THE MUSIC OF ELLEN C. COVITO: AN INTERVIEW WITH YOU NAKAI

This paper will examine scores which present processes that constitute the composition and prerequisite or cause the formation of temporary or permanent collectivities. Formation of collectivity before or/and during the performance can be traced as common element in compositions such as Burdocks (Christian Wolff, 1971), Sonic Meditations (Pauline Oliveros, 1971), One minute is more than one minute (Porfiriadis, 2011/12). In Burdocks and in One minute is more than one minute, the musicians must decide about the macrostructure and the microstructure of their performance all together (Wolff, Porfiriadis). In the case of a large number of performers, the ensemble may also decide by choosing representatives (Wolff) or by working in smaller groups (Porfiriadis). In Sonic Meditations, Oliveros states that her verbal score is intended for groups whose performers work together for a long time and meet regularly. In all three cases, composition is synonymous with the process. In Wolff’s piece the performer is invited to be in constant and direct contact with her fellow players (through cueing techniques). In Oliveros’s piece s/he is invited to act in an esoteric way (through techniques of meditation) maintaining contact with her fellow players and the environment while in my score the performers are invited to create collectively a specific structure with the material given. Two of the compositions (Oliveiros’s and mine) make use of verbal notation, while Wolff’s composition in addition to verbal notation makes use of graphic notation as well as elements of conventional notation. The musical and social implications of such practices will be explored through the analysis of these three pieces, while the performance of my score will hopefully trigger a conversation on the meaning of composition as a process.

2018

This paper investigates the connections between contingency, or the action of chance and indeterminism, in improvisation (and it’s associated relationships with composition), and proposes contingency as a driver of new ideas, new interactions, new sounds, new perceptions. Drawing on the history and practices of the Experimental Music movement in the 1950s (Nyman 1999) and including the jazz tradition as essential in the experimental debate (Lewis 1996), I investigate the potential of contingent elements present in improvised music making: elements that are beyond the full control of the composer and/or the musicians, and/or the audience. My research investigates these elements within the practice of three stylistically differing case studies: the ‘beyond free jazz’ work of pianist/composer Satoko Fujii (Japan), ‘minimalism meets jazz’ work of drummer/composer John Hollenbeck with the Claudia Quintet (US), and the acousmatic and spectral music practices of the prepared instrument quartet Dans Les Arbres (Norway and France). Cross-referencing the outcomes of these practices against texts by Piekut (2014), Priest, (2013), Kane (2014), Gottschalk (2016), Tenney (2014), Lacy (2006), Bailey (1993), and others, I contend that contingency is a potent force in music making. What I have termed the Experimental Composition Improvisation Continuum (ECIC) views the relationships between the contingent (experimental) and compositional and improvisational elements in music making as being in flux: flowing between differing degrees of engagement. The ECIC offers a way to position work beyond genre and to acknowledge the contribution of elements within it, ‘the outcome of which is [are] unknown’ (John Cage, 2013, p. 13).

Cultural Studies Review, 2010

Outmoded patterns of thought, to invoke Deleuze, plague the practices and discourses of 'new' classical music. 1 Such a claim may seem absurd given 'new' music has earned a reputation for being unorthodox, experimental and subversive, and characterised by a mindset preoccupied with musical progress, complexity and historical necessity. 2 In this essay I shall argue that despite the plethora of styles which now seem to embody 'new' music, it has become increasingly repetitive, and locked into static conventions for its presentation and composition. 3 This is due, in part, to the recent emphasis given to its entrepreneurial activities but, as I will also show, the resistance of organisations to programming women's music means that a whole dimension that might be opened up as 'new' continues to escape our notice. The reputation of the music-in which the widespread belief is that it occupies musical territory marked by violence, discord and a hostile sound-worldmeans that it struggles to attract large audiences. It is imagined as music that is not easy on the ear, and listeners frequently complain that it is incomprehensible with some even suggesting that it is noise, not music. 4 Such an idea was made clear to me Sally Macarthur-Women and New Music 249 in the early 1990s when I worked as the music officer for the Australian chamber music organisation Musica Viva. To minimise the possibility of audiences leaving in droves at the interval break, Musica Viva adopted the practice of programming the new, thus unfamiliar, work before the interval break. It assumed that if audiences were forced to listen to the music, they would gradually develop a palate for it. But mainstream audiences have long resisted 'new' music, no matter how hard the classical music organisations have tried to introduce it. Linda Dusman makes the point that audiences who regularly attend 'classical' concerts of historic music are less likely to attend 'new' music concerts. 5 Audiences for 'new' music consist mostly of practitioners and they tend to be small in number. 6 'New' music composers are simultaneously fringe-dwellers and members of the avant-garde where they gather prestige. 7 While 'new' music of the serialist persuasion prizes itself as a rational discourse-for Susan McClary, 'a cluster of puzzles to be solved painstakingly in seminars' 8-to the ear it can sound disordered and irrational. According to McClary, the gendered implications of 'new' music's irrationality give rise to its practitioners' 'emphatic posturing about Difficulty'. 9 While 'new' music is also postmodern, implying that it is 'tonal' (and to that extent 'easier on the ear'), it is rarely mistaken for other types of music such as popular music. By and large, 'new' music seems inaccessible, complex and difficult when compared to popular music. 10 According to McClary, however, when 'new' music became institutionalised in the mid-twentieth century, safely couched in the academy, it began to lose its disruptive edge. To misquote McClary slightly, 'new' music has come to play the game of 'Difficulty For Its Own Sake'. 11 In this view, music 'that announces Difficulty as its raison d'être does not subvert'. 12 The neoliberal structures which organise 'by drawing strict boundaries, creating binary oppositions and dividing space into rigid segments with a hierarchical structure' are alive and well in the places inhabited by 'new' music practitioners. 13 Like McClary, I argue that this music no longer transgresses the conventions of tonality or technical 'difficulty', a hallmark of its performance practice, but is, instead, maintaining what has long since become the status quo. 14 The 'end-product'-the musical composition and the musical performance-and the individualised 'entrepreneurial subject' are core to 'new' music's modus operandi. These are constructs, however, founded on old ways of thinking which have become VOLUME16 NUMBER2 SEPT2010 250 deeply entrenched and self-perpetuating. Rapid technological changes have impacted on music as much as elsewhere in the new convergent media age. In the 'new' music scene, the entrepreneurial discourse that self-consciously and uncritically celebrates 'new' music's 'edginess' is contradicted by a set of

La Deleuziana , 2019

This paper draws on artistic explorations of territorial and spatial forces through analysis of projects set in the natural landscape, in a specific indoor site or at the threshold between the two. Specific attention is given to the artistic processes at play in the transformation of materials cre-ated/collected in the natural environment when shaped for presentation in an indoor location. What is the relation between being and becoming in this liminal space? According to Erwin Straus, the impetus to this process is the pathic moment of sensation, a moment which evolves in two dimensions: as an unfolding of the world and of the self (Straus 1965). Louis Schreel argues that in Deleuze and Guattari, artistic practice activates a process in which «the work 'captures' forces at work in the world and renders these sensible. Its effects are above all real and not merely imaginary: the image is not a mental given but a concrete, existing reality» (Schreel 2014: 100). Here, Deleuze distinguishes between the percept-landscape in the absence of man-and affect, the non-human becomings contained in the artwork. This paper wishes to unpack these processes through a study of two concrete instances of artistic practice, aiming to create immediate interaction between musician and environment, in which either of the two authors took part.

Musicology Australia, 2012

This virtual dialogue that brings into play two seemingly opposing positions actually exposes complementary ideas about improvisation. Marcel Cobussen deals with the complexity of interactive and unique environments and seeks to expand the scope of the concept, pointing to the inevitable presence of a certain degree of improvisation in any musical performance. For him, improvisation is always present. Rogerio Costa, in turn states that, on the one hand this broader view can contribute to overcoming rigid and simplistic categorizations, however, can eventually reduce the power of environments specifically centered on improvisation. From this point of view he emphasizes the social significance of free improvisation in specific musical contexts in Brazil. The apparent differences between the two approaches are mainly due to different perspectives from which each of the researchers weaves their reflections. The various issues raised during the dialogue-some of them seemingly unanswered-can serve as starting points for new debates and discussions that contribute to further research on the subject.

EXCESS. FORUM FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART (4.-7.8.2016) 48th International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt Jörn Peter Hiekel, Dieter Mersch, Michael Rebhahn and Fahim Amir (CURATORS) This forum, consisting of an opening, a closing discussion and three panels, seeks to probe the current state of the relationship between music and philosophy, as well as the mutual consonances and dissonances. With a view to the present, it is of particular interest to ask what questions are stimulating New Music today, what challenges it faces, and what shared themes or »contemporaneities« unite and separate philosophy and New Music today. In this way — and very much following on from earlier discussions in Darmstadt — the forum will attempt to show how compositional strategies and concepts exemplify reflections on changes within the whole of contemporary culture. The forum, which will take place in two languages (German and English, with simultaneous interpretation), defines itself as an open-ended discussion whose topics will be introduced in keynote speeches. In each case, one composer and one philosopher will act as hosts and play the part of structuring and further developing, with their guests, the discussion that already started before the course. PANEL 1: SURPLUS Dieter Mersch ChristianGrüny, Jennifer Walshe, Ashley Fure, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Michael Pisaro, Bernhard Waldenfels The term»surplus, «which is also implied in the over- all title EXCESS, allues to today’s increasing expansion of the compositional through approaches like intermediality, heterogeneity of material, body/performance, theatricality, etc. Thus the term »surplus« relates on the one hand to the »derestriction« of the arts towards different forms of expression, representation and production; but, on the other hand, also to a political aspect between the critique of art as a productive force in modern capitalism and the surplus of the aesthetic as something that does not submit to the cycles of economic exploitation. PANEL 2: THE POLITICAL Michael Rebhahn Douglas Barrett, Dror Feiler, Fahim Amir, Chaya Czernowin, Harry Lehmann, Mathias Spahlinger The political dimension touched on in the first group of themes will be explicitly foregrounded in the second complex. It addresses the ever pressing question of the relationship between art, reality and politics, which constantly arises in new ways for music too. Just as the »worldrelation« of music is being intensely debated at the moment, the concern is at once a far more fundamental analysis of the relationship be- tween the aesthetic and all that characterizes and constitutes the polis, the political and lastly the »community«. What is the role of art in this, especially if the practice of art identifies itself first and foremost as critique, as an element of resistance or subversion against claims to political power? A substantial element of this fundamental problem also encompasses the interplay between music and the historical, as expressed in notions of »contemporaneity« and »witness.« Intervention: Fahim Amir and Tomás Saraceno Every work of art is an uncommitted crime After the critique of Eurocentrism new approaches demand to also »provincialise the human«. If dogs are indeed the new feminists as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of dOCUMENTA (13), famously stated in relation to the seminal work of Donna Haraway, what is there to be done in the realms of aesthetics, production and politics? Philosopher Fahim Amir and artist Tomás Saraceno engage in a conversation about challenges and promises of multi species constellations in art starting from both Saracenos work with spiders and Haraways Companion Species Manifesto (2003). A Cyrtophora citricola spider will join the conversation as guest speaker. PANEL 3: MUSIC AS PHILOSOPHY Jörn Peter Hiekel, Simone Mahrenholz, ManosTsangaris, Brian Ferneyhough, Patrick Frank, Gunnar Hindrichs, Albrecht Wellmer Music, like art in general, constitutes its own form of thought and insight that is every bit as advanced as philosophy, but uses other means and follows different »logics.« It is not only a matter of initiating a dialogue between music and philosophy in order to evoke mutual tensions or proximities, but rather of showing how music, or the musical and »compositional,« can be viewed as »a form of philosophy« — and of attributing to it an »epistemic« power of its own. On the one hand, this raises such time-honored questions as that of »truth« in art, which after Hegel was taken up most significantly by Heidegger and Adorno; and on the other hand, it needs to be readjusted to the present conditions. One must therefore interrogate the »self-will« of aesthetic thought and ask what music — especially New Music, as the most »abstract« and at once the most emotional art — »knows,« or how it organizes and reveals its knowledge.

Music Theory Online

Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music, 2017

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