Improvisation and Exhaustion

2014

Throughout her life, she has been driven by two factors: curiosity and creativity. As a third grader, she was accused of "asking too many questions." She grew disillusioned with authority and spent her adolescence discovering ways to expand her freedom. These skills proved useful when she faced her greatest challenge yet, becoming an adult. Jessica's first two years of college were a struggle, not academically or socially, but. She lost touch with her childhood wonder and found herself trying to fit into a box much to narrow. Faced with the decision to live uncomfortably or venture into the unknown, she chose to follow her heart. She now journeys down an unpaved path and her fear is slowly giving way to excitement.

CARPA6: The 6th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts 2019, 2019

This presentation focussed on the trans-disciplinary Artistic Research project Drench, whose iterations include a creative radio feature and a public art installation. Writer and performer Jools Gilson and composer Sebastian Adams developed the experimental radio documentary The Rain Box in 2017 for Lyric FM in Ireland. The Rain Box was nominated for a New York Festivals World's Best Radio Award for Sound Art in 2018. Gilson and Adams are now in the process of developing a series of umbrellas, which will tell stories and enfold you in sound when the rain falls. This presentation focused on the ways in which aspects of theatre and music composition navigate disciplinary boundaries of theatre, music, broadcast radio and participatory performance to engage world-making meaning production. Our new public art project comprises a series of adapted umbrellas, which respond to precipitation / location and connect the presence, rhythm and ferocity of rainfall with tendrils of story and sound. This paper documents the sharing of a prototype of this new work and the ways in which Drench elaborates the creative, theoretical and political implications of mobilising located fluidity through embodied storytelling. Drench explores climate through the practical fact, poetic resonance, and multiple meanings of rain in Ireland; the national pleasure of rain complaint, the nuanced descriptions of rain's qualities, and the simple wonder at water pouring from the sky. Drench braids documentary footage, fairy tales, and Irish words for rain or rainy days, many of them no longer in use. This lost language of rainfall locates bodies and communities in a landscape of rain, light and wind. We're interested in the connection between linguistic and environmental gestures inflected through different disciplinary forms. By doing this, Drench aspires to rework the relationship between internal emotional worlds and environment as a way to engage in climate discourse.

Current Musicology, 2005

was a watershed year in the life of Steve Reich. Following numerous experiments with magnetic tape, he had, while creating his tape piece It's Gonna Rain, identified a fascinating process that would serve as the basic compositional tool of his output until about 1971, and as a foundational component of his output thereafter. l Reich's preoccupation with processoriented music in turn helped define a musical trend that shifted the standard historical narrative of twentieth-century concert music away from the reigning high modernist serialism of the 1950s toward minimalism. Defenders of the new style emphasize the cultural triumph of minimalism. For Susan McClary, minimalism is "perhaps the single most viable extant strand of the Western art-music tradition;" for K. Robert Schwarz, a specialist in this style, minimalism is "a potent force ... its influence is pervasive and enduring;" and for the composer John Adams, minimalism is "the only really interesting, important stylistic development in the past 30 years" (McClary 2004:289-98; Schwarz 1997:1-17; Adams quoted in Schwarz 1996a:177). These writers often attend to minimalism's programmatic reaction to the perceived structural complexities of high modernism with its ametric rhythms and pervasive intervallic dissonances. In contrast to high modernism, minimalism offered musical structures dearly audible to the listener; its rhythms were pulse-based, often elaborated in the context of extended repetition of short musical figures, and its pitch structures were simple, usually associated with, though not identical to, traditional diatonic constellations. Commentators may differ on the relationship minimalism takes to modernism-McClary argues in terms of a qualified Oedipal "reaction formation" to modernism; Wim Mertens argues in terms of a negative dialectical "final stage" of high modernism-but few commentators fail to situate high modernism as the central referent in describing the emergence of minimalism in music (McClary 2004:292; Mertens 2004:308). Whether the argument hinges on a theory of history beholden to Freud or one beholden to Hegel, modernism under these readings remains minimalism's basic condition of possibility. Most minimalist composers have themselves been outspoken about their aversion to certain forms of modernism, especially institutionalized

Tanz der Dinge/Things that dance, 2019

The elusive nature of the creative process in art has remained a puzzling phenomenon for artists and their audiences. What happens to an inspired artist in the moment of creation and where that inspiration comes from are questions that prompt many artists to explain the process as spiritual or mystical, describing their experiences as ‘channelling the divine’, ‘tapping into a greater reality’, or being visited or played by their ‘muse’. Pianist and improviser Keith Jarrett (b.1945) frequently explains the creative process in this way and this is nowhere more evident than in discussions on his wholly improvised solo concerts. Jarrett explains these massive feats of creativity in terms of an ability to ‘channel’ or ‘surrender to’ a source of inspiration, which he ambiguously designates the ‘ongoing harmony’, the ‘Creative’, and the ‘Divine Will’. These accounts are freely expressed in interviews and album liner notes, and are thus highly accessible to his audiences. Jarrett’s mystical accounts of the creative process, his incredible improvisatory abilities, and other key elements come together to create the strange aura of mystery that surrounds his notorious solo concerts. This paper considers Jarrett's accounts of the creative process within a Gurdjieffian context. In the late 1960s Jarrett became fascinated with the writings of Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949). Although Jarrett was never affiliated with a Gurdjieff Foundation group, it is clear from his statements that from this time on, Gurdjieff’s teachings greatly facilitated Jarrett in conceptualising and articulating his experiences of improvisation. It is not difficult to appreciate the jazz musician’s attraction to Gurdjieff’s teachings. In Gurdjieff’s perpetually vibrating cosmos music is granted the power to effect individuals and phenomena dramatically, and is an important tool for self-development. Gurdjieff placed a great deal of weight on those structures that jazz musicians hold most dear: scales, modes, and harmonics. In fact, Gurdjieff elevated these structures to cosmic significance, viewing them as analogous to the very structures and workings of the universe. Gurdjieff’s views on the importance of co-ordinating intellect, feelings and body would also have undoubtedly resonated with jazz musicians who are immersed in a genre that is simultaneously intellectual, emotional and physical.

Public, 1994

TEXT, 2013

In this essay, I consider the poetics of the weather and studies in creativity, as a site to develop emplaced relations for a multi-species sense of place and research methods for place-based inquiry. I take up the theme of this TEXT Special Issue, ‘Writing creates ecology: Ecology creates writing’ as a conversation seeking generative responses to current dilemmas in terms of both ecology and higher learning. The context of the broader conversation sustains a personal inquiry that is quite specific and particular. The relationship I have to the work and that, to which it speaks, is intimate and lived. The themes woven into the piece are in tension with an individual and collective responsibility to respond to the more-than-human world in ecological crisis. The work is in progress, speculative and open-ended; I embody the work not merely as another project but as seeking a manner of life to live. The focus of these concerns can be summarised as revolving around varied forms of attent...

Physical Review E, 2002

We demonstrate how, from the point of view of energy flow through an open system, rain is analogous to many other relaxational processes in nature such as earthquakes. By identifying rain events as the basic entities of the phenomenon, we show that the number density of rain events ...

Barbara Baert Looking into the Rain Humankind has a special relationship with rain. The sensory experience of water falling from the heavens evokes feelings ranging from fear to gratitude and has inspired many works of art. Using unique and expertly developed art-historical case studies-from prehistoric cave paintings up to photography and cinema-this book casts new light on a theme that is both ecological and iconological, both natural and cultural-historical. Barbara Baert's distinctive prose makes Looking Into the Rain. Magic-Moisture-Medium a profound reading experience, particularly at a moment when disruptions of the harmony among humans, animals, and nature affect all of us and the entire planet.

Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities, 2019