The ever-decreasing space I’ve had for music
Lately I’ve been both fortunate and unfortunate in equal
measure. I’ve taken up a new job – an exciting and stimulating job that has me
working in the music industry full-time; I’ve managed to find myself a new home;
I’m working on a commission from the London Sinfonietta for a solo double bass
piece to be premiered at the Southbank Centre in December; and – the cherry on
the cake – my partner will be over from Brazil for Christmas. Good times. On
the other hand, the mayhem of moving across the country, having to buy white
goods that have since spectacularly failed, and finding the people I need to contact
aren’t available at useful times has devoured a significant portion of my life recently.
Now I’m happy but exhausted, bereft of mental space, and fast approaching my
commission deadline with very little to show for the time I’m supposed to have
spent working on it. First world problems, I know. Nevertheless, this evening has
been the first real opportunity in a month or so that I’ve had to collate my
thoughts on the commission, to challenge myself, and to steer myself clear of writing
something well-crafted-but-generic with only a couple of weeks to go.
I’ve decided to blog about the process for two reasons.
First, I think more composers (and all creative artists) should be open about
their creative processes, partly to share ideas and partly to undermine the
idea of the genius-composer working secretively in their ivory tower – a view
held by too many people (including composers). Secondly, I’ve been able to draw
on a number of creative catalysts from a host of sources, almost none of which
are related to dots-on-page musical matters.
An invitation to find new musical space
The nature of my commission is perhaps peculiar but, to my
mind, more stimulating than the usual call for staged concert works. The brief is
to produce a five-minute solo piece to be played in an unusual space within the
Queen Elisabeth Hall building. The space will be transformed in collaboration
with a team of designers from Central Saint Martin’s (UAL). I like to think of this
as producing an installation-like experience that offers more interesting and
immersive opportunities for audience engagement than the ‘everyday’ concert
format. There are five composers producing such solo pieces, each in a
different space, writing for a different instrument, and working with a
different team of designers. So far we’ve met the designers as a massed group, but
we’ve yet to be assigned our final working partnerships. The spaces our pieces
will occupy are to be decided after a site visit next week.
So what am I writing? First, I want to dispense with the
word ‘writing’. Admittedly I’ll be the recognised author of the ‘musical work’,
which ordinarily equates to a composer having written some dots for someone else to interpret. And this is
obviously a part of what I’m doing, but only to a limited extent. My aim is to
craft an ‘experiential space’. I admit that sounds horrendously pretentious! It’s
not a label I like, but it’s probably the best approximation I can produce with
the words language has to offer. There are plenty of quotes and sentiments that
roughly equate to “music expresses what language can’t”. However hard to pin
down that idea might be, I have to say I agree that music has such potential (this
raises the question: how much music tries to express something language can
also express perfectly well, if not better?).
Sharing space
The central ideas I’m working with are intimacy, expressions
of connection, openness (or lack thereof), and the potentially dangerous notion
of tenderness. Why is tenderness so dangerous? Because it sidles-up alongside
nostalgic views of Romanticism (with a capital R). I’ve nothing against
Romanticism per-se – I like a lot of the music, certainly – but there’s something
of a sepia-tinted fetish for it, which frequently operates as a yardstick
against which many people measure the worth of ‘contemporary classical music’. Perhaps
this (along with ideological differences) is why a lot of contemporary
composers avoid associations with Romanticism like the plague. I don’t avoid it
so fervently, but I agree that association with 19th century is,
depressingly, like interpretative quicksand.
Musical nostalgia aside, tenderness is, in a more general
sense, a kind of connection, openness, and often a form of intimacy; it can be associated
with romanticism (little r) alongside other expressions of compassion. This
brings me back to my central themes, which I chose in response to the performer
I’m working with, Elena Hull. Elena is an incredibly expressive bassist. I’m
sure those people that are fond of the rhetoric surrounding 19th-Century
nostalgia would say she’s able to project with the sensitivity, expressivity,
and clear, searing tone commonly associated with the cello. I’d say she’s damn
good! For some reason the double bass is still seen as a grumbly, dry
instrument, which Elena proves it needn’t be. What’s more, she specifically
expressed an interest in exploring the ‘romantic’ (not Romantic) side of the
instrument in this project.
What I’m aiming to produce is a space in which the audience’s
relationship with the performer and the music they hear is not subject to the
boundaries and spectatorship of the concert hall. I want to work on something
the audience can feel. I mean that
literally; the double bass is capable of producing sounds that go right through
you – a connection with sound and the musical experience I want to promote. To
a certain extent I also want the audience to feel something in the psychological, emotional sense. I don’t want
to create an emotional narrative or a programmatic tale (that would be big R
territory again). I want the experience of sharing the space with Elena and the
sound she produces to tap-into other areas of the audience’s repository of
experiences – specifically their experiences with intimacy, expressions of
connection, openness, and tenderness.
Organising a new musical space
What impact does this have on how I compose? How do I
organise my ‘material’? For that matter, what is my ‘material’? As far as I’m
concerned everything within the performance space is a vital kind of ‘material’.
In order for me to promote the idea of openness and some very human kinds of
connection I want to get rid of the boundaries that ordinarily classify and separate
people in a performance environment (performers versus audience). In my new
work everybody’s an agent of activity. Elena will respond to the actions of the
people around her according to sets of instructions. These instructions – the score
– will focus on her physical actions and will draw on my experiences with open
notation and open instrumentation (even though the instrumentation here is
fixed). I want the gesture of her performance, which I see as another vital tool
for exploring my central themes, to be as important as the sounds she makes. The
challenge will be to create shifts of openness in her performance and to produce
a situation whereby the audience feel able to ‘connect’ with Elena and her
sound such that they willingly explore the space and the experience they have
within it. Getting this right will be difficult and I’m still in the planning
stages. To give you some idea of the processes I’m going through here are some
of the questions I’ve posed to myself:
- What is the initial impression projected when the audience enters the space?
- How does the performance begin and end?
- How does Elena produced ‘closed’ and ‘open’ sounds and gestures?
- How exactly does the audience’s interaction impact the performance space and how does this impact Elena’s actions?
I’ve also written these pointers:
- Avoid binaries! This is not intimacy versus non-intimacy (or whatever)
- Exploration of contact… with music, with people, with bodies (no groping!)
- Shades of ‘warmth’ – soft glow; intense, personal; playful warmth
- Familiar intertwined with (and most certainly not opposed to) the unknown – tantalising
- Performer’s actions respond to audience’s actions
It’ll be interesting to see where these ideas go and how
much I can make craft them into a relatable experience.
Thinking about Music and People’s Relationship with Space
Before I sign-off I want to say a few words about what it
was that set me off down this route. Perhaps most obviously my own romantic relationship
is challenged by vast geographical distances – a small personal space set
against a huge physical one. While not in the slightest bit ideal (or
enjoyable) the situation has caused me to assess the value of intimacy,
closeness, and connection in their non-tangible forms. The need for my partner and
me to find ways of exploring and coming to terms with the ‘space’ our
relationship occupies has directly motivated my work on this commission.
On a less self-centred note, I’ve had cause to consider the
use of music in closed, ‘non-standard’ spaces on a number of occasions recently.
I’ve been approached about the idea of writing music to work alongside an
audio-described tactile art exhibition for the blind. Flooding a blind person’s
aural space with sound, however subtle or quiet, is an act that comes with a
phenomenal amount of responsibility, not least because it can disrupt that
person’s relationship with the world around them. Unsurprisingly, this has got
me thinking a lot about our relationship between music and space – something I
want to explore a lot more. I’ve also recently started working with Dame Evelyn Glennie, who’s profoundly deaf and also one of the world’s foremost concert percussionists.
Learning about Evelyn’s relationship with sound and how she crafts musical
spaces for herself has led me to think seriously about the physiological aspect
of music-making, about our very real contact
with sound. All in all, circumstances have encouraged me not to take musical
spaces and our methods of engagement with music for granted.
My new (currently
untitled) solo double bass piece will be premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall,
London, on Sunday 8 December 2013. It has been commissioned by the London
Sinfonietta as part of Writing the Future, which is generously supported by The
Boltini Trust Anthony Mackintosh and Michael & Patricia MacLaren-Turner.
