gloves which are custom designed, built and programmed by the second author. Using flex (bend) sensors, these gloves detect the extent to which the wrist is bent and continuously send this data (through a Lilypad microcontroller and Xbee wireless transmitter) to a MaxMSP patch. Each glove also has a slider and several buttons whose data is sent with the wrist bend data. Like the other bodily movements detected through the camera, the wrist flexing motions are observed as part of the spectacle. By contrast the use of the sliders and buttons is much less a part of the dance, but is needed for additional remote control of the music (and graphics) algorithm.

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Fig. 5-3: Viscous vs. fluid texture controlled by height (head or hands, whichever is higher).

Fig. 5-4: Circle of 5ths based harmonic space: population ranging from hollow (one pitch class) to full (all twelve pitch classes) and every increment in between.

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Fig.5-5: Filling in (populating) the circle of 5ths harmonic space by moving forward.

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The music algorithm is encoded as a procedural score script programmed in the RTcmix language; this runs in an rtcmix~ object in a MaxMSP patch. In the MaxMSP patch, the raw and computed data from the Kinect camera and glove feed as input parameters to the rtcmix~ object which runs in a loop, producing the continuous stream of music, whose qualities shift according to the fluctuating values of the input parameters. As of this writing there are 12 input parameters accessible at a time and three more that are accessible indirectly, by switching the operating mode of some of the glove controls. Additionally, one of the glove buttons initiates a pitched percussion attack on demand–a gestural capability that is an exception to the continuous stream interactivity paradigm of Fluxations. The pitched percussion attack is played by a dedicated rtcmix~ object which coordinates with the continuous streaming (looping) rtcmix~ object in terms of its pitch content. The spatial mappings deserve discussion here, as they define how the dancer-improviser’s moves affect the generated musical stream and therefore its expression. We do not map raw sensor data directly to physical properties of sound; rather we employ a multi-layered mapping strategy (Hunt and Wanderley 2002), which means we translate the raw sensor data into quantities that are more easily conceptualised. Texture is affected primarily by the vertical position of the body. In particular, the maximum height of the dancer’s head and hands affects the viscosity versus fluidity of the texture (average duration of pitch events regardless of their interonset interval, their pulse speed) as shown in figure 5-3 (Mailman 2010, 2012b). The Fluxations algorithm chooses its pitches based on: (1) the harmonic space chosen, (2) how sparsely or fully the harmonic space is populated; (3) pitch-class (circular) transposition and (4) minimum and maximum pitch boundaries. In the Fluxations paradigm minimum and maximum pitch boundaries are not often used expressively; they are usually set wide and the octaves of the pitch events are randomly distributed to create a diverse harmonic wash. One of the harmonic spaces is based on the circle of fifths, as in figure 5-4. At its most hollow, it is populated by a single pitch class (pitch regardless of octave). As the dancer moves closer to the camera, the harmonic space incrementally fills in to a P4/P5 dyad, the “sus 4” trichord, the “I’ve Got Rhythm” tetrachord, the pentatonic scale, the Guidonian hexachord, the diatonic scale and eventually the full chromatic, and, at the closest proximity to the camera, the microtonal continuum. This is partly shown in figure 5-5.

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Fig. 5-6: Pitch class transposition effected through lateral movement.

The dancer’s gradual movement forward is heard as a gradual change in the generated music because the degrees of harmonic fullness are incremental and the complexity of the texture is sufficient to overwhelm any sense that one is ever crossing over any discrete increments. The change can only be experienced as continuous, because the following parallelism is upheld by Fluxations’s action response system: to move to a distant point in physical space one must move through intermediate points; so to move from a harmonically hollow sound (one or few pitch classes) to a fuller one (a full chord or scale etc.) one must move through the intermediate degrees of harmonic fullness. As shown in figure 5-6, the lateral movement in physical space controls pitch-class transposition and projects the same principle of continuity as just explained: intermediate

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points in space correspond to intermediate harmonic qualities in the generated music. For whatever pitch-class set is operative based on forward-backward position (harmonic fullness), moving laterally transposes it incrementally on the circle of 5ths. Exactly how continuous this sounds depends a lot on the dancer’s forward-vs.-back position, which controls harmonic fullness. This was explained previously by the first author (Mailman 2012a) but is also indicated in figure 5-7. The greater the harmonic fullness (the more forward the dancer is) the more musical continuity there is when moving laterally. At the front-most position, lateral movement causes no change whatsoever. Rhythm is controlled by the left hand, primarily by flexing the wrist. The flexing works in two modes, toggled by a button on the left hand. In one mode, the algorithm maintains a steady pulse; flexing the wrist increasingly outward causes the aural articulation of the steady pulse stream to become increasingly sparse, by increasing the probability that a pulse point will go unarticulated, as shown in the Mode 1 section of figure 5-8. Unarticulated pulse points are chosen randomly so the wrist flex makes the rhythm increase and irregular, thus indirectly making it more syncopated. Additionally, buttons on the left glove multiply or divide the pulse speed, independently of the sparseness. In the second mode, sparseness is disabled and flexing the wrist instead accelerates or decelerates the pulse speed, as in the Mode 2 section of figure 5-8. Other parameters, such as low pass filter (timbral brightness), timbral hardness (marimba loudness), loop length and iterations, textural thickness (number of simultaneous notes), homophony (tendency for multiple notes to coincide), durational diversity, maximum and minimum pitch and which harmonic space (pitch interval basis) is operative are controlled by other dispositions and relative distances of the body, shown in figure 5-9, as well as by glove buttons and sliders. Though different from conventional instruments, much of the interactivity of Fluxations is clear when observed. This is because it upholds the principle of continuity of space and does so simultaneously in many dimensions of movement (forward-backward, lateral, height, wrist bend and distance between hands) thus infusing a wide variety of trajectories of dance motion with a correspondingly wide variety of trajectories of qualitative change in the generated music.

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Fig. 5-7: Varying degrees of continuity from lateral motion, as depending on forward vs. back position.

Fig. 5-8: Rhythmic control based on left hand wrist flexing.

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Fig. 5-9: Various interface control moves.

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Artistic and Philosophical Context The appeal of interactive technology relates back to the avant-garde performance art phenomenon that surged in the 1960s and the more selfconscious theorising of media coinciding with this. Following Cage’s 1940s experimental performances at Black Mountain College, Kaprow described “happenings” as event-based performances shaped by participation of the audience that occurred in abandoned factories, lofts, parks, buses and so on (Packer 2001, 280). These, along with the multimedia and cross-media works of Cage, Cunningham, Oldenberg, and Fluxis artists, challenged the fixed work concept in favour of an aesthetics of flux. They traded the being of art for the becoming of it. The indeterminate, spontaneous and ephemeral aspects were as crucial as their collaborative, participatory and interactive nature. For Kaprow: The line between art and life should be kept as fluid ... as possible, [which] led to a performance style that pioneered deliberate, aesthetically conceived group interactivity in a composed environment: …art [as] a continual work-in-progress, with an unfolding narrative that is realised through the active participation of the audience (Packer 2001, xix, 280).

Not all of these tendencies promote expression per se. Yet some contemporaneous theories do just that: Marshall McLuhan famously asserted “the medium is the message” and Buckminster Fuller prompted artists to seek spiritual transcendence, by examining the capabilities and physiology of their medium. Since the 1960s, new and resurgent philosophical developments enable a reframing of the artistic relation of spontaneity to the body, to technology and to media. The Fluxations paradigm enables the flexibility to spontaneously create sudden attentiongetting changes as well as nuanced atmospheric changes to the audible properties of the stream of musical sound. In the artistic domain, such nuanced fluctuations may serve as “vectors of transmission for feeling” as described in the metaphysics of Whitehead, and recently applied to the aesthetics of media (Whitehead 1929, Shaviro 2009). Through systems such as ours, technologically enriched expression may be embodied in physical motion. Thus an artistic philosophy can now be synthesized with theories of embodied mind developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999)4 and the philosophies of flux and process articulated by Heraclitus,

4

See also Lakoff and Nunez 2000.

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James, Bergson and Whitehead.5 Considered in this light, the capabilities and physiology of the medium now suggest active physicality as a path to spiritual transcendence through artistic expression.6

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Citadel Press. 1923/46. ––. Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1910. ––. Creative Evolution. New York: Random House. 1911. Foerster, Heinz von. “Cybernetics of Cybernetics.” In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition, New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003. Heraclitus. The Cosmic Fragments, trans. Stephen G. Kirk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1962. Hunt, Andy and Marcelo Wanderley. “Mapping Performance Parameters to Synthesis Engines.” Organised Sound, 7/2, (2002): 97-108. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1909. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1980 ––. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. 1999. Lakoff, George and Rafael Nunez. Where Mathematics Comes From. New York: Basic Books. 2000. Mailman. Joshua B. “An Imagined Drama of Competitive Opposition in Carter’s Scrivo in Vento” Music Analysis Vol. 28, (2009): 2-3. —. 2010. “Emergent Flux Projecting Form in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet.” Analysis of Music by Women Composers Session, Committee on Status of Women, Society for Music Theory, Indianapolis, November 2010 and Seventh International Conference on Music Since 1900 / Society for Music Analysis Conference, Lancaster, U.K., July 2011.

5

Recent compositions inspired by Heraclitean themes include Music Literature: Heraclitus 1–6 (2007), by the Fluxus composer Philip Corner (Frog Peak Music), and Joshua B. Mailman’s computer music piece Heraclitean Dreams (2008) (www.joshuabanksmailman.com). 6 To see videos of Fluxations visit http://vimeo.com/album/1872304 and http://joshuabanksmailman.com/interactive/interactive_gallery.html. To learn more about the authors’ work visit http://www.joshuabanksmailman.com, www.copperbluemedia.com, and www.sofiart.com.

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—. 2012a. “The Fluxations Stochastic Interactive Algorithmic Music Engine (SIAME) and iPhone App” Proceedings of the 9th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC), Copenhagen. —. 2012b. “Interactive Computer Simulation for Kinesthetic Learning to Perceive Unconventional Emergent Form-bearing Qualities in Music by Crawford Seeger, Carter, Ligeti, and Others” Proceedings of the Inter-national Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) and European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), Thessaloniki, Greece, July. —. 2012c. “Comprovisation, Emergence, and the Fluxations Human Body Interface” Skin—Surface—Circuit: Embodying the Improvisatory, ICASP-McGill Center for the Critical Study of Improvisation Interdisciplinary Conference, Montreal, June 14-16. —. 2013a. “Improvising Synesthesia: Comprovisation of Generative Graphics and Music” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 19, 3. —. 2013b. Full Body Comprovisation No.1 and Full Body Comprovisation No.2, videos published in the journal soundsRite: http://soundsrite.uws.edu.au/ Mailman, Joshua B. and, Sofia Paraskeva 2012a. “The Sound and Touch of Ether’s Flux” Music, Mind and Invention: Creativity at the Intersection of Music and Computation. College of New Jersey, March 30-31, Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body conference at Chancellors Hall, Senate House, University of London, April 19. Mailman, Joshua Banks and Paraskeva, Sofia. 2012b. “The Fluxations Human Body Movement Interface for Comprovisational Computer Music.” Music Cognition, Technology, Society, Cornell University, May 11-13. Packer, Randall. Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York: Norton. 2001. Rokeby, David. Very Nervous System. http://www.davidrokeby.com/vns.html Salter, Chris. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2010. Schacher, Jan. “Motion to Gesture to Sound: Mapping for Interactive Dance.” Proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Sydney, Australia. June 15-18, 2010. Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Tanaka, Atau. “Sensor-Based Musical Instruments and Interactive Music.” The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, Oxford University Press, (2009): 233-57.

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––. “Mapping Out Instruments, Affordances, and Mobiles.” Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2010), Sydney, Australia, 2010. Wessel, David and Matthew Wright. “Problems and Prospects for Intimate Musical Control of Computers.” Computer Music Journal, 26, 3, 2002. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. 1929/1978.

CHAPTER SIX MATERIALISING METAPHORS, REFLECTIONS FROM A MOVEMENT WORKSHOP MAGNUS ANDERSSON

Music is movement. It is not possible to play an instrument without bodily engagement and sound itself is by its very nature movement as it is vibrations. Our language to describe music is permeated by language pertaining to movement and that music is movement is a doxa so ingrained in our thinking that even philosophers forget to question it. Husserl, for instance, did not ask whether there is movement in music, but what in music makes us experience music as movement. Music can also move us emotionally and even the ostensible arch-sceptic against emotionalism in music, Eduard Hanslick, did not reject that music is movement. He rather strengthened the view, although the abode of movement shifted. This fundamental insight could be stated with what Lakoff and Johnson calls a metaphorical concept – music is movement.1 From this concept derives expressions like: the music came to a halt in a fermata, a lullaby may be lilting, a sequence may move up or down, there may be a bouncing quality to staccatos, a particular chord may be played weightily and so forth. But metaphorical language is not merely a product of constructions in language. Lakoff and Johnson claim that our thoughts are structured according to metaphorical concepts: In actuality we feel that no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis (Lakoff and Johnson’s italics).2

1

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, (1984): 2. 2 Ibid.

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Music does indeed come to a halt in a fermata and this is a metaphor that musicians live by. Nonetheless, the level at which the musician knows the concept from an experiential perspective varies greatly. Through elaborating the experiential basis per se, that is, the musician’s movement skills and awareness, we can elaborate how we think about music, how music is experienced and how it is interpreted. I work with helping musicians and dancers elaborate their bodily experience of the metaphor music is movement through physical movement or, more specifically, through dance. The work is based upon our practice as professional tango dancers and teachers. 3 I have yet to conduct large-scale surveys and qualitative interviews. Nonetheless, I have experience of teaching many dancers and quite a number of musicians too. So although these findings are preliminary, they are based upon an extensive practical experience. After explaining some of the exercises that we give to our students, I discuss the benefits that musicians may reap from a corporeal way of understanding music-making. The most fundamental element in the tango is the walking steps (caminada in Spanish) and our method, hence, focuses on walking. Rather than concentrating on the points from and towards which we are walking, our work concentrates on the process – on what happens in between the outer points of the step. We scrutinise the energy used to travel from one point to the next or the time in between the attack of notes in music. One of the first elements we work with is the side-step. The student is asked to take wide steps, vigorously and quickly. Sometimes we even make them jump from one point to the other. We deliberately give them very little time to traverse a substantial distance. The high intensity performance we ask for causes most students to begin to notice, for instance, how they push the floor or how the foot, calf, quadriceps and gluteus muscles interact in their energetic side-steps. The aim of the strenuous task is to stimulate the development of corporeal strategies for achieving it. The thinking-mind is still involved in the exercise but more as an observer than as the primary motivator for the students’ side-steps. Moving in this fashion there is a flowing quality to the steps that even many experienced tango dancers lack. All further exercises strive to maintain this energetic and flowing quality, which proves difficult when we decrease the intensity of the steps. We then transfer the work with the side-step to walking forward and backward. After finding a particular place of the sole of the foot on which 3

In writing “our” the author wishes to acknowledge his tango partner and researcher Anne Marit Ligaard.

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to stand, the dancer’s task is to push the floor in order to walk one step with the correct amount of energy to find their balance on the corresponding spot on the other foot. Maintaining the flowing quality of the steps secures that we understand movement as energy rather than as structure. There will nonetheless be structure to their dance, but the structure, for example the side-step or a forward/backward step, comes as a consequence of how the dancers energetically push the floor. We then encourage the student to experience timing and energy as two separate parameters of rhythm, and here begins one of the most important parts of our work. We ask them to change one parameter but not the other, which is excruciatingly difficult; consider how even trained musicians often unwittingly increase the tempo when performing a crescendo. The musicians/dancers are asked to keep the distance of their steps the same and to use the same amount of time for the step, but to exercise the step with more energy. The excessive energy will push the dancers beyond the established point of balance on their foot. They roll through it and the excessive energy becomes expressed in another step. We could of course simply have asked our students in the first place to take two steps, but our aim is that the repertoire (the two steps) and the expression should happen as a consequence of how they work with energy through pushing the floor. The second step is thus already inherent in the pushing foot that makes the dancer leave the spot where he/she began. By giving the first step different energies, it could stop or it could lead into a second step. This means that structure in our tango improvisations comes as a consequence of the energetic work. How the dancer pushes the floor is the expression in itself. Expression is thus primary and its structure follows as a consequence of how we express it in our dancing. This is very different from thinking that structure is primary, with expression placed upon structure as a surplus. How does this transfer to musical performance? Musicians can use their movement experience when there is a distance that must be travelled in a musical work. A dancing violinist may be better equipped to time her bowing and the terpsichorean pianist may, with more ease, find a new chord on the keyboard. Another clear example of how movement studies can help musicians is when they need to play very slowly. Movement studies can make their playing more precise and can engender a far better musical understanding of how to shape or listen to the time in between notes. When we ask our tango students, even advanced and musically experienced ones, to walk to very slow music, many if not most of them put their feet down too early. They do not walk faster than the music, but

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they are slightly ahead of the beat with each step. The problem is that the dancers do not have sufficient understanding of the energetic aspects of rhythm. Instead of focusing on expressing the energy that renders the structure and which is expressive in itself, the dancers who step too early are concentrating on the structure they want to perform. The result is both a poor expression and a failure to be structurally and rhythmically precise. An understanding of the principles of movement described above may help to solve this problem. It may also give instrumentalists tools to vary their interpretation. Unless they make this shift from structure to energy/expression, the violinist or pianist will be inexact in their leaps, and this produces a musical movement that is as jerky and awkward as that of the eager dancer’s misstep. Another result of the halted movement is the reduction of the musician’s ability to control tone production. The jerkiness of the movement comes through in the tone and the consequence for timbre and dynamics of a delayed or hastened movement will be clear. What is perhaps more interesting than the “do not” of not hurrying or arriving too early, is what the musician can gain from developing their understanding of movement. I have already mentioned how a good understanding of movement can teach the violinist to better use the length of her bow, but there are also expressive gains to be made. A violinist with a rich repertoire of energies with which to travel the same distance during the same amount of time, will gain a better understanding of the relationship in bowing, between pressure and speed. This, in turn, enhances understanding of the energy with which one note leads into the next, which has implications for the performance of crescendo or diminuendo, vibrato and other expressive devices. I have suggested that there are technical gains to be made by musicians who work experientially with movement. Working with movement also has benefits directly related to musical expression. The focus on what happens in between the notes, in our work, represents a radical departure from the usual understanding of rhythm and structure as a series of points in time. For example, a good understanding of movement is essential for a pianist needing to tie slow notes in a legato. Although there is nothing the pianist can do with the tone after it is played, the tone keeps sounding and living and in that instant the movement studies gives a clearer understanding of both decay and concatenation with what follows, that is it helps the pianist with phrasing and legato alike. Moreover, working with the entire body we gain a better understanding of gravity and thus also of the nature of acceleration and deceleration. One final example related to weight and timing is when we want to delay a

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single event, typically done by extending a short pause before the onset of a note. Physical movement can give a deeper understanding of the energetic elements in play when working with different lengths of the preceding note, the length of the pause and the best way to mark the following note, all of which may be somewhat abstract when experimented with on the instrument. Also, gravity and the manipulation of the energy give the musician a physical feeling of her way of doing it. Playing with it through movement studies will also give her an ample repertoire of other possible ways to perform the accentuation. What is suggested in this short article should be practiced rather than read about. Still, movement studies can help us scrutinise the metaphorical concept that music is movement by helping the musician expand the relevant experiential basis. I have suggested several different ways that the musician can use movement studies in practice. The examples should be read as possibilities rather than as an attempt to create a complete taxonomy. Musical language may seem abstract; it may seem as if it resides in conventions severed from practice. It is the author’s belief that movement studies can “corporealize” the metaphors that musicians work with. Studying dance can help us consider that our brain is already structured to think of music in terms of movement. A practice as dancing musicians can help us live by the metaphorical concept that “music is movement” more intensely.

Acknowledgements Although this article is single-authored, it is based on the findings of a five-year long and very intense partnership in dance together with Anne Marit Ligaard, who in my eyes is one of the world’s most distinguished dancers.

Bibliography Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

CHAPTER SEVEN SHAPING MUSIC, SHAPING YOU: OPTIMISING MUSIC PERFORMANCE POTENTIAL THROUGH BODY MOVEMENT/DANCE MARILYN WYERS

This chapter is a summary of a research-in-action session presented to delegates attending the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice conference at the University of Cambridge in July 2011. In this session I addressed the challenge of how music instrumental and vocal teachers can optimise performance potential in their students suggesting that one possible solution could be the use of a body movement/dance approach. Utilising a refreshing combination of different modes of transferring knowledge; explanatory text, framed video footage, demonstration and physical workshop I offered the delegates an opportunity to experience at first hand some of the techniques I use in my research, and gain even in a short time, something of the bodily understanding of my work. A key part of this experience was the music of Neil March, a contemporary British composer whose compositions seek to embody the shape of organic, everyday gestures and interactions. The purpose of the session was to: x x x

Share performance-based research-in-action. Physically explore body movement/dance techniques that address the music performance practice of shaping phrase through Diversions, a new piano solo piece written by Neil March (2009). Consider possible connections between shaping phrase through body movement/dance and accomplishing a greater sense of control over shaping parameters available to music performers

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during performance such as dynamics, tempo, emphasis and pitch. After a brief introduction to the somatic foundation supporting my work, which draws on the movement principles of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze (1921), Rudolf Laban (1988) and Irmgard Bartenieff (1980) delegates were able to experience a journey from initial self-consciousness, inevitable in the setting, to a real enjoyment and immersion in the physical tasks, alone and with partners. The effect was that an increasing connection with an organic sense of movement and communication, give and take, ebb and flow was noticed by the delegates and the alterations in perception and quality of concentration that this gave. Following a brief physical warm-up, the first body movement task I introduced highlighted the influence of breath on the perception of shape in music performance. Delegates were invited to focus and connect with their organic breathing rhythm and energise different parts of the body by breathing into those areas of the body, consciously releasing any tension or unnecessary gripping in the joints and muscles. It was clear that they noticed many areas in the body that needed releasing as faces visibly softened and shoulders perceptibly relaxed. They were then invited to move different parts of the body freely in the space around them as they inhaled and exhaled with the goal of releasing further tension, exploring personal space and becoming more aware of their bodies and proprioceptive processes. Linking this with sound, I played a series of harmonic progressions on the piano influenced by Howard Skempton’s Toccata (1996) and asked delegates to alternate between inhalation and exhalation inspired movements when they perceived a harmonic change. I asked delegates to notice how they were shaping their bodies in space, to take in how their breath supported their movements and to remember the sensation. Observations by the delegates about this task reflected the importance of breath for all musicians. In conversation with one delegate the following comment was made: Musicians rarely move themselves, not even to do sport. They mostly begin to practise without a physical warm-up, repeating and repeating passages over and over without taking a break to stretch, release tension or embody what they are trying to achieve. Very often when facing difficult passages they hold their breath which does not seem to help at all. It seems

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that attempting to shape music without being conscious of the movement of breath cannot be effective.1

During the session I made it clear that using body movement/dance to support music performance practice is nothing new. Great music educators such as Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, Zoltan Kodaly and Shinichi Suzuki were among some of the people I mentioned and issues were raised regarding the role of the body and movement in music performance practice in the 21st century. Is it important? What is the point of it? Where can body movement fit in to established and already overcrowded syllabi and course programmes? These were some of the questions I posed and resulting discussion suggested that perhaps the use of dance/movement in music performance practice is a significant tool that western culture has tended to either forget or to minimise. It was suggested that, in part, this could be due to the dualistic notion of learning that still permeates the western art cultural system often relegating the body to a lesser part in comparison with the rational brain (Manifold 2008).2 In support of the use of body movement/dance in the music performance learning process, I drew the discussion toward recent neurological research that has begun to study the imbalance between mind and body and is promoting a more integrated approach. I referred to the work of neurocognitive scientist, Jessica Phillips-Silver and discussed two of her studies Feeling the Beat (2005, 1430-43) and Hearing What the Body Feels (2007, 533-46) 3 which provided empirical evidence that suggests that the way humans move their bodies can influence their auditory perception of rhythm and that the interrelationship between music and body movement is fundamental to music processing throughout life. I also pointed out that music psychology research over the past decade has shown a renewed interest in the relationships between the body and expressive music performance. Notably, Jane Davidson’s work on the use of body movement in performance argues that body movement has multiple functions and that interdisciplinary links between music, dance and drama can be helpful to reconcile technical and expressive skills in music performance teaching and learning situations (Davidson et al. 2001).

1 Comments made by a delegate in conversation with the author at CMPCP Conference, University of Cambridge, July 2011. 2 www.manifoldmelodies.com/docs/Manifold_Dalcroze_Voice 3 These articles are available online for download at: http://www.brams.umontreal.ca/plab/publications/article #81 and #82 respectively

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I gave further insight into my work by giving a brief overview of an empirical research project that involved six music performance students at Goldsmiths, University of London. The main research questions posed in this project were: x x x x

How can body movement/dance be used to support the music performance learning process? To what extent can it help improve a greater sense of control over shaping phrase during performance? How do music performance students make sense of their experiences of doing body and movement dance tasks to inform performance? Did student participants perceive any desirable changes or differences in the way they shaped music in performance after participating in sound-related movement tasks?

Using a phenomenological approach to investigate these questions I explained the methods I used to collect and analyse the data. These included: x x x

Practical intervention workshops and scenarios. Individual semi-structured interviews. Inter/Intrapersonal process recall.

I gave examples of the data collected and showed and discussed video footage of the practical intervention workshops. In particular, I used two video-clips showing student participants physically exploring the sense of musical shaping through dance/movement in response to Neil March’s piano piece Diversions to give an idea of the type of embodied tasks involved in my research. With regards to the last two research questions I gave examples of students’ verbal responses taken from individual interviews analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). 4 I reported that one student had said that the body movement/dance tasks: Left me energised and gave me a good feeling about me and my body and moving around with my body as I was performing. It was like opening lots 4

Further insight into this data analysis approach can be found in J.A. Smith, P. Flowers and M. Larkin. “Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research.” Sage, 2009.

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of doors to see how your body responds to all sorts of different kinds of impulses, such as sound, other people’s movements.5

Additionally, another student had commented: I think the ball exercise really helped in phrasing, we physically shaped the musical phrase that you played and I got a kind of feel of rhythm and weight that I tried to transfer to my singing…yes, it helped because when I looked at myself in the mirror during my individual practise session I looked and felt more relaxed and natural yet active and alive, less stiff and tense and more able to make an emotional contact with my body.6

In the next part of the session I dealt specifically with the notion of the relationship between shaping music and shaping movement. I gave a working definition of shaping movement, as the way we contour our bodies in three dimensions in time and space. 7 I explained that this definition is derived from Laban Movement Analysis and refers to the aspect of human movement which allows the mover to accommodate to the plastic character of objects in space; to their volume, or contour, their three-dimensionality and consequently to mould space into plastic forms whether in clay as the sculptor does, in the air, as the dance and mime artists do, or in the air and with sound as the musician does (Dell 1977). I observed that anatomically speaking, shaping movement and shaping music requires the constant blending of the muscle group functions in many joints to allow the body’s fullest adaptation. For example, a pianist might interpret a challenging virtuosic passage by moulding their body in the shape of whatever empty space is created by the assortment and combination of sounds and silences in the passage. In other words, shaping the sound by adjusting and adapting their movement to follow the dictates of the sounds on the piano’s form establishing a bridge between themselves and the instrument, suggesting that the form of the piano does not change during a performance but the form of the musician’s body does. To clarify this rather fuzzy idea of shaping music I asked delegates to take a few minutes to discuss in small groups their ideas and understanding about the notion of shape in music. Comments that emerged included: 5

Interview data taken from on-going unpublished PhD research by Marilyn Wyers in March 2012. 6 Ibid. 7 Author’s working definition based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). Further information about LMA can be found in R. Laban (1988) Mastery of Movement and J. Newlove and J. Dalby (2003) Laban for All. Nick Herne Books

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x x x x x

It is like an amoeba, not fixed, continually moving, adapting and changing shape. It is like molecules stuck together, that keep growing and shrinking. It seems to me to be related to form, in Portugal, where I come from we don’t have a separate word for shape, we use form to refer to the shape and structure of something. To me it appears to be some kind of pathway, an aural illusion of line/accent/colour/texture/weight. It seems to me to represent sonic flow in a natural context such as the shape, movement and sound of waves as they continually build and disperse in different ways.

In order to explore the notion of shaping music physically the next part of the session was dedicated to body movement and dance tasks that addressed the parameters involved in shaping music phrase. This was done through live performance and non-score based perception and analysis of Neil March’s piano piece Diversions. To enable participants to familiarise themselves a little with the piece, I played a short extract from the opening twelve bars followed by March’s explanatory notes regarding the background of the work, the compositional process and the collaborative relationship that has emerged between himself as a composer and me as a performer. Diversions was composed in late 2009 and can be seen as part of a sequence of solo piano works beginning with March’s Sonata for Piano (2008) written for Coreen Morsink, followed shortly by Momenta (2008) for Emma Firth and subsequently No Surrender (2010) for Marilyn Wyers. These pieces are not meant to form any sort of group or “suite” of individual movements. On the contrary they are distinct individual works. Diversions is an attempt to address the lack of textural and registral contrasts of the first two works whilst remaining consistent in the perpetual development of March’s harmonic language and adherence to certain compositional principles. He is also mindful of his desire to follow logically from the overtly soundbite constructed Sonata for Piano and the subtly variation-based Momenta by combining elements from both approaches. For example, whereas Momenta begins with 16 bars of music and then reconstructs them with each bar subtly altered pitch wise and/or rhythmically, Diversions opens with a short main theme which repeats numerous times throughout the piece and is altered on every occasion of its appearance. Equally, in the sense that it deploys relatively brief periods of contrasting material, it is the earliest indication of March’s more recent

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tendency to link the separate soundbites through short but clearly identifiable transitions. He pointed out that the short opening theme is important because it deploys the principle of the democratic distribution of the 12 tones available to the conventional piano but also make a strong statement about his harmonic and aesthetic leaning via its use of compound whole tone, jazz-inflected but nevertheless atonal harmony. In these two opening bars the seeds for the entire piece are sown (Fig. 7-1). 8

Fig.7-1: Diversions bars 1-2: Neil March © 2009 by Hornetmuziq Press. Reprinted by kind permission from the copyright owner.

Like most of his works, March makes a point of clearly marking each section A, B, C, D... However, these should not be mistaken for rehearsal marks. They are where he places the beginning of each soundbite. In this work, for the first time he has also marked out a series of transitions that link together the material in each distinct section, now also a feature of his work. To illustrate this, I played soundbites C and D and the transition between these two soundbites. Soundbite C lasts a mere five bars but makes an important statement, contrasting the thicker textures that dominated his previous two piano pieces with two-part counterpoint, then two-note chords set against onepart lyricism before suddenly large bass clef chords appear in the two-bar long transition and a pronounced silence punctuates the end of that passage and the opening of the D soundbite idea9 (Fig. 7-2). At this point I invited the delegates to do a physical movement task that attempted to embody the shape of the harmonic texture of March’s soundbite and transition ideas in this passage. Subsequently, I asked them to physically explore the ametricality of Diversions through the notion of inner-pulse rather than an outer imposed 8

It is possible to listen to a live recording of Diversions at the following link: https://soundcloud.com/hornetmuziqpress/diversions-solo-piano-piece 9 All analysis taken from composer’s unpublished notes to the performer.

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beat. This was done through the human movements of walking, clapping and passing a ball.

Fig. 7-2: Diversions bars 19-39.

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Fig. 7-3: Diversions bars 1-12.

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This led to the final task in which I asked the delegates to physically identify and shape the departure and arrival of phrases as they listened to the opening twelve bars of the piece. This was done with a partner and a metre long wooden dowel, which the delegates, facing each other, held between index fingers. The purpose was for partners to shape the movement of the dowel in time and space indicating their perception of the departure and arrival of phrases as I performed the opening twelve-bar section of the piece (Fig. 7-3). March concluded his comments by talking about the collaborative process between composer and performer. He mentioned how working together with a dancer/pianist had influenced his work and illustrated this by likening musical textures, densities, registers and timbre to broad concepts of body movement such as time, space, shape, energy, weight and flow. He pointed out that as a consequence of our cooperative endeavours this particular music-movement connection has taken on a more conscious meaning in his more recent works. The session ended with an opportunity for discussion and reflection which helped to identify what had been experienced and to recognise the implications of dance/movement for learning and teaching music performance in terms of optimising student’s potential to accomplish a greater sense of control over shaping phrase in preparation and performance. A final thought was that: Playing music is a concrete form of musical thinking, and the body is as much a part of finding out about music as it is a means for its actualisation (Clarke 2002, 68).

Bibliography Clarke, Eric. Understanding the Psychology of Performance. In Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding, ed. John Rink, Oxford University Press, (2002): 59-71. Bartenieff, Irmgard and Lewis, Dori. Body Movement: Coping with the Environment, New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1980. Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile, 1921/1988 Rhythm, Music and Education, Salem, New York: Ayer Company Publishing, 1988. Davidson, Jane W., Jorge S Correia, and Stephanie Pitts “Reconciling Technical and Expressive Music Skills.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 35/3, (2001): 51-62. Dell, Cecily. A Primer for Movement Description, New York: Dance Notation Bureau press, 1977.

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Laban, Rudolf. Mastery of Movement, Northcote House Publications, 5th edition, 1988. Hétu-Manifold, L. 2008 Applying Jacques-Dalcroze’s Method to Teaching Musical Instruments and its Effects on the Learning Process. Retrieved 23 April 2011. www.manifoldmelodies.com/docs/Manifold_Dalcroze_Voice March, Neil. Diversions, Piano Solo, Hornetmusiq Press, October 11, 2009, Sibelius and PDF files. Phillips-Silver, Jessica, and Laurel J. Trainor, “Hearing What the Body Feels: Auditory Encoding of Rhythmic Movement.” Cognition, Volume 105, (2007): 533-46. —. “Feeling the Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception.” Science, 308 (5727), 1430. Skempton, Howard. “Toccata” In Collected Piano Pieces, Oxford University Press, (1996): 8-12.

CHAPTER EIGHT BENEFITS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY CREATIVE COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES OSVALDO GLIECA

A moving-thinking body is commonly associated with dance forms and consequently with inseparable relations to music as well, creating connections with theatre, acting, performance, ballet, cinema and a web of infinite links between them. The most basic engagement in music requires a moving-thinking body, as it is not even possible to play an instrument without the body and mind working together and likewise for dance, feelings need to be conveyed with a controlled articulation of the body that take place together with music, sounds, rhythms, speech and spheres of visual and media arts. This suggests that music and dance can be seen as two interdependent forms of art, and so their cultural practices and customs are tied to the experience of interdisciplinary conditions with all the cultural relations between the subjective experiences of absorbing these forms of arts and the related expressive forces embodied in other artistic disciplines. The arts and all their associated disciplines are filled with innumerable concepts and theories that have now reached the point of a complex accumulation of often conflicting meanings offering boundless combinations and adaptations and consequently, treating each art or discipline in isolation of each other is now unthinkable. Words like interdisciplinary, multi-stylistic or poly-cultural have in the last twenty years or so gained a foothold in artistic discourse, but the cramped logic of old theories of the arts can only distance them from actual artistic practice. Music and dance are non-autonomous forms of art and their socio-cultural circumstances are fundamental frameworks for the experience and creation

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of meaning. 1 Absolute aesthetic theories that use certain tools and principles fail not only to address contemporary values of interdisciplinary collective collaborations, but also that arts transcend time. Time quickly changes human habits and tastes which accordingly can soon become dated, so consequently cultural studies must constantly be reconceptualised as they move within a socio-cultural context that can be transitory in its nature. The proliferation of varied and often unlimited cultural problems is a result of the postmodern cultural implosion of Western developed countries, now forced to give way to pragmatic, pluralistic approaches that are pivotal in the formation of progressive thought where traditional methods and resources do not guarantee validity in their application. Our cultural habits and behaviour pass away in a nonlinear fashion and so conventional procedures can give results that are unclear, inflexible and fossilised. Today, many practices are merging together creating new syntheses, the nature of which is often quite unpredictable, and in reflection of this, the rapid expansions and evolution of interdisciplinary studies are redefining intellectual traditions and communities of practice as well as the infrastructure of university departments. These emerging meanings need to be evaluated through practical engagement at first; the advent of digital technology, for example social media, has revolutionized human interaction which continues to progress rapidly with information now easily shared around the globe. As a result, many cultural notions can lose their value, being replaced by or juxtaposed with one another and this profoundly affects the way we manage information and its meaning; ideas can quickly appear old fashioned, although certain practices or theories tend to be retrieved and modified according to new circumstances. In this kind of positive rebound, everresponsive to circumstances, interdisciplinary practices in music and dance can only extend the boundaries of old concepts, and so new relations can emerge generating a range of activities to explore connections between trends and tastes fused with human behaviour within the diverse levels of social textures. These practices are bound up with the notion of “give and take” where challenges blur with rational academic and professional practices that renovate the relationship between these arts and the universities, transforming the faculties and departments to inter-professional. Music 1

Non-autonomous is intended as forms of art that for their creation are interindependent from other external disciplines and diverse factors which are not necessarily related with them directly or related to each other.

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and dance contribute enormously to interdisciplinary practices calling for investigations of contemporary studies and social behaviour, often with radical and spontaneous relationships to sub-topics such as transgender studies, ethnomusicology, postmodernism, globalization, urban studies and cinema. The art of creating and organising sounds and bodily movements is naturally associated with forward-thinking principles, the authority of which arise from certain practical considerations that are in turn influenced by social demands with subsequent natural repercussions in all the media communications and technologies that influence human interactions. These practices make a valuable contribution to tradition and the preservation of historical awareness with a range of useful connections to cultural studies. The collaborative practices can help in the creation of new theories that will lay the foundations for uniting art-making and its various contexts as a manifestation of embodied human thought and theoretical approaches from cultural customs. In this way it is possible to promote cross-cultural knowledge and skills in the service of common goals, including plural relationships and considerations, rather than thinking at the superficial level of pure expertise within a single discipline or craft. Collaborative creative practices are necessary to avoid detached applications of theoretical hypotheses in isolation from each other, with the risk that they can produce forms of art that lack conceptual integrity. These collaborations between artists typically start with a process of familiarisation with the resources available; this serves as an initial form of orientation for learning or assigning some rules and how they work together. This is a procedure of discovery, so that the collaborators can acquire a kind of geography of the terrain of possibilities for joint creative work. Collective practices require a capacity for active listening and observation without rigid preconceptions of what should be achieved: not seeking instant perfection, but launching directly into activity that will develop trust and a sense of security between participants who will then be prepared for any unexpected events that might occur. It would be beneficial if conceptual bases are selected to reinforce these developments in order to create a common platform for an interactive area that can later be adapted to new capacities and can draw the boundaries in which the collaboration will function. Once these earlier concepts emerge as clear, these new extrapolated theories can be introduced in an organic fashion from the praxis of collaboration generated by a conscious application towards future progressions. To unify the subject matter it is important to maintain the interdependence of elements: forms of human expressions remain alienated from their own

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limitations unless concepts from other fields are introduced; this increase furthers the potential of coping with the multiplicity of meanings making the interpretation of a performance ambiguous resulting in a continuous interplay of something that stimulates free play for the imagination of the viewer.2 Collaborative practices might not occur in a predictable way or with a specific plan to follow and there will be stages of revisiting ideas as the work progresses towards the final goal that eventually emerges; when engaging in collective practices there will be a constant flow of new ideas. Among all these newly arisen ideas it is important not to lose sight of the need to recollect key elements that possess potential for future development. This process of recollecting the material recently created will certainly have associations with the older material and help to establish whether there are values that dominate others, either as a development or contrast and what they can represent to ensure a consistent aesthetic justification. Creative collaborations assume a continuous metamorphosis from the medium in which they engage: choreography and music composition could be either made by aleatoric and intuitive strategies or from predetermined written instructions, oscillating respectively between descriptive and prescriptive procedures. The artists involved in a kind of improvisatory domain have less control of their medium: improvised practices imply the performers feel and respond to ideas in different ways allowing them to contribute to the material with their own ideas, thus influencing the creative processes and negotiating with the choreographer or the composer as well as the other performers. The ephemeral transitory character of the material could change or modify its entity in real time, disappearing the moment after it has been executed; therefore the creation resides in the memory of performers. Conversely, dealing with written instructions, which are inflexible in their nature, freedom to the performer is provided only for the interpretation of the composed material. Written instructions can be studied and observed without changing unless the artists want to make arbitrary alterations. Such discussions can only help the artists involved to reflect on, and make changes emphasising different ways of adapting or

2 Through many of his writings Umberto Eco embraces the idea that all interpretations are indefinite. Any attempt for a final meaning lead to the unavoidable rise of a never ending shift or slide of other meanings as a pivotal aesthetic factor of contemporary art; see Umberto Eco’s “The Poetics of the Open Works.” In The Open Work. (1989): 1-35.

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reshaping their medium and/or injecting accordingly the new intellectual approaches to enrich both the processes and the resultant outcomes. Critical evaluations between these two approaches cannot define one or the other as right or wrong, but the only reason that they find a valuable justification resides in the fact that they correspond genuinely to the notion of contemporary artistic collaboration, a practice fed by intuitive rationale. The aleatoric elements find parallels with experimentation suggesting reciprocal interactions behind an ethical and moral conduct, while written procedures fall into a discipline with specific rules to follow aiming to a proper order, and self-control. Both the resultant theories guided by these approaches are the result of a phronetic principle of practices and a plural thinking in response to the collective cultural issues, thus driving the creative outputs towards a social constructive relevance that fit positively into the future of multiculturalism and all its related issues. 3 Interdisciplinarities usually search for society habits and behaviour in connection with other subjects and those issues that might also emerge when particular subjects have a connection with other branches of knowledge. In creative collaborations, practices need a phronetic approach before theories are established, but not primarily ones that set up the way to practice, rather ones that engage with the reaction the audience. This should be a procedure that aims for new creative processes and sources a genuine reflection of our future environment as a mission that form a synthesis within syncretism. Music and dance are living organisms: they move within socio-cultural factors that can easily be extemporal in their nature, which means they need to be re-conceptualised continuously as their vitality changes as a result of useful functions into society-customs. They live in a perpetual evolutionary phase and many courses of study are flourishing for their unavoidable links to other topics from the fact that a pluralist platform has weakened the dominance of one idea only. Rather, these ideas rub shoulder with each other to bring forward an ordered and sustainable praxis and theory knowledge. Society today is indeed fragmented and very few now expect deliverance from grand ideologies, whether populist or 3

Phronesis is not itself a matter of pure knowledge or practice requiring an expertise or authority, but points to the determination of directing the right course of actions as an ethical ability to judge the appropriate choices to make analysing the particular and unique human circumstances. This concept can be found through Aristotle’s thinking and other scholars who followed his studies. But in this specific context it is treated to a broader range by Wayne Bowan’s “No One True Way.” In Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice (2009): 5-12.

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academic. Religion has not disappeared from our societies and still plays a large moral role with their concerns of beauty and significance, but it now draws attention to the complex nature of the social texture in itself looking for principles to share in peaceful cooperation. Artists must seek to voice the pluralism of present-day society in an ethical committed way, treating it as a virtue of the multiplicity of our ways of living alongside each other and leaving useless political, religious and commercial speculations. Today, individuals do not belong to a single monolithic community, nor are they condemned to a hopeless isolation; rather, each individual is drawn into an over-lapping array of associations. Accordingly, teaching in higher education should be “polystylistic” on approaching distinct and complex problems, drawing concepts from the history and traditions of the different cultures that gathered together within our society, as nowadays Europe and UK are facing dramatic political and cultural changes recently provoked by its economic anxieties and questions of identity faced by world migration. Cultural diversity is an asset naturally bonded with collaborations and interdisciplinarities bring different ways of analysing issues, ways of offering solutions and approaches to methodologies. The sheer fact of interdisciplinary collaborations actually increases the horizon and enriches the progress that are crucial for our success in living together. The concept of interdisciplinarities within artistic collaborations capture the intensity of today’s networks of collaborations and practices that extend across whole working sectors and levels of society. We are now witnessing this fragmented multi-dimensional era leading to significant innovations that will influence our ways of “musicking” moving and thinking.

Bibliography Balasubramanyam, Chandramohan, and Stephen Fallows. Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Books, 2009. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work: Harvard University Press, 1989. ––. The Focault’s Pendulum: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Kant, Immanuel. 1790, the Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Klein, Thomson Julie, and Carl Mitch am. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity: Oxford University Press, 2010. ––. Interdisciplinarity, History, Theory & Practice: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

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Kristjánsson, Kristján. Aristotle, Emotions and Education: Ashgate, 2007. Regelsky, A. Thomas, Gates Jerry T. ed. 2009 Music Education for Changing Times: Springer, 2009.

CHAPTER NINE THE ORPHEUS MYTH IN ROMANIAN CONTEMPORARY BALLET: LINKS BETWEEN MUSICAL SUGGESTION AND MOVING EXPRESSION TATIANA OLTEAN

The research presented here focuses on two musical scores recently composed: Orfeuridice, a ballet for choir and chamber ensemble by ùHUEDQ0DUFXDQGThe Lyre of Orpheus, a choreographic poem by Tudor Feraru. The staging of the two works compares the choreographic perspective of Melinda Jakab, who was challenged to create two different approaches to the myth in one single show. The particular use of symbols and messages involved both in music and dance are linked to the two ideas that lead the choreographic view. The relation between tradition and modernity in the creative approach of the ancient myth is also discussed. Along the centuries great composers have been inspired by the myth of the Thracian singer able to uproot trees, change the course of rivers and enchant savage animals with the sounds of his lyre, and who descended into the Underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice, whose life had been taken away from her on the very day of her marriage: Heinrich Schütz, Henk Badings, Hans Werner Henze are just a few of the composers who wrote ballet music based on this myth. Moreover, a revival of the myth happened during the 20th century, especially in the work of Igor Stravinsky (Apollon Musagète, Persephona and Orpheus). At the same time Romanian composers have highly valued the myth of Orpheus. There are few musical works based on the myth in the Romanian musical output, but nevertheless, they are of major impact and interest in staged works of Marcel Mihalovici, Gheorghe Dumitrescu and Cornel ğăUDQX As for Romanian ballet works, the two scores that are subject to analysis here are the first ones based on the myth. Although ùHUEDQ

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Marcu 1 and Tudor Feraru 2 DUH ERWK GLVFLSOHV RI &RUQHO ğăUDQX the prominent leader of the Romanian School of Composition and disciple of 6LJLVPXQG 7RGXĠă ZKR ZDV RQH RI WKH JUHDW IRUHUXQQHUV LQ 5RPDQLDQ composition. Tudor Feraru seems to show a deep interest in chamber instrumental genres, generally non-SURJUDPPDWLF ZKLOH ùHUEDQ 0DUFX LV attracted to the vocal genres: choral, vocal and vocal-instrumental, as well as opera. For Tudor Feraru the Lyre embodies Eurydice, music and creativeness at the same time. The Lyre is stolen by satyrs and kept captive in the Underworld, together with the artist’s reason to live and FUHDWH2QWKHFRQWUDU\LQùHUEDQ0DUFX¶VYLHZWKH$QFLHQWP\WKLVQRW fundamentally changed or aborted, but presented in successive episodes that are cut and interpolated with a cappella choral interludes. Concerning the architectural structure of the two works one can identify features that both composers use, as well as some particularities that are bound to the unfolding of the myth in each work. In The Lyre of Orpheus by Tudor Feraru there is a rather epic view of the story in which, excepting the first and the last episode, there is a purple line of light holding the action focused on the Underworld part of the myth (episodes 4 to 7, see Table 9-1). In Orfeuridice E\ùHUEDQ0DUFXWKHUHLVD more lyrical and poetic approach to the myth and, although one can identify the focal point of the unfolding of the story (episodes 3, 5, 7, see Fig. 9-1), they are always interrupted by a cappella static moments by the choir. In spite of these particularities, the essential moments of the myth are to be found in both works: they are the love duet between the two lovers, the descent to the Underworld, Eurydice’s death and the wandering/death of Orpheus. As a personification of music, the Lyre of Orpheus in Tudor Feraru’s work is suggested by the sonorities of the harp, whereas Orpheus has his own timbrality suggestion: the clarinet. This way the composer gives life to a love story through musical suggestion in the second episode of his ballet using stretto imitation between the two instruments, as well as mirrored superimpositions. From a choreographical point of view, Orpheus’ whole body plays his lyre, which is, as said before, embodied by Eurydice herself. The mirrored positions and gestures of the two lovers, as well as the reversed image, particularly that of Eurydice playing the “invisible” strings of Orpheus, 1

ùHUEDQ 0DUFX JUDGXDWHG LQ  IURP WKH *KHRUJKH 'LPD 0XVLc Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where he now teaches harmony. 2 Tudor Feraru graduated with a Masters Degree in Music from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and a PhD from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

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himself seen as an instrument, are depicting the very essence of the choreographic idea: Eurydice guides Orpheus’ inspiration, his whole creative power.

2 3 4

I am Orpheus, I am Euridyce Orpheus and Euridyce If You Were To Come in Hell

5 6

The Lyre of Orpheus Tudor Feraru Sunrise Over the Olympian Forest Orpheus and His Lyre The Stealing of the Lyre Orpheus’ Descent to the Underworld Before the Throne of Hades The Charming of Persephone

5 6

7

Return and Punishment

7

Orpheus in the Underworld I Do Not Know Whether I Belong To You Orpheus’ Death

1 2 3 4

1

Orfeuridice ùHUEDQ Marcu Preludio

Table 9-1: The bold subtitles of the several episodes show the common parts of the myth that appear in both works.

Fig 9-1: Tudor Feraru, The Lyre of Orpheus, Episode 2: Orpheus and his Lyre, bars 37-42 (cl., hp.).

Conversely, in the episode of the Satyrs of the same work, the three dancers embody the atmosphere of the Underworld as signifying everything opposite to the living world through a type of backward movement or rewind movement. The musical unfolding sustains this

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moving expression through rhythm and accents. The quasi-chaotic, though synchronic, movements of the three satyrs are followed by Orpheus joining them in their horrid dance. Orpheus has to become a satyr to be allowed into the Underworld. The final episode in The Lyre of Orpheus is of an extraordinary choreographic imagination: The maenads dismember Orpheus without even touching him. Jakab Melinda creates a powerful moving expression of the approaching death, through an act of invisible flogging of Orpheus. ùHUEDQ 0DUFX¶V Orfeuridice is based on two literary sources: Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Books X and XI) and four poems by Elena Maria ùRUEDQ +LV JHQUH RSWLRQ EDOOHW IRU FKRLU DQG LQVWUXPHQWDO HQVHPEOH reminds us of the syncretic Ancient Greek tragedy, as well as the spectacular French Baroque musical-theatrical performances where voice, instruments, verse and movement equally contributed to the artistic performance. In a sharp antithesis to the former ballet the composer turns his head, as Orpheus does in the myth, back to tradition, without being anachronistic. Actually, finding the right balance between tradition and modernity, without being captive in tradition and never giving in to PRGHUQLW\ LV ùHUEDQ 0DUFX¶V PDLQ YLUWXH LQ WKLV ZRUN ,Q KLV PXVLFDOdramaturgical approach the composer prefers a much more poetic and static atmosphere, with the exception of the episode of Orpheus’ slaughter by the hands of the maenads, a frantic dance based on a Lydian scale, in a rushed tempo:

Fig 9-2ùHUEDQ0DUFX2rfeuridice (Orpheus’ death), bars 308-309.

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There are two separate distinct worlds in this work, that of voice, of chanted word, and that of pure instrumental sound, and of musical meta-language. The choir fulfils an important stage role within the FKRUHRJUDSKLFYLVLRQRIùHUEDQ0DUFX¶VEDOOHWLQWKHQH[WHSLVRGHWKDWRI Eurydice’s death, where she, according to the myth, receives a fatal bite from a snake, the choir members gradually surround her, through wavelike motions of their arms, a gestural symbol for the snake. Orpheus is heartbroken for the irreversible loss of Eurydice and dies, torn apart by the Bacchantes, but she returns from eternity in order to reunite with Orpheus, forever, in the realm of myth. The two lovers, driven by the sounds of the lyre kept in the Sculptor’s hands return to the initial image of the statue of the embraced couple. The human body (choir or dancers) is used in both choreographic DSSURDFKHV DV DQ HQOLYHQHG EDFNJURXQG ,Q ùHUEDQ 0DUFX¶V EDOOHW IRU example, a moment of confrontation takes place between Orpheus and The Sculptor around the choir, placed on the entire surface of the stage. In The Lyre of Orpheus, the same device is used through the dancers, in the episode where, after losing Eurydice, Orpheus desperately searches for her among shadows, even unveiling the head of each dancer, but never finding his beloved. While in Tudor Feraru’s The Lyre of Orpheus one can identify a choreographic vision closer to the epic concreteness of the myth full of V\PEROV DQG JHVWXUDO H[SUHVVLYHQHVV LQ ùHUEDQ 0DUFX¶V Orfeuridice the choreographic concept tends to be more abstract, stylised and lyrically poetic. In both works, as in the choreographies, tradition meets modernity in a finely balanced way revaluing the ancient myth through sound, gesture and symbol.

Acknowledgements Both works have been composed as part of a postdoctoral research grant entitled Avatars of the Orpheus Myth in the History of Music, funded by the Romanian National Council of Scientific Research in Universities. Many thanks to Roxana-Paula Huza for the Romanian to English language translations.

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Bibliography Acsan, Ion. 2UIHX úL (XULGLFH vQ OLWHUDWXUD XQLYHUVDOă (Orpheus and Eurydice in Universal Literature). Bucharest: Albatros, 1981. Hunger, Herbert. Lexikon der griechischen und roemischen Myhologie: mit Hinweisen auf d. Fortwirken antiker Stoffe u. Motive in d. Bildenden Kunst, Literatur u. Musik d. Abendlandes bis zur Gegenwart, 8. Erweiterte Auflage. Wien: Verlag Brueder Hollinek, 1988. Kapp, Reinhard. Chronologisches Verzeichnis der auf Orpheus (und/oder Eurydike) bezogenen oder zu beziehenden Opern, Kantaten, Instrumentalmusiken, literarischen Texte, Theaterstücke, Filme und historiographischen Arbeiten http://www.musikgeschichte.at/kapporpheus. pdf (last accessed June 22, 2011). Urseanu, Tilde, Ion Ianegic and Liviu Ionescu. Istoria baletului (The History of Ballet %XFKDUHVW(GLWXUD0X]LFDOă Feraru, Tudor. Lira lui Orfeu (The Lyre of Orpheus). MediaMusica: Cluj-Napoca, 2011. 0DUFXùHUEDQOrfeuridice, MediaMusica: Cluj-Napoca, 2011.

CHAPTER TEN INSIDE/OUTSIDE: TOWARDS AN EXPANDED NOTION OF MUSICAL GESTURE NGUYӈN THANH THӪY AND STEFAN ÖSTERSJÖ

This paper outlines the search for an artistic method within a three year artistic research project on musical gesture. A conceptual understanding of how musical works can be analysed in terms of “gestural sonorous objects” (Godøy 2006) became the spark for a series of experimental productions. Our discussion starts out with the function of visual gesture in Rolf Riehm’s Toccata Orpheus for solo guitar (Riehm 1990) and the ways in which the bodily action of the performer is treated as an intentional compositional parameter in the piece. Building on the concepts of this piece, we launched a pilot project aimed at the making of an installation for video, electronic sounds and the performance of three choreographed musicians. We are also starting work on an installation and performance work called Inside/Outside. This piece addresses issues of gendered identity in the context of the performance of traditional Vietnamese music and how it is expressed in the bodily movement of the performers. Three musicians are placed in glass boxes as if they were objects in a museum. The choreography of the performance will be built on an analysis of the choreography of gender (Foster 1998) in the performance in traditional Vietnamese music. The point of departure for the international artistic research project Music in Movement1 is an expanded notion of musical gesture. The initial 1

Music in Movement is a three years project headed by the Malmö Academy of Music and funded by the Swedish Research Council. It involves researchers, composers, choreographers and performers from several countries in Europe as well as USA and Vietnam.

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creative spark is the concept of merging the practices of choreography and musical composition in the production of musical works that are not reducible to its sound and performances that intentionally explore bodily gesture as an integrated expressive means. .

Survey of the Research Field Musical gesture, understood not only as an acoustic phenomenon but also as bodily movement, has emerged as an important subject of study in music psychology, musicology and semiotics in the past few decades. Much study has been devoted to the way an audience experiences musical performance indicating that, rather than focussing on the pure audio signal, the senses interact with and amalgamate the visual and sonic information. Building on a multimodal conception of human perception (Berthoz 2000; Hatten 2006) recent research on musical gesture finds gestural images to be integral to the perception of music. The sensorimotor system makes the motor action of producing gesture and the perceptual interpretation of it into interchangeable entities (Hatten 2006, 2). Following Rolf-Inge Godøy and Alexander Refsum Jensenius, we find that musical gesture can be analysed into four categories: x x x x

Sound-producing gesture Sound-accompanying gesture Communicative gesture Sound-facilitating gesture

In musical performance, these visual gesture-types and the sounding result of the actions create compound units that Godøy calls gestural-sonorous objects (Godøy 2006). With reference to the typology and morphology of sound-objects by Pierre Schaeffer (Schaeffer 1966), Godøy suggests a paradoxical parallel between this seminal work of the analysis of sound objects and the nature of these multi-dimensional perceptual entities. However, the theory and terminology for these new approaches to musical gesture is still in progress. More practice-based research into the field is needed in order to work out the theoretical framework in further detail.

Purpose and Aims In a study on the German composer Rolf Riehm’s Toccata Orpheus (1990) for guitar solo, Stefan Östersjö identifies an original approach to musical composition. The bodily action of the performer is treated as an

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intentional compositional parameter in a way that makes an unusual kind of theatricality of the performance emerge as a result of the composed structure. In his analysis, Östersjö argues that the expressive units in the piece cannot be analysed merely as sonic events but that they are better understood as gestural-sonorous objects (Östersjö 2008). With regard to the artistic quest of further exploring this expanded notion of musical composition and the intention to provide new knowledge that will contribute also to the research into musical gesture, two key objectives for “Music in Movement” were identified: x x

To develop artistic strategies that allow musical composition and choreography to amalgamate and give rise to novel modes of expression. To contribute to the development of terminology and theory in the study of musical gesture.

Pilot project: Toccata Orpheus In spring of this year, 2013, we were working on a pilot project in which the main ambition was to test and develop artistic methodology. The choreographer Marie Fahlin has been working with Stefan Östersjö and NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy in sessions where the gesture components of Riehm’s Toccata Orpheus were intended to be the point of departure. Marie wanted to move beyond interpretations of the gestural-sonorous objects in the piece, experimenting with performing the movements without the instrument and also of applying the same movements to performance of this guitar piece on the ÿjQ WUDQK. Both of these approaches suggested fruitful methods for further work. A series of reflections emerged from the performances without instrument: first, it is obvious that much of the strain that characterises much of the relation between the performers’ body and the instrument in this piece is exchanged with a certain lightness, ease and lack of distinction in the movements when they are performed without the instrument. Obviously, the gestures themselves create a distinct sense of tension and release. Second, Stefan observed difficulties in performing the piece without receiving a sounding result. It appeared necessary to him to focus on an inner image of the sounding result to perform the gestures that make up the composition. In the next phase, Stefan taught sequences of the piece to Thӫy, without using the score, but instead attempting to transform the visual gesture over to performance on the ÿjQ WUDQK. We then performed the

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material as a duo choreography, also without instruments. The next step was to make improvised variations on these gestural materials, working by repetition, expansion and transformation. In this stage we found new gestural-sonorous objects emerging through the improvisations: material that we intend to develop further in the making of an installation on Toccata Orpheus. This piece will consist of choreographies, performed with and without instruments that can be understood as interpretations of the original guitar piece. But these interpretations will also generate videos and a soundscape generated by the Austrian composer Gerhard Eckel using quantitative data from motion capture of Östersjö’s performance of the piece. The installation will take place in an old nuclear reactor in Stockholm in September 2013. Through the expansion and modification of the gestural-sonorous objects found in Toccata Orpheus, we hope to develop general strategies for composing new works along the same lines. The next project we are moving into is an installation/performance conceived by NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy. It is a piece that deals specifically with the expression of gender in the performance of traditional Vietnamese music.

A Gender Perspective on Traditional Vietnamese Music With the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU) and its campaign for equality expressed in the so called “three criteria campaign” the country has reached a high level of emancipation for women. There is a certain complexity in the way gender has been constructed in Vietnam, with an overlap between socialist and Confucian models (Schuler et al. 2006, 385). The campaign encouraged women to “study actively, work creatively, raise children well and build happy families.” While these goals are all related to the social development intended by socialism, are women at the same time expected to conform to the gender norms of Confucian worldviews? They should keep quiet, do all the housework and make individual sacrifices for the sake of family harmony. Obviously, the overlap of these goals does put strong pressure on women in the country (Schuler et al. 2006, 386). Can musical practices reflect the social organisation in a society? Would it be possible to trace these multiple layers of social norms also in the performance of traditional music? The role that gender plays in the way musical practice is organised has been observed by music ethnologists and anthropologists looking at many different societies (George 1993, Koskoff 1989, Williams 1998). It is clear that there is no

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way to separate musical practice from society in which it is situated and vice versa: The questions raised have to do with the role music-making plays in producing or subverting gender-based hierarchies of prestige and authority: Does music support or threaten predominant ideas about gender? How does it shape the way in which women and men experience sexual hierarchy? Can music-making itself be a form of sexual politics? (George 1993, 2)

It is beyond doubt that there are societal implications to be found in the gender norms of the performance of Vietnamese music. Gender is a socially defined behaviour: something that we do. Research in sociology has indicated that the interaction between the biology of our sex and the psychological, social and cultural processes behind how we “do gender” is complex. However, it remains essential to identify the parameters lying behind this construction, by doing so our understanding can move to more structural levels in society: Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micro political activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine “natures.” When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas (West and Zimmerman 1987, 126).

Following Judith Butler, “doing gender” has often been discussed in terms of performance. This performance of gender builds very much on the repetition, most often of verbal acts, that are “naturalised” in the body (Butler 1990, XV). In an attempt to move from the verbal domain to the bodily aspects of this embodied way of “doing” gender, Susan Leigh Foster (1998) suggests that a better way of thinking of these socially defined behaviours, distinct from our biological nature, is by reference to dance. Moving to a more overarching level, rather than merely discussing the performance of gender, she suggest that an understanding of the choreography of gender would become an analytical concept that allows a wider perspective on how we construct identities in society: Choreography, the tradition of codes and conventions through which meaning is constructed in dance, offers a social and historical analytic framework for the study of gender, whereas performance concentrates on the individual execution of such codes. Choreography resonates with

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Chapter Ten cultural values concerning bodily, individual, and social identities, whereas performance focuses on the skill necessary to represent those identities. Choreography presents a structuring of deep and enduring cultural values that replicates similar sets of values elaborated in other cultural practices, whereas performances emphasise the idiosyncratic interpretation of those values. Like performativity, choreography consists of sets of norms and conventions; yet unlike performativity, or at least its general usage thus far, choreography encompasses corporeal as well as verbal articulateness. Choreography therefore serves as a useful intervention into discussions of materiality and body by focussing on the unspoken, on the bodily gestures and movement that, along with speech, construct gendered identity (Foster 1998, 5).

Following Foster, we believe that this overarching perspective also allows for a better understanding of the social relations and the cultural significance of traditional Vietnamese music today. By way of this analysis of the choreography of gender in the performance of traditional music, we can intentionally challenge the ways in which traditional Vietnamese music has supported societal norms. Hence, experimental musical practice becomes a vehicle for propositions of social change.

Inside the Choreography of Gender Less than a century ago, only men played traditional instruments in Vietnam. This always took place in private settings. Today, most of the traditional music is played by women in concert hall settings and TV shows, always in traditional dresses and with a body language that is choreographed to constitute pleasant entertainment for men. And this goes not only for the entertainment produced in the media. This is NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy’s account of her involvement in the making of a promotional DVD with traditional music on initiative from the Head of the Department at the Vietnam National Academy of Music: In it, they made me pose for a performance of a three minute piece, and the recording of it brought me to two different provinces with scenic landscapes that made me suffer a lot, for instance when performing in a stream balancing dangerously on a float. It should be noted that at this time I did not know how to swim. Also, on the float I was bitten by insects that, together with my fear of falling into water, made this video recording session a truly horrific experience despite the pastoral appearance it may have in the photo. (See Fig. 10-1).

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Fig. 10-1: A photo from the recording session on the float taken from Thӫy’s personal account 2012.

Inside/Outside is an installation and performance work. Three musicians are placed in glass boxes as if they were objects in a museum. All the performers are young beautiful women in traditional costume, with beautiful and pleasant body language: or are they? In the glass boxes, the three performers perform traditional music but, just as the music at times is distorted, also the gesture of the performance at times moves outside the domain of the pleasant. The artistic method is diverse. In the initial stage we collected a series of performances of traditional music in TV-shows from Vietnam. In the qualitative analysis of these videos we looked at the gesture types and specifically also at the expression of gendered stereotypes in the action of the performers. These characteristic gesture types were then further developed in workshops with Marie Fahlin, Matt Wright and The Six Tones. By taking pieces of traditional music as material in these deconstructive processes, new music emerged that is intentionally decomposed by the new choreography. The duality expressed in the title of the piece is also a fundamental part of the music. The traditional music is at times reversed into noisy electronic sound in the electronic soundscape, performed in real time by the British laptop performer Matt Wright with material from the live performance as its source.

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In May 2012 the first workshop took place in Hanoi. In it we collected and analysed recordings of performances of traditional Vietnamese music. Based on material from this analysis, two etudes for Inside/Outside were developed and premiered in the Kim Ngân temple in the old town in Hanoi. The further analysis of the video material became the grounds on which the final choreography and compositional work was worked out in August and October of the same year. The first version of the piece was performed at the Kim Mã Theatre in Hanoi in November 2012.2 Inside/Outside prompts the questions: What is the significance of gender in traditional music performance? What is really the inside and what is the outside in this specific context? In an artistic form, this installation work wishes to address these fundamental issues aiming towards a discussion that goes beyond the field of experimental music and art.

Summary and Future Work Composing with gestural-sonorous objects challenges our conception of what music is as well as the conventions for musical notation and indeed also the models for music analysis. Artistic methods for the creation of choreographed musical work need to be further developed. The initial work in the present research project provides some possible starting points for artistic research in this field. An analysis of the choreographies of gender expressed in musical performance contributes to a critical societal perspective. It is our hope that the artistic work on Inside/Outside will be a way to create and conceptualize musical performance in a manner that situates our practices in current critical discourses in society.

Bibliography Berthoz, Alain. The Brain’s Sense of Movement. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Brendel, Alfred. Musical Thoughts & Afterthoughts. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Davidson, Jane, W. “Visual Perception of Performance Manner in the Movements of Solo Musicians.” Psychology of Music, 21, (1993): 103-13. 2

Video from the premiere can be found at www.youtube.com/ostersjo

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Foster, Susan Leigh. “Choreographies of Gender.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1998): 1-33. George, Kenneth M. “Music-Making, Ritual, and Gender in a Southeast Asian Hill Society” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 37, No. 1, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, (1993): 1-27. Godøy, Rolf Inge. “Gestural-Sonorous Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer’s Conceptual Apparatus. Organised sound, 11(2), (2006): 149-57. Godøy, Rolf Inge and Marc Lehman, eds. Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement and Meaning. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gritten, Anthony and Elaine King, eds. Music and Gesture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Hatten, Robert, S. “A Theory of Musical Gesture and its Application to Beethoven and Schubert.” In Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Jensenius, Alexander Refsum. Action-Sound: Developing Methods and Tools to Study Music-Related Body Movement, University of Oslo, Oslo, 2007. Koskoff, Ellen. ed., Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Östersjö, Stefan, SHUT UP ‘N’ PLAY! Negotiating the Musical Work. Lund University, Malmö, 2008. Riehm, Rolf. Toccata Orpheus, Munich: Ricordi, 1990. Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Schuler, Sidney Ruth, Hoang tu Anh, Vu Song Ha, Tran Hung Minh, Bui Thi Thanh Mai, Pham vu Thien. “Constructions of Gender in Vietnam: In Pursuit of the ‘Three Criteria.’” Culture, Health & Sexuality, Vol. 8, No. 5, 383-94, Taylor and Francis, Ltd, London 2006. West, Candace and Don H. Zimmermann. “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2, 125-51, Sage Publications, London, 1987. Williams, Sean. “Constructing Gender in Sundanese Music.” Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 30, 74-84, International Council for Traditional Music, 1998.

CHAPTER ELEVEN TWO BEE KELVIN THOMSON

Two Bee is a film consisting of an edited collage of audio-visual media selected from recordings of a number of live performances of my “bee works” composed between 2007 and 2012.1 It was shown at the Composer, Choreographer and Performer Collaborative Conference of Contemporary Music and Dance/Movement at Senate House, University of London in April 2012 as part of my presentation and was preceded by a short explanatory introduction. This chapter is an expansion of the introduction giving more background and commentary about the works – how and why they came about, and their connections. I will begin with a brief outline of my artistic and aesthetic research concerns; this will be followed by a commentary on the works in chronological order of composition with compositional and collaboration notes. My compositional approach is underscored by a pluralistic aesthetic and artistic position – embodied in the title of my research project: Composition: hybridity, fusion and stratification. My compositional process involves layering and combining a range of intra-musical styles with stimuli drawn from a range of extra-musical sources. I explore ways to create works that have a coherent organic unity that goes beyond the constituent parts. I am interested in deconstructing and searching for new meanings in what is omitted rather than what is included — finding, animating and generating musical ideas from a range of “frozen” sources. I am also interested in recycling my existing works for new settings and collaborating with performers and other practitioners in order to discover new inherent meanings in my existing works. The Gestalt aspect of collaboration often tends to take one along new creative paths, producing 1

It was not possible to supply a DVD of Two Bee as part of this publication. A copy of this film may be obtained by emailing a request to [email protected].

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results that are larger than the sum of their parts. My bee works are a testament to this and they were initiated in 2007 after reading Sylvia Plath’s poem The Arrival of the Bee Box (1965). The setting of words to music is a stratifying activity involving the layering of words and music, but it is also the coming together of bi-authorial meanings and intentions. I was immediately captivated by her poetic account of someone receiving a box of bees through a compelling series of metaphoric images. She describes the box as: “the coffin of a midget or a square baby” and “dangerous.” She refers to the sound of the bees as “the unintelligible syllables... like a Roman mob.” She thinks that she has “ordered a box of maniacs” and vacillates between her various positions as their dissatisfied owner “they can die” or as benevolent “sweet God” and “setting them free.” The seven-verse poem ends with a single, separate line “The box is only temporary”. I read this as a possible motto for pluralism – that even one’s own creations “boxed” by scores and recordings are temporary and can be subject to revision and re-thinking. But I was curious about the poem’s meaning. Who is the “I” speaking and why bees? Some investigation confirmed that the narrator was Plath herself. Her father Otto was a bee specialist2 and Plath and poet-husband Ted Hughes had started keeping bees in Devon during an attempt to reconcile their troubled marriage. She had written the bee poems a year before committing suicide. Plath scholar Christina Britzolakis (2006) has suggested that the box in the poem represents the constraints to Plath’s own creativity vis-j-vis her position as a female in a male dominated society, her relationship with the successful Hughes and her lifelong bouts of depression. Britzolakis comments here helped to channel my creative direction: In the 1962 sequence known as the Bee Poems, a surrealist logic of displacement and condensation inserts the dynamics of the oedipal family into a social and historical continuum...the beehive...is a classical trope of the hierarchically ordered, industrious collectivity. It is also a rich source of paradox and contradiction. It is a matriarchal society of female producers. It is also... an authoritarian society. The hive allows the poet to assume multiple and constantly changing points of identification.3

I set the poem as a dramatic monologue for solo-unaccompanied soprano voice, exploiting the maximum pitch range and the expressive 2

Plath, Otto Emil. 1934. Bumblebees and their Ways. The Macmillan Company. Britzolakis, Christina. “Ariel and other poems.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2006): 119-120. 3

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potential as far as possible. In 2009 I was disappointed to receive an email from Faber publishers informing me that they are currently “unable to grant any musical setting rights in Plath’s work by request of the Plath foundation.” This is still the case despite earlier settings.4 John Cage had faced a similar dilemma in 1969. Merce Cunningham had choreographed a dance to the rhythms of Satie’s Socrate (1919).5 Cage had produced a two piano arrangement, which Satie’s publishers did not approve. Cage then “rewrote” his arrangement applying new pitches to Satie’s rhythms and retitled his “new” composition Cheap Imitation.6 Cunningham responded by calling his dance Second Hand. Cage’s strategy and Plath’s final line “The box is only temporary” led me to explore alternative routes to express my fascination with Path’s poem, resulting in the works shown in Two Bee. Some of these works involved collaboration and interactions with performers trained variously in Laban, Lecoq and Bharatanatyam disciplines; a theatre director inspired by Butoh dance and the physical theatre techniques of Jerzy Grotowski; and a gestural body-percussionist. The following section shows the creative recycling process, compositional “genetic” connections and creatively motivating circumstances.

The Works: Chronological Commentary 2007 The Arrival of the Bee Box (6:00) for solo-unaccompanied soprano voice. 2009 * 7 Dispun (10:00) an electronic soundscape for A Confused Horror, a short physical theatre piece produced in collaboration with theatre director Vivek Narayan. This was a response to the first chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1995) which contains a rather graphic eye-witness account of an eighteenth century execution. Vivek “was interested in exploring the relationship between ambient, arrhythmic music and movement.”8 I created an ambient soundscape consisting of a low string 4

“Edge” in Oliver Knussen’s Symphony no. 2 (1970-1971); Ned Rorem’s Ariel: 5 Poems of Sylvia Plath, for soprano, clarinet and piano; Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Lament for a Hanging Man (1984) for soprano and ensemble; Shulamit Ran’s Apprehensions (1978-1979) for voice, clarinet and piano. 5 Erik Satie, Socrate, Paris: Edition de la Sirene, (1919). 6 John Cage, Cheap Imitation, Henmar Press, 1970. 7 * Compositions that involved interaction with movement practitioners. 8 Vivek Narayan, “Within a Confused Horror: Personal notes on process and product,” Master’s Essay, Royal Holloway University of London, (2009): 1.

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cluster chord, consisting initially of the first five semitones of a chromatic scale, gradually increasing throughout the piece until all twelve semitones are used. The slow hypnotic effect is interrupted each minute by a strong percussive chord with warning cues on mark trees and drums. A haunting duduk sample appears occasionally.9 The static nature of the music gave Vivek and the dancers an opportunity to experiment with the grotesque statuesque movements found in Butoh with the exposed reality of Grotowski’s approach. Dispun was used in later works discussed below. 2010 Song’s Eternity (6:30) for alto voice and piano was my first response to the copyright constraint. I replaced Plath’s words with John Clare’s “Song’s Eternity” and Emily Dickinson’s “Fame is a Bee.”10 2011 Song’s Eternity (7:30) for oboe and piano was my second attempt – discarding words and allowing the narrative trajectory of Plath’s poem to be emoted instrumentally. This was produced in collaboration with oboist Rachel Broadbent and pianist Kevin Vockerodt. Fragments of this piece were used later in Two Bee. 2011 * The Arrival of the Beat Box (10:00) for soprano voice and speaking bodypercussionist was composed for the Second Athens Composer/Performer conference – an opportunity for composers and performers to work together to produce new works.11 I proposed initially to collaborate with a soprano to produce a new piece retaining the drama of The Arrival of the Bee Box using vocal sounds only and no words and was assigned to collaborate with soprano Danae Eleni and body-percussionist Enrico Bertelli – hence the title The Arrival of the Beat Box. After introductory emails and Skype conferences, we exchanged scores and recordings. I sent 9 OMO. A term, derived from the Turkish düdük, used for a family of double-reed instruments of ancient Armenian origin, which became popular in the Caucasus, Middle East, and Central Asia. The duduk is now often used in popular film soundtracks. 10 John Clare (1793-1864). Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Clare celebrates the enduring power of song, while Dickinson wryly comments on the positive and negative qualities of fame. These choices seemed apt in relation to the potential enduring power of music and my perception of the Plath foundation’s short-sighted limitation of creative responses to her and her work. 11 http://athensconference.blog.com/

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recordings of The Arrival of the Bee Box and Song’s Eternity, the Britzolakis article (amongst others) and my initial thoughts about the piece: I have always thought of the poem as a one-act play involving two protagonists: the narrator and the bees. The dramatic tension/interest is their interaction. In reworking as The Arrival of the Beat Box, the protagonists become the soprano and the arrival of a box of beats (the percussionist). I welcomed creative input. Danae sent musical examples of the portrayal of insanity by sopranos12 and mentioned that she could sing in Greek and provide Greek and IPA transliteration. Enrico sent some scores and performances of his speaking body-percussion work. 13 He preferred controlled improvisation parameters rather than a set score and was prepared to perform spoken text and movement gestures. His first language is Italian. The next stage was to find solutions to the following problems: What new structural design and rationale could be used to effectively integrate the existing composition into the new work? How could the lyrics of the original composition be transformed? What role would the percussionist play? What words would he use? What rhythms would he play? What sort of controlled improvisation parameters?

Structure I structured the piece as a musical dialogue in fourteen short sections (labelled A–N) that focus alternately on each performer: Section A – Percussionist, Section B –Soprano and so on. The percussionist follows the structure of the seven-section nomos, an ancient Greek symposium song form.14 (1) eparcha, statement of rules; (2) metarcha, basic tuning and rhythm to be employed; (3) katatropa, first development; (4) metakatatropa, second development; (5) omphalos, central point; (6) sphragis, conclusion in which poet refers to himself; (7) epilogus, coda.

12 For example Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti “Il dolce suono,” “Spargi d’amaro pianto.” For a more extended list see Barker, Paul. Composing for Voice. London: Routledge, (2004): 102. 13 Vingko Globokar, Toucher (Peters, 1968); Francois Sarhan, Home Work (2011). 14 Mathiesen, Thomas. “Ancient Greek Music.” The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2009, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e260

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Text Transformation The soprano follows the narrative trajectory of Plath’s poem, using sounds derived from Plath’s original words and pitches from my first setting. The transformations were achieved by applying methods drawn from music technology sampling techniques: vv.1 and 6 – reversed lyrics (Table 11-1); vv. 2 and 5 – soprano sings vowels while the percussionist simultaneously beatboxes consonants (Table 11-2); vv. 3 and 4 – Greek translation. The soprano was also involved in interacting with the percussionist during the nomos sections and used a table of 12 emotions (Table 11-5) as part of her controlled improvisation parameters. The emotions were derived from expression markings in my original Plath setting. Section B (Plath verse 1) I ordered this, clean wood box Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift. I would say it was the coffin of a midget Or a square baby Were there not such a din in it.

Soprano sings words backwards I deredro siht, naelc doow xob erauqS sa a riahc dna tsomla oot yvaeh ot tfil. I dluow yas ti saw eht niffoc fo a tegdim rO a erauqs ybab ereW ereht ton hcus a nid ni ti.

Table 11-1: Applying a Human Version of Music Technology “Reverse Sampling” Technique.

Section D (Plath verse 2)

Soprano intones extracted vowels

The box is locked, it is dangerous. I have to live with it overnight And I can't keep away from it. There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there. There is only a little grid, no exit.

/‫ܥ ܼ ܥ ܫ‬, ܼ ܼ e-eԥ-‫ܮ‬/ /‫ܼܤ‬ ‫ܼܼܼݛ‬Rԥ‫ܼܤ‬  ‫ܤܼܤ‬L‫ܤܣ‬L‫ܤܣ‬L ‫ܣ‬H‫ܣ‬H‫ܼܥ‬ /‫ ܣ ܭ‬o ܼ o o ‫ܤܼܤ‬L‫ܥ‬ ܼܼ‫ܭ‬ /‫ ܼ ܭ‬o i ‫ ܼ ܣ‬ԥ ܼ o ‫ܼ ܭ‬/

Percussionist beatboxes extracted consonants Th-b-x s-l-ckd-t-s d-dngrs. h-v-t l-v-w-t-v r-n-t n-d-c k-p-w-f-r m-m-t. Th-n-w nd-s-c-nt-s whts-n-th-r. Th-r-s n-l-t-l-gr n-ks-t.

Table 11-2: Applying “Beatboxing” Technique.

Percussionist’s Words, Rhythms and Gestures In Apian Imagery and the Critique of Poetic Sweetness in Plato’s Republic, the philologist Rana Saadi Liebert “examines the apian imagery

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that runs through Plato’s Republic in order to show how Socrates exploits traditional bee-related metaphors to strengthen his case against poetry.”15 Socrates’ proposition of the contradictory nature of the poet as prolific creator or lazy parasitic drone resonated with Plath’s own internal creative doubts as suggested by Britzolakis. This, along with Satie’s Socrate (containing Socratic quotes), provided a rationale for text selection for the nomos sections and provided a neat historical continuum for the creative fascination with the bee. I selected texts from Socrates, Pindar and Timotheus (reputedly the master of the nomos). One of these texts (Table 11-3) suggested the use of eleven-beat rhythms. I devised a rhythm grid (Table 11-4), which Enrico used to create his rhythmic patterns. Enrico also devised a series of gestures (Table 11-6) that became quite a focal point of the piece. It is easy not to notice the movements that musicians make when performing, particularly percussionists. Performing these movements silently has quite an impact and was highlighted in Section M when the soprano and percussionist performed the movements together as a silent mime. Section K (Nomos part 6) Sphragis: conclusion in which poet refers to himself TIMOTHEUS: “ tis the debauchers of the ancient music, them I keep off, the tune torturers who shriek as long, and shrill as loud, as any common crier, and now Timotheus opens the Muse’s chambered treasury of many hymns and gives kithara playing new life with eleven-stroke metres and rhythms.”

Italian Translation by Enrico Bertelli TIMOTEO: “ sono la corruzione della musica antica, i tengo lontani, I torturatori della melodia che gridano così a lungo, stridono così forte, come ogni comune urlatore. ed ora Timoteo apre il tesoro remoto dei molti inni delle Musee dona nuova vita al suono della kithara con metri e ritmi dagli undici colpi.”

Table 11-3.

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Rana Saadi Liepert, “Apian Imagery and the Critique of Poetic Sweetness in Plato’s Republic,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 140, no.1 (2010): 97-115.

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2+2+7 2+7+2 3+3+5 3+5+3 5+3+3 7+2+2

Rhythm Grid of 11 Subdivisions of 11 Beats 2+2+5+2 2+2+3+2+2 2+5+2+2 2+3+3+3 3+2+2+2

Table 11-4. Calmly Fearfully Vindictively

Table of 12 Emotions Jokingly Lovingly Lullaby Curiously Frantically Deluded

Annoyed Ominously Finally accepting

Table 11-5. List of 12 Gestures 1. Copyright Gesture (left hand – stop-sign, right hand – “Royal” wave) 2. Dumbbell (forearm vertical lift, palm down) Percussion instruments: 3. Bells (index, middle finger) 4. Guiro (scrape to right) 5. Finger Cymbals (two hands, ‘tea-party’ little fingers) 6. Drum-Kit 7. Tuning Fork

Techniques: 8. Percussion Rolls 9. Choked Cymbal 10. Elbow Glissando (left elbow on drum, right hand plays on head) Other instruments: 11. “Air” Guitar 12. Piano sideways, (two octave ascending scale ending with ‘chucking in the bin’ motion)

Table 11-6.

I like to think that The Arrival of the Beat Box took the shape of Britzolakis’ comments quoted above. It follows a surrealistic logic of displacement and condensation – the latter being a psychological term for the fusion of two or more images, ideas, or symbolic meanings into a single composite or new image, as a primary process in unconscious thought exemplified in dreams. The performers participate in an historical continuum, linked by bee metaphors. Furthermore the performance

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articulates multiple and constantly changing points of identification. It is almost as if Sylvia Plath had participated as a silent collaborator. 2010-11 * An Arrangement of Shoes (54:00) electronic incidental music and sound design for Theatre Counteract’s Bangalore production of Abhishek Majumbdar’s one-woman play. “Virtual” collaboration took place during many Skype conferences with director Vivek Narayan (now resident in Bangalore). The brief was to create non-culturally specific music for this production. Theatre Counteract is part of a developing trend of South Indian theatre and aims to produce provocative productions that push boundaries of expectation. I worked with a substantial amount of audio source material drawn from Indian film music, popular songs and traditional ragas. I produced music in my usual way according to my reading of the play and proceeded to blend and mix sounds according to my taste, in collaboration with Vivek. The score included a re-worked version of Dispun (2009). While the drone remained unchanged, the percussion cue instrumentation was replaced with recognisable Indian percussion instruments. Actress/dancer Anitha Santhanam wrote to me to explain her responses to the music: The techniques that I used come from two traditions - one is my training in Lecoq based theatre (at LISPA) and the second is over 20 years of experience as an Indian dancer and my training in choreography as well. The text was treated as a play text, a base, from which we could devise. After a few readings, we looked at an entirely physical approach to creating character, beginning with the different walks. I experimented with many walks for a character - till something clicked internally. I also looked at how each character approached the playing space... these strategies are based on Lecoq work. For the choreography of the nightmare sequence I used very minimal movement, entirely sitting. A Muslim girl in a small town in India does not have great freedom of movement. The music came in towards the final stages of the rehearsal process. And it was an invisible voice in the space. To me a very strong presence. It darkened some characters and lightened the others. The music also suggested the outer world of the play. The opening sounds, temple/ mosque. And since the music took the influences of cultural film songs but the treatment was different, it suggested a universe where these things exist but now being examined in another time, our time where the Western and Eastern aesthetic are in collusion. For me it was very interesting that the music did not overwhelm the actor but was a base, a foundation, giving a solid reality to the world of the play. And it's quite incredible that this was achieved long distance. Perhaps that has a lot to do with the long Skype meetings between you

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Chapter Eleven and Vivek and the understanding you have between you. I think what was different about this collaboration is that all of us had a fine sense of music because there was a sense of musicality to everything: the characters, the walks, the timing of each act, the repetitions etc.

2012 * Bee (10:00) for soprano, bodyist and electronic soundscape (Dispun) is an adapted version of The Arrival of the Beat Box (2011) produced in collaboration with Danae Eleni and choreographer Marilyn Wyers and was motivated by the sudden unavailability of a body-percussionist for a scheduled concert in Glasgow. The fourteen section structure (A–N) of alternating nomos and Plath poem was maintained, but the challenge here was to find a way to articulate the nomos sections through movement alone. Dispun became the foundation to the piece providing both a stimulus for Marilyn’s choreography and a backdrop to Danae’s unchanged vocal sections. I also added a recording of Sylvia Plath reading “You do not do, you do not do” from the first line of her poem “Daddy” (1962). This line was subjected to a number of technological transformations and also provided some rhythmic interest. The following extracts from Marilyn’s choreographic notes outline her movement strategy: I had an idea to use a Laban approach with regard to how I might structure the movement in the various sections. For example: spoken text would remain spoken; beatbox would be based on Laban’s rhythmic effort actions such as dab, slash, glide, wring, float, thrust, press, flick; body percussion would be based on Laban’s perceptions of pathways in space/trace forms using his idea of the kinaesphere and geometric shapes such as the cube/box; combined spoken text and body percussion would become text and body movement simultaneously. My idea for this would be to do some contact improvisation; gestures would become expressive body gestures used to underscore spoken text based on effort actions. Using effort actions to convey character. Section A, Statement of Rules: (Effort Actions) Float–Thrust; Glide–Slash; Dab–Press; Flick–Wring. Speaking Bodyist: Try saying phrases in different efforts. For example from the moment you enter, give a “floating” performance. The distance to the soprano may be quite a long one. You will not know exactly because you will not have a concentrated, direct focus. Your pathway will be circuitously flexible and sustained, your focus indirect and glancing. You may use a chair, for example “floating” over, under, round or on it breathing comfortably and only speaking when ready within your movements and movement pathways. Alternatively, try saying the same phrase using a thrusting effort. From the moment you enter you are ready to conduct a thrusting conversation/exchange of views. In other words you are in charge and conscious of time. Your actions are strong, sudden and direct and this is

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clearly demonstrated in movements and the way you move authoritatively around the space. In this section you might choose to explore one effort action throughout or different ones for each phrase. Different ones might work better as this could provide a ‘statement of rules’ providing insight into characters feelings. Section B: Speaking Bodyist can underscore the moods of the narrative trajectory of the soprano referring to effort actions and the table of 12 emotions (Table 11-5), for example dabbing calmly or gliding ominously. Section C: Speaking Bodyist to accompany speaking with improvised rhythmic stepping of fragments of the 11/4 grooves using a 9-point dance within the cube/box as directions in space. Placing emphasis/weight on the first beat of each grouping e.g. 3+5+3 = 123/12345/123. Perhaps just use one grouping to clarify movement aspect? Section D: Improvise the 9-point dance in cube spatial orientation placing emphasis/weight on different beats simultaneously with the soprano. This is where we could perhaps introduce some contact improvisation especially with regard to thinking about giving and taking weight? Maybe in the sections marked ‘fearfully’, ‘lullaby’, “curiously”? There are also a lot of dynamic shifts in this section. Sections E, G, I, K: Developing ideas from Section C. Section F: Developing ideas from Section B. With the addition of specific gestures to signify guiro, bell and tongue clicks. Section H: Developing and amalgamating effort/action 12 emotions ideas from sections B and the 9-point dance ideas from section C. Section J: Speaking Bodyist to ad-lib vocal accompaniment to the soprano. Perhaps using stillness in the body as a contrast or adding fragments of 11/4 rhythmic grooves when feeling is appropriate… drawn from the list of 12 gestures (Table 11-6) and 8 effort actions.

2012 * Two Bee (10:00) is an edited collage of audio recordings and selected video footage drawn from performances of the above works, produced in collaboration with film-editor and sound engineer Nick Pugh. Two Bee was initially intended to be a silent film of the Glasgow concert of Bee, accompanied by the Bee soundscape and fragments of Song’s Eternity performed by live oboe and piano, but oboist Rachel was unable to perform due to breaking a tooth the week before the conference. The film segments were arranged according to the fourteen-section nomos/Plath structure (Table 11-7). The Dispun drone acted as a foundation throughout as a basis on which to layer fragments from all bee works to date. While the Plath estate’s copyright constraint led to the generation of these works, they could not have been realised without the input of my collaborating partners who in each case took me along new creative paths, offering opportunities to re-think my pre-existing work. Each piece has reminded me of how important it is to be creatively open to finding

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solutions to unexpected problems. Plath’s last line seems an appropriate concluding thought: “The box is only temporary.”

Two Bee Supplementary Information and Credits Two Bee is a short ten-minute film made for and presented at the Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body conference, 19th April 2012. The film was made on the 16th/17th April 2012, a few days prior to the conference, entirely for research purposes, to be shown at the conference and not intended for nor received any form of financial reward in any way. It comprises an edited selection of “archival” recordings of performances of the composer’s work.

E F G

nomos/Plath Structure nomos 1 Plath 1 nomos 2 Plath 2 nomos 3 Plath 3 nomos 4

H I J K

Plath 4 nomos 5 Plath 5 nomos 6

L M N

Plath 6 nomos 7 Plath 7

Section A B C/D

Source

Time

Dispun (continues throughout) The Arrival of the Bee Box An Arrangement of Shoes/ Song’s Eternity (superimposed) The Arrival of the Beat Box The Arrival of the Beat Box The Arrival of the Beat Box Bee, Song’s Eternity (superimposed) Bee An Arrangement of Shoes The Arrival of the Beat Box Bee Song’s Eternity Bee The Arrival of the Beat Box Bee The Arrival of the Bee Box

0:00 0:28 1:31 2:54 3:24 4:16 4:42 5:11 5:43 6:19 7:20 7:50 8:49 9:10

Table 11-7.

The film was made quickly following the unfortunate indisposition of a performer scheduled to perform one of the composer’s works at the conference. There was therefore no time for polite notification to inform relevant parties of the film production/showing. The composer covered the

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cost of the film production. The composer has not received financial benefit of any kind from the performances that make up the film or from the film itself. The composer added an additional soundscape to some of the existing performances for the making of this film and the composer considers that performers’ moral rights have been respected in all cases. All necessary credits, where information is available, are made at appropriate points during the film.

Performance Details The Arrival of the Bee Box Setting of Sylvia Plath’s poem for solo unaccompanied soprano voice Soprano: Sarah Leonard Audio recording of composition workshop held on 30th October 2007 at Royal Holloway, University of London Song’s Eternity Oboe: Rachel Broadbent Piano: Kevin Vockerodt Audio recording of premiere on the 11th March, 2011 at the Picture Gallery, Royal Holloway, University of London An Arrangement of Shoes Author: Abhishek Majumbdar Director: Vivek Narayan Actress/dancer: Anitha Sanathanam First performance on the 15th November 2011 at Ranga Shankara, JP Nagar, Bangalore, India The Arrival of the Beat Box Soprano: Danae Eleni Speaking Body-Percussionist: Enrico Bertelli Film made on the 18th November 2011 at The Centre for Creative Collaboration, London Bee Soprano: Danae Eleni Bodyist: Marilyn Wyers Film made by Deryck Beaumont of the premiere on the 2nd March 2012 at the Arches, Glasgow

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All music composed by Kelvin Thomson. Film and audio editing, mastering and production by Nick Pugh on the 16th and 17th April 2012.

Bibliography Barker, Paul. Composing for Voice. London: Routledge, 2004. Britzolakis, Christina. “Ariel and other poems.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, Cambridge: CUP, (2006): 119-120. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1995. Liepert, Rana Saadi. “Apian Imagery and the Critique of Poetic Sweetness in Plato’s Republic.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 140, no.1 (2010): 97–115.

CHAPTER TWELVE CAN YOU SEE ME? THE EFFECTS OF VISUAL CONTACT ON MUSICIANS’ MOVEMENTS IN PERFORMANCE ROBERT FULFORD AND JANE GINSBORG

Musicians’ movements depend on auditory feedback, visual feedback and on the musical score itself. The present study explored the use of visual feedback by examining the movement and looking behaviour of performing musicians. Four violinists were observed playing together as duos in conditions in which one or both players faced away from their partner. Being able to see a co-performer did not affect movement behaviour unless there was the possibility of eye contact, when both movement and looking behaviour increased. The results suggest that while players move expressively when they perform they also modify their movements to communicate with their co-performer. This chapter reports part of an observational study designed to help understand the salience of visual information reported by musicians with hearing impairments.1

1 Robert Fulford, Jane Ginsborg and Juliet Goldbart (2012). Functions and uses of auditory and visual feedback: Exploring the possible effects of a hearing impairment on music performance. Reported in full in the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition and 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 335-343. Retrieved from http://icmpc escom2012.web.auth.gr/sites/default/files/papers/335_Proc.pdf

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Movement and Gesture in Music Gesture exists in a wider context of non-verbal communication; we illustrate size, position and shape using actions of the fingers, hands, arms, body and face. Adam Kendon defines gesture as: Those actions or those aspects of another’s actions that, having these features (of manifest deliberate expressiveness), tend to be directly perceived as being under the guidance of the observed person’s voluntary control and being done for the purpose of expression rather than in the service of some practical aim (Kendon 2004, 15).

However, Kendon’s definition does not acknowledge that, in music, movements also serve practical purposes. Visual information is relied upon by all musicians to maintain good temporal synchrony and stylistic cohesion and is especially important for musicians with hearing impairments (Fulford, Ginsborg, & Goldbart 2011). The boundary between movement and gesture is therefore blurred in musical performance. Factors affecting musicians’ movements include the musical score itself, which contributes to the repeatability of ancillary gesture production by musicians over successive performances and familiarity between coperformers and musical performance conventions (Ginsborg 2009). Furthermore, studies of cross-modal perception have demonstrated that it is possible to obtain emotional information, such as an expressive manner from the visual perception of solo singing and instrumental playing. It is also possible to infer pitch relationships from solo singing using visual information.

The Influence of Visual Feedback on Movement to Music In a study undertaken by Morgan, Killough and Thompson, four to seven-month old infants produced less spontaneous rhythmic movement to music when visual information was presented simultaneously.2 While this is evidence that if music is heard, it is moved to, we argue that their findings reflect the so called “Colavita” effect of visual sensory dominance: human beings are more likely to rely on visual than auditory information when carrying out temporal processing tasks (Colavita 1974).3 2

Morgan, Gin, Killough, Cynthia M., Thompson, Laura, A. “Does Visual Information Influence Infants’ Movement to Music?” Psychology of Music, 2011. 3 Colavita, Francis B. “Human Sensory Dominance.” Perception, & Psychophysics, Vo1. 16 No.2, 409-412, 1974.

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Even visual information may be unnecessary for tasks involving vestibular and/or proprioceptive feedback in the auditory encoding of musical rhythm (Phillips-Silver & Trainor 2005, 2007). Expert musical performance, however, is a special case. Louise Banton found no difference between the performances of pianists who were prevented from hearing what they were playing while sight-reading unfamiliar scores and those who sight-read as normal. However, pianists who were prevented from seeing their hands on the keyboard made significantly more errors (Banton 1995).

Aims While research has shown the expressive power of visual information for audiences, little attention has been paid to the ways in which musical performers make use of the visual cues provided by their co-performers, such as the torso curls of string players observed by Davidson and Good (2002) and the gestures and glances of singers and pianists rehearsing together (King and Ginsborg, 2011). The present study aimed to explore the relationship between, and effects of, visual information on violinists’ movement and looking behaviour while performing. Hypothesis 1 predicted that players would move more when they could see their coperformer than when they could not. Hypothesis 2 predicted that they would look more when their co-performer was facing towards, rather than away, from them.

Method Design: The study combined observational and experimental methods: behaviours were coded, measured and compared in two experimental conditions for individual players: visual and non-visual. The independent variable was the players’ ability to see, or not see, their co-performer. Thus, two-way looking was achieved when both players experienced the visual condition, facing towards each other and one-way looking when one experienced the visual and the other the non-visual condition (see Table 12-1). The dependent variables were movement behaviour (the duration of time players were moving) and looking behaviour (number of glances and length of gazes towards their co-performer) during performance. Participants and Materials: Four violinists (postgraduate students at the Royal Northern College of Music) formed two violin duos for the purposes of the study and learned a newly-composed work lasting two minutes, Sketch, by Emma-Ruth Richards.

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Visual – Visual

Visual – Non-visual

Non-visual – Visual

Non-visual – Non-visual

Table 12-1: Condition matrix “same” conditions in bold.

Procedure: Having learned the work in advance, the two duos were video-recorded performing it in all four combinations of conditions (see Table 12-1). In the “same” conditions, the visual conditions were experienced before the non-visual conditions and then the remaining two conditions in random order. Analyses: The movements coded were lifting of the eyebrows and scroll arm, and torso curls. Movements required for sound production were excluded, as was co-performer-directed looking behaviour in nonvisual conditions.

Coding Scheme and Reliability To establish inter-rater reliability an independent judge coded video footage from six performances representing 10% of the total data. Kappas ranged from 0.42 to 0.71 for individual observations with a figure of 0.61 achieved overall on 8.3% of the data, representing a substantial level of agreement between coders (Landis and Koch, 1977).4

Hypothesis 1: The Effect of Attenuating Visual Information on Movement Behaviour Hypothesis 1 predicted that players would move more when they could see their co-performer. There were no significant differences between the duration of eyebrow lifts, torso curls, scroll lifts or total movement overall in the visual and non-visual conditions, so the hypothesis was not supported. Differences between the durations of movement behaviours in the two visual conditions, two-way and one-way looking, were also investigated. There were no significant differences between the duration of eyebrow lifts, torso curls or scroll lifts, but there was a near-significant difference 4 Landis, J. Richard, and Koch, G. Gary. Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data. Biometrics, 33(1), 159-174, 1977.

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between total movement overall in the two conditions such that movement lasted longer when the players could see each other (M [mean] = 16.03, SD [standard deviation] = 8.08 seconds) than when one could only see the other’s back (M = 10.98, SD = 6.05 seconds, t = 2.00, df = 30, p = .055, r = .34).5

Hypothesis 2: The Effect of Visual Feedback on Looking Behaviour Hypothesis 2 predicted that players would look towards their coperformer more when they were facing towards rather than away from them. Significantly more glances were made in two-way than one-way looking conditions (two-way, M = 10.23, SD = 3.13; one-way, M = 6.75, SD = 3.75; t = 2.86, df = 30, p = .008, r = .46). To this extent the hypothesis was supported. There was, however, no significant difference between the durations of gaze in the one- and two-way looking conditions.

Post-hoc Analyses The table 12-2 below shows the total duration of coded movements and looking behaviours broken down by player and condition. Rebecca’s most characteristic movements were her scroll arm lifts being coded for the longest duration of all the players. Jess moved the least of all the players and had a very controlled and physically restrained playing style. The most distinctive characteristic of Rosemary’s playing style was her eyebrow movement which was coded for a longer duration of time than any of her other behaviours. Sarah looked for much longer than all the other players.

5

t (t-statistic) is calculated to compare means, df (degrees of freedom) reflect sample sizes, p (p-value) is the probability that test statistics occurred by chance alone, r (Pearson’s r) represents the strength of association between two variables: 0 (no effect), 1 (perfect effect).

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Looking

Movement

Eyebrow Scroll Torso Visual Non-visual

Duo 1 Rebecca Jess 49.68 37.47 14.19 0.00 154.73 66.83 65.86 22.96 117.02 46.47 117.76 43.32

Duo 2 Rosemary Sarah 21.35 79.53 70.70 78.57 59.76 58.11 29.83 136.16 91.04 146.37 69.25 126.47

Table 12-2: Durations in seconds of coded movement and looking behaviour by player and condition.

Individual Players’ Movements For individual players, there were differences between visual and nonvisual conditions. For example, while eyebrow lifts were generally coded for an equal or shorter duration than looking behaviour overall, Rosemary’s were coded for over three times as long as her gazing or glancing toward Sarah (see Fig. 13-2). The frequency and duration of her eyebrow lifts increased significantly when the players faced each other (frequency: visual, M = 4.88, SD = 1.46; non-visual, M = 3.63, SD = 0.74; t = 2.16, df = 14, p = 0.049, r = .50, and duration: visual M = 5.40s, SD = 1.17; non-visual, M = 3.44s, SD = 1.06; t = 3.51, df = 14, p = 0.003, r = .68). Differences were also found in comparisons between one- and twoway looking conditions. Rebecca lifted her scroll significantly more often when there was the possibility of eye contact with her partner Jess (oneway, 4; two-way, 8) and for significantly longer (one-way, 6.92 s; twoway, 11.9 s, in both cases U = 16.00, N1 = 4, N2 = 4, p = 0.003, r = 0.84). A post-hoc lag-sequential analysis suggested that lifting the scroll was functional, at least in part, for all players, resulting from the necessary shifting of the hand on the fingerboard to a new position at entry points and beginnings of phrases.

Discussion Hypothesis 1: The Effect of Attenuating Visual Information on Movement Behaviour While there were no differences in the overall durations of movement between the visual and non-visual conditions, more movement was made when there was the possibility of eye contact in two-way than in one-way looking conditions. Does this support the idea that players consciously

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intended their movements to be seen, resulting in more frequent and longer gestures? Or might the potential for eye contact cause an increase in movement that is pre-conscious, a response to visual stimuli rather than an intention to communicate? The present results show that both possibilities can occur. Rebecca made more, and longer scroll lifts when eye contact with Jess was possible. She could therefore be described as exaggerating this movement for Jess’s benefit. This would suggest that its intention was to communicate, thus rendering the movement gestural as defined by Kendon (2004). Conversely, eyebrow lifts occurred independently of looking behaviour, and not necessarily for the co-performer’s benefit: Rosemary was no more likely to raise her eyebrows when eye contact with Sarah was possible. So while eyebrow lifts may be perceived by coperformers as gestural they may equally be an attribute of a musician’s unique physical and performance style, used as an ancillary expressive gesture in music performance, as in normal conversation.

Hypothesis 2: The Effect of Visual Feedback on Looking Behaviour All four players looked at each other significantly more often when they had the opportunity to do so in two-way conditions, but gazes were not significantly longer. This suggests that the potential for eye contact prompts, but does not prolong, eye contact. Gazing directly into coperformers’ eyes when playing feels uncomfortable, perhaps. It is known that long gazes, unless directed towards a lover, are usually taken as a challenge (Ellsworth & Langer 1976) and that, in dyadic conversation, eye contact is used to regulate turn-taking with the speaker looking up to hand over, as it were, when s/he has finished speaking (Kendon 1967). It may be that the two-way looking condition in this study, where both players faced each other, added a conversational dimension to the situation whereby the intensity of direct eye contact resulted in players looking towards each other more often but for less time. Looking behaviour was maintained by all players in one-way conditions: the frequency of one-way looking was 66%, and the duration 90%, of two-way looking. This shows that eye contact is not the sole purpose of partner-directed looking; rather, there is value for musicians in being able to perceive co-performers’ movements and gestures, even if viewed from behind. Davidson and Good (2002) argue that co-performerdirected looking (including eye contact) helps musicians achieve performances that are both temporally synchronous and unified in manner. Argyle and Dean (1965) proposed that looking behaviour and physical

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proximity have an inverse relationship, both signalling intimacy. In the present study, lag sequential analysis confirmed that looking behaviour was the most common behaviour to occur within one second of entry markers. The higher frequency of glances in two-way conditions may be a signal of the intimacy between players afforded by the face-to-face configuration in these conditions.

Conclusions The present results extend current knowledge about how movements are visually perceived and used by musicians and their co-performers. That players made more movement and looked more when they had the potential for eye-contact supports the idea that players’ conscious knowledge of being seen by co-performers adds intentionality to physical movement. The influence of the visually-perceived co-performer on performers’ movement and looking behaviour highlights the generative processes behind the execution and delivery of musical movement. Movements forming in response to auditory and visual stimuli can be altered, augmented or projected for the benefit of co-performers. Even those movements required for the sound production (such as the scroll lift of a violinist) as well as ancillary gestures (such as torso curls and eyebrow lifts) both have the potential to be perceived by co-performers and/or the audience as carrying the conscious intent of gestural-ness or a specific manner (for example, Rebecca’s scroll lift). Every movement in music performance can therefore be said to vary on a number of dimensions: (1) the degree to which movement represents a response to (pre-conscious) internal auditory representations of music; (2) the degree to which the movement is requisite or facilitates sound production from an instrument or voice; (3) the degree to which the musician adds or mediates the element of consciously intended expression; (4) the degree to which the movement is consciously perceived as being expressive by co-performers and/or an audience. The volitional generation of gesture is subject to physiology and a performer’s cognitive processes as well as socio-cultural influences. Furthermore, while performers can control the generation and execution of gestural movement, they cannot control the way observers, whether co-performers or audience members, construct their understanding of it. There is a distinction, therefore, between the function of movement in conveying expressive meaning to the observing listener and to the observing co-performer. While most research has focused on the former, this study suggests that co-performer-

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directed physical expression may be just as salient for the performer as that which is audience-directed. Jane Davidson has written that a performer’s capacity to deal with moment-by-moment processing of tempo changes or memory slips depends on “an opening of ears and eye to hear and see cues” (Davidson 2009, 370). The present results support this observation by highlighting the value of visually-perceived information in music performance. The importance of spatial location in relation to co-performers is important, not only for musicians with hearing impairments (Fulford et al. 2011) but also for those with normal hearing, given the effects of face-to-face orientation on player behaviour. Subsequent work with musicians with hearingimpairments will further explore the use of verbal and non-verbal communication in music performance in shaping gestures and rehearsal talk.

Acknowledgements The present study was supported by a grant from the Arts Humanities Research Council in England; the authors would like also to thank the four violinists for their enthusiastic participation.

Bibliography Argyle, Michael, and Janet Dean “Eye-Contact, Distance and Affiliation.” Sociometry, Vol.28, (1965): 289-304. Banton, Louise, J. “The Role of Visual and Auditory Feedback during the Sight-Reading of Music.” Psychology of Music, Vol.23, No.1, (1995): 3-16. Davidson, Jane D. “Visual Perception of Performance Manner in the Movements of Solo Musicians.” Psychology of Music, Vol. 21 No.2, (1993): 103-13. —. “Movement and Collaboration in Musical Performance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Richard Parncutt, New York: Oxford University Press, (2009): 364-376. Davidson, Jane W. and James M. M. Good, “Social and Musical CoOrdination between Members of a String Quartet: An Exploratory Study.” Psychology of Music, Vol. 30, No. 2, (2002): 186-201. Ellsworth, Phoebe C. and Ellen J. Langer. “Staring and Approach: An Interpretation of the Stare as a Nonspecific Activator.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 33, No.1, (1976): 117-22.

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Fulford, Robert, Jane Ginsborg, and Juliet Goldbart. “Learning not to Listen: the Experiences of Musicians with Hearing Impairments”. Music Education Research, 13(4), (2011): 429-446. Ginsborg, Jane. “Beating Time: The Role of Kinaesthetic Learning in the Development of Mental Representations for Music.” In Art in Motion, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, (2009): 121-42. Kendon, Adam. “Some Functions of Gaze-direction in Social Interaction.” Acta psychologica, 26, (1967): 22-63. Kendon, Adam. Gesture. Visible Action as Utterance Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2004): 7-16. King, Elaine and Jane Ginsborg. “Gestures and Glances: Interactions in Ensemble Rehearsal.” In New Perspectives of Music and Gesture, ed. Elain King and Anthony Gritten, Surrey: Ashgate. (2011). 177-202. Phillips-Silver, Jessica, and Laurel J. Trainor. “Feeling the beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception.” Science, 308 (5727), 1430, 2005. Phillips-Silver, Jessica and Laurel J. Trainor. “Hearing what the Body Feels: Auditory Encoding of Rhythmic Movement.” Cognition, 105(3), (2007): 533-46. Thompson, W. F., Russo, F., & Quinto, L. “Audio-visual Integration of Emotional Cues in Song. Cognition & Emotion, 22(8), (2008):1457470. Thompson, W. F., Russo, F. A., & Livingstone, S. R. “Facial expressions of Singers Influence Perceived Pitch Relations.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17(3), (2010): 317-22. Vines, B. W., Krumhansl, C. L., Wanderley, M. M., Dalca, I. M., & Levitin, D. J. Music to My Eyes: Cross-modal Interactions in the Perception of Emotions in Musical Performance. Cognition, 118(2), (2011): 157-70. Wanderley, M., & Vines, B. “Origins and Functions of Clarinettists’ Ancillary Gestures. In Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. (2006): 165-191.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

In authoring and editing this book, the aim was to make aspects of composer, choreographer and performer collaboration and the work of researchers and practitioners in this field accessible to a wide spectrum of people. For a topic of this diversity and complexity, this was not an easy task but, like with most intricate matters, it was possible to retain the profundity of the contributors work while unravelling the simplicity of a unifying thread: “sound, music and the moving-thinking body”. In her book The Thinking Body originally published in 1937, Mabel Todd said that “it is as profoundly true that we are as much affected in our thinking by our bodily attitudes as our bodily attitudes are affected in the reflection of our mental and bodily states.” It was her firm belief that we can bring the power of psychological processes to bear on all our physical movements. Todd was far ahead of her time in seeing the relationship between thought and movement and in perceiving the connection between mind/body. But, as she realised, this perspective was all too often suppressed by modern living and the inhibitions of attitudes toward the body as a mode of perceiving the world in which we live. Although this perception may have changed since 1937, the challenge to relate thought and movement remains and the mind/body debate continues. Of course, many composers, choreographers and performers have addressed these challenges, Meredith Monk (b. 1942), the ground breaking composer, singer, dancer and choreographer is a pioneer in interdisciplinary performance. She creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Much of her music is often part of an all-embracing theatrical concept in which the impulse for music is frequently movement. In an interview with a reporter from The Classical Review, June 2011, she said “I had a revelation that the voice could be like the body and that it could have a kind of articulation and flexibility and fluidity like the body has.” It is encouraging to note that artists, such as Monk, are using movement as a catalyst for creating new musical work and that the research community is taking a greater interest in interdisciplinary and collaborative practices in the arts. It is hoped that this book demonstrates the significance of this trend and will provide starting points for further

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exploration. With this in mind, it is encouraging to consider that perhaps an expansion of work in this field may prompt a second edition of Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body.

CONTRIBUTORS

Magnus Andersson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo, specialising in music and movement, performance studies and artistic research. He leads the Academy’s major targeted area of research in performance: The co-creative musician. He is also a tango dancer directing his own school in Oslo, Norway (TangoTango) together with Anne Marit Ligaard. In addition, Andersson is a certified Stott Pilates’ teacher and a music critic. Joshua Banks Mailman is a theorist, analyst, critic, philosopher, performer, technologist, and composer of music, teaching music theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and previously at Columbia University and New York University. He researches musical form from flux, temporal dynamic form (PhD. 2010, Eastman School of Music) and is published in the Journal of Sonic Studies, Music Analysis, Psychology of Music, Music Theory Online, and Perspectives of New Music. His “Improvising Synesthesia: Comprovisation of Generative Graphics and Music” appears in Leonardo Electronic Almanac. His multimedia and sound works are in soundsRite, Open Space Web Magazine, and Enough Records 100 Years of Noise. Visit www.joshua banksmailman.com. Robert Fulford is a PhD student in Music Psychology at the Royal Northern College of Music. He previously studied Music with Education (BA) and Educational Psychology (MPhil) at Homerton College, Cambridge. His current research focuses on interactive performance for musicians with a hearing impairment in collaboration with the Acoustics Research Unit at the University of Liverpool funded by the AHRC. Other interests include cross-modal perception and communication and the use of hearing aid technology in music. He is co-leader of the North-West Deaf Youth Orchestra run by the charity Music and the Deaf, and a British Sign Language user.

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Jane Ginsborg is Associate Dean of Research, Director of the Centre for Music Performance Research, and Programme Leader for research degrees at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. Winner of the British Voice Association’s Van Lawrence Award in 2002, for her research on singers’ memorizing strategies, she is Managing Editor of Music Performance Research, and holds editorial positions with the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, Musicae Scientiae and Psychology of Music. She is currently Chair of the Conservatoires UK (CUK) Research Ethics Committee and President of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). Helen Julia Minors is Senior Lecturer in Music at Kingston University. She edits Ars Lyrica and is Vice-Chair of the National Association for Music in Higher Education. Publications include Music, Text and Translation (Bloomsbury 2013), chapters in Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature (Ashgate 2013); Bewegungen zwischen Horen und Sehen (Wurzburg: Konigshausen&Neumann 2012); La musique francaise: esthetique et identite en mutation 1892–1992 (EditionsDelateur 2012); articles/reviews in Opera Quarterly (2006), Nineteenth Century Music Review (2007), Dance Research (2009), Notes (2010), Ars Lyrica (2011), Cahiers de la société québécoise de recherche en musique (2012), Dance Research Journal (2013), Slavonic and East European Review (2013). Tatiana Oltean is Assistant Professor at the "Gheorghe Dima" Music Academy of Cluj Napoca (Romania), teaching Music History in the Department of Musicology. She graduated with a Bachelor's degree (department of Musicology, 2003), then earned her Master's degree (department of Musicological Syntheses, 2005) and her Doctor's degree (in Musical Stylistics, with a thesis entitled Analytical Perspectives on the Opera-2UDWRULR 0DQROH WKH &UDIWVPDQ E\ 6LJLVPXQG 7RGXĠă  XQGHU WKH SURIHVVLRQDO VXSHUYLVLRQ RI DFDGHPLFLDQ &RUQHO ğăUDQX Professor, PhD) at the same institution. Her musicological interests include analytical aspects of the works of Romanian composers, performing arts and the mythology music binomial. Stefan Östersjö is one of the most prominent soloists within new music in Sweden and a world famous guitarist. Since his debut CD (awarded a Swedish Grammy in 1997) he has recorded extensively and toured Europe, the U.S. and Asia. Special fields of interest are the interaction with electronics and experimental work with different kinds of stringed instruments. He has co-operated with conductors such as Lothar Zagrosek,

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Peter Eötvös, Pierre André Valade, Mario Venzago, Franck Ollu and Andrew Manze. He is Lecturer of Artistic Research at the Malmö Academy of Music and also research fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Gent, Belgium. Sofia Paraskeva is an artist who experiments with interactive media, film, video and sound. She explores sound and visuals in the context of leading edge technology, developing computer vision installations and interactive performance wearable instruments such as wireless musical gloves, and bodysuits. Her work spans across interactive art and design, filmmaking, video production, visual effects, graphics and experimental sound. Paraskeva has a BA degree in Visual Studies from Oxford Brookes University and a BA in Media Communication from Emerson College, Boston. As a teenager she studied piano for several years and music theory and harmony at Trinity College of Music London. Jeremy Peyton Jones is a composer and music lecturer. He has composed for his own ensembles and written several scores for theatre works including commissions for the Royal Opera House and BBC Radio 3. His piece Endings for ensemble and live electronics, in collaboration with sound artist Kaffe Matthews, was premiered at the Southbank Centre, London in 2012. He is Senior Lecturer in Composition at Goldsmiths, University of London. His chapter, Accommodating the Threat of the Machine: the act of repetition in live performance is due to be published in the forthcoming Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and PostMinimal Music. Michael Picknett is a composer, director and performer specialising in collaborative work in both electronic music and acoustic concert music. He has composed music across a wide range of organisations including: ROH2, Glyndebourne, EDge ‘09 and several other theatre and dance organisations. He is currently engaged in practice-led research for a doctorate in music composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where his research is in devised music (music is composed through a collaborative process with the performers). His recent practice explores the presence of musicians on stage and the creation of music as theatre.

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NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy studied at the Hanoi National Academy of Music where she received her diploma in 1998, followed by a Master of Arts at the Institute of Vietnamese Folklore in 2002. NguyӉn Thanh Thӫy has recorded several CD’s as soloist with orchestras and solo CDs with traditional and experimental music. Since 2009, she has been involved as a researcher in the international research project (re)thinking improvisation, as a collaboration between the Hanoi National Academy of Music and the Malmö Academy of Music. At present she is launching an artistic doctoral project at the Malmö Academy of Music concerned with gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. Kelvin Thomson was born in South Africa and has been based in the UK since 1981. He is a music director, vocal coach, pianist, organist, composer and arranger. As a PhD in Composition candidate at Royal Holloway he is exploring new solutions to fuse the potential inherent in a range of extra-musical contexts and intra-musical styles. He is interested in hybridity, fusion and stratification and composing music inspired by bees. The Silence of the Bees: A Science Opera (2013) was described by Opera Talent as “an enterprising, thoroughly commendable piece of complex musical theatre, displaying good craftsmanship and musical imagination.” Mark Wraith was a principal soloist with Ballet Rambert under the direction of Christopher Bruce. He danced the title role in Pierrot Lunaire and principal roles in The Tempest and Les Noces. He trained at The Australian Ballet School and The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he also taught movement for singers. He has worked abroad as a performer and teacher including The Sydney Dance Company, The Lindsay Kemp Company in Italy, The Fires of London, and Grupo Madera in Venezuela, where he taught movement for musicians. He has worked as an opera repetiteur (pianist) at The Royal Opera, and also played for ballet classes.

EDITORS

Osvaldo Glieca is a composer born in Rome and living in London since 2003. He studied electronic music with the Italian composer Stefano Petrarca in Rome, then started his career as an arranger working with the record label Soundsneverseen until 2003. His main fields of interest are contemporary classical and ethno-music. His thinking is greatly influenced by Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. Osvaldo is also a rock guitarist and jazz saxophonist, his compositional visions and projects are interdisciplinary in nature attempting to synthesise contemporary classical music and multimedia that follows Louis Andriessen’s approach to blending the sounds and timbres of ethno-music from Brazil, Latin America, West Africa and Indonesia. Marilyn Wyers is a pianist, dancer and dance/movement-based music performance educator. She studied piano and ballet at St. Petersburg State Conservatoire, Russia and has performed as a pianist and dancer in many major cities in the world including Cairo, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Beirut, Hamburg and London. She was Head of Music at the International College in Beirut for many years before taking up the position of music lecturer at Bosphorus University in Istanbul. Her work involves the application of dance/movement-based learning and teaching experiences that encourage the joint development of technical, creative and expressive skills to music performance studies in higher education. Recently she was appointed Deputy Chief Examiner for the International Baccalaureate Music Diploma programme. Marilyn has a special interest in performing contemporary classical music, contemporary dance and ballet and she is currently pursuing a PhD in music performance practice and movement imagery at Goldsmiths, University of London.