Wed 28 April: Martin Butler

Martin Butler, distinguished composer, and Professor of Music at Sussex University, gave a talk on the processes of collaboration and creative discovery in particular connection with his opera, A Better Place, and his work with ensemble notes inegales.

Nobody Likes a Control Freak

I want to speak about two examples of collaboration:
1. A Better Place - my opera commissioned by ENO Studio
2. Notes Inegales - my work in this ensemble which blurs the roles of composer and performer

I wrote an article for a book on Music and Collaboration which was never published. This addressed the following points in relation to A Better Place:

The process of collaboration in opera is complex and demanding; interested parties include composer, librettist, funder, producer.
Opera is costly; perhaps mired in bourgeois sensibilities; and yet it is still a valid art form in its special properties, which include the artificial telescoping of time, distinguishing it from song setting.
In this context, the composer is the first, and foremost, director.
The creation of the score requires a special kind of precision.
But there is then a responsibility in the production to be open to exigencies as they arise (i.e. more time/less time for action).
I was teamed up by ENO Studio with Cindy Oswin. To create something using the resources of ENO Studio.
We decided to invent the story through improvisation.
We began with actors.
We were interested in enquiring into the qualities of ghostliness.
Windows became important in the language of the piece.
Although I was initially unused to the lack of structure, I learnt to derive the material from the leading players.
The pacing, and musical ideas, came from this process.
A woman learns her husband has been killed.
She goes into denial.
'A Better Place for you'
She adopts two teenage refugees from a war zone.
She meets a male character, in some way the embodiment of the river her apartment overlooks, called Siward; he wants to get her to kill herself and almost succeeds.
Mary King was the singer for Suzanne in the workshops and developed a repertoire of musical gestures.
Because she has perfect pitch her vocal ideas always started from the same note (E).
This 'natural' gesture of descent I then developed into a constructed symmetrical structure, around a pitch centre of A flat. [example]
Meanwhile, the 'river' chord drowns, or contains, Siward. [example]
The musical examples in the session demonstrated:
(a) Suzanne reflecting on previous life; the links between formal compositional procedures and narrative. And
(b) The confluence of forces at the climactic part of the opera; the intertwining lines of orchestra and voices featuring the fundamental material (rising-River; falling-Suzanne)

Now I will describe my work with the ensemble Notes Inegales.
This is directed by Peter Wiegold who spoke earlier in this seminar series.
I play piano with this unusual group of hand-picked musicians.
As a performing member of the group I also compose, arrange and improvise.
We're interested in improvisation and notation, and the area in between.
Peter uses signals to direct the flow and the course of the performance.
I arranged Spanish Key from Bitches Brew.
Peter Wiegold 'transcribed' the playing style of Davis' trumpet sound.
My work with the ensemble is becoming important to wider compositional strategies.
It's important to know how a player will respond to material.
The ensemble's practice relates well to my long-standing practice of improvisation of musical material at the piano.
Working with the ensemble can imply differing levels of collaborative commitment.
A kind of loop arises in our process:
(1) Composer provides something
(2) Performers realise and transform the material
(3) Composer then has to respond to these results and work out a new strategy

Question from the floor: is Notes Inegales influenced by known/historic examples of improvising ensembles?
- Not really; we reflect on our own practice; not on others.

Comment from the floor: it seems there may be a field of probability; there may be a dialogue between determinism and chance? Or, more simply, just as Miles created the sound by picking the players, so does Peter Wiegold.

Wed 21 April 2010: Jonathan Harvey

Jonathan Harvey is a distinguished composer who has worked extensively at IRCAM. He was Professor of Music at Sussex University from 1977 to 1993. Symmetrical Collaborations? The question mark is the relevant part. Nearly all music is a collaboration of some sort. Collaborations are often unsatisfactory; one personality swamps the other. Or they go in different directions and don't add up to anything. I want to start with a collaboration which is antithetical. Unexpected, but I came to approve. Passion and Resurrection. It's a traditional picture of humanity; with some psychology. The language is simple and stark. The monks acted out these operas themselves in the mass. Mallarme wrote: The future of theatre could be derived from the mass. Something ancient; taken from a great distance. The work starts in a mass; the priest becomes Caiaphas; who meets Judas. It ends in the mass. It repeats the events of the crucifixion and resurrection; brutality; and lyrical. Goes with the architecture of Winchester, where it was done. The florid 15th C resurrection and the austere 11C Passion. The singing participation of the audience is important. The plainsong provides the material of the piece. It can be done in a theatre. This is what I want to talk about; already a big step. Each singer has a halo, reflecting medieval thinking; an aura of harmonics, a spectral harmonic series; the string harmonics are stuck on a spectrum; the more sacred the character the richer the spectrum. Quite naïve, medieval. There is a serial structure interwoven in the pentatonic plainchant. Resurrection=a new world - rises out of the bass linearity of the Passion. The axis is in the middle; it floats outwards in mirror symmetry. Consider this director in a production in Austria at a monastery - it has the feeling of a theatre: Paul Flieder. He has done productions at quite a high level; serious; his view was how can we make this gospel story relevant or live. What do people believe in now? He said Jonathan Harvey is not tainted by Nazism. This is a man who can write singing and beautiful melodies and not be embarrassed. This shadow of Nazism means we cannot be the same as you, who escaped that experience. The Christ in the resurrection is important, a white robed figure who magically appears out of the architecture of the cathedral; Flieder decided to make Christ invisible, just a voice. The other big difference is Judas, who dies soon after he tries to give the 30 pieces of silver back; this is all cut out; Judas continues to haunt the opera like a hunted man. He looks at the action; usually invisible to the characters on stage but watching. At the end he comes again across Pilate, a cynical, brutal characterisation. When he has fulfilled his function, Pilate casually kills him - so much for Judas. That was quite different from how I imagined it. Just as the crowd is about to strike Judas in anger, the gentle voice of Jesus is heard, ”For lo, I am with you always”. The crowd desists. All the soloists sing pentatonic music; behind this Paul Flieder had men in black shifting the blocks until a wall is formed. Then you see Pilate appear to eliminate Judas. In that silence you see the brass stand up. They make a tritone blast; this tritone is taken to the outer edges of the cathedral and out into the street (in former productions). They did that, but whereas I thought of it taking the Gospel as a challenge, here a wall is built and something is written on the wall. It's a poem by Paul Celan; his best known poem. A cry of the heart. Black Milk of Daybreak ... we drink and we drink. Todesfuge; a harrowing poem. The whole meaning of the opera is changed by this; it becomes a statement about the victimisation of the repentant Judas. In a sense Judas became the principal character. Flieder wanted to make it something that he could believe in. I was shocked - it was not in my opera score when Pilate appeared and executes Judas. There was no conversation between us about this. An antithetical collaboration. The more I saw it, the more I found it interesting; I thought: how does this relate to our world where most are agnostics? How does it relate to contemporary events? So that's an interesting collaboration for me. The next collaboration is a piece of dance, a commission to write music to a film. Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker; had the idea to ask ten composers to write music to ten short films originally inspired by Les Noces. A summery idyllic quality to the film. Filmed by Thierry de Mey. A brilliant film maker. Projected on three screens; not all showing simultaneously. A composer of mathematical disposition; he cuts in a composerly or mathematical way. We were sent the film; it wasn't just film music; the idea was the players would be in front of the screen; the musicians would follow the timing but it was reversing the usual dancers on stage, tape played... an interesting inversion. Some were more exact than others. Magnus Lindberg was very precise. Francesconi said each language is a universe of its own; he did most of his actual writing with the film off. Avoided temptation to write 'subtitles'. Wrote the piece as an expansion of one choreographic movement. Steve Reich waited for a good entry point; at a leap point his music leaps in. Otherwise the music followed its own logic. My approach was different. I followed the film carefully. Closely. The cutting of film was important. Three girls moving among the trees, the shadows of the leaves on their bodies, very dryad-like, wood-nymph like. The trees are signified by big vertical octaves and tendril like ornaments. Simple; two harmonies; a spectral harmony and a pentatonic harmony govern the language. There was a sense of being engulfed by the screens and the sound at the first performance. There was amplification; but I didn't use electronics. Thierry de Mey added natural sounds later (breathing, footsteps). I trusted him. The steps were done to Stravinsky first. They had a record player going in the parks where they filmed it, so the dancers knew what to dance to. But Thierry de Mey didn't listen to the music when cutting, he used his formal instincts. I composed the music to the film. The film was a 'found' object. I just present it as, for me, an interesting collaboration which raises issues. Everyone might think I worked closely with the dancers, but no, not at all. Another example from dance. A real collaboration. 'At a cloud gathering'. Susan Buirge. Choreographer in Paris, now in Japan. She always makes her dances based on ancient cultures. She set up an Asiatic institute for dance in Japan. She said, which culture shall we take? I said Tibet. We decided to go to North India monasteries which are flourishing. We went at New Year to visit the purification ceremonies; 3 hours; extremely elaborate. Most dances were laid down in the 15th century by the fifth Dalai Lama. It is codified and highly complex. It takes a year to rehearse. I can't begin to explain the symbolism of the dances. They showed us in detail how this worked. They were some of the most peaceful and open people. It was a deep collaboration because I have gone into Tibetan Buddhism. We took in all the space, and architecture. Susan's work is influenced by abstract minimalism, Sol de Witt. The gestures are symmetrical and calculated. There are with six dancers and a percussionist who is part of the action. The percussionist is with electronics. I worked with Gilbert Nouno from IRCAM. It sounds like realtime but because of the exigencies of the touring, realtime treatment was recorded; the percussionist has a click track in his ear to pick up the signal from the computer. It sounds as if it’s treated through the loudspeakers. We will hear the spatialised shells; and then the six isorhythms which make the main section which lasts about five or six minutes. [The extract was from part three of the piece]. The rhythmic structure is clear. Repeating the same rhythm, each time just changing a little bit. The most direct result of my visit to Tibetan monasteries was Body Mandala, which I wrote shortly after that. The orchestral sounds are direct quotations at times from the ceremonial music. These are peaceful people; their music is ferocious because it's purification. Fourth collaboration is Speakings.This is the second piece in a tryptych: Body Mandala, the first piece, is a purification of the body. Speakings - is purification of speech; purification of mind is the third one, called …towards a Pure Land. Speakings was a collaboration with IRCAM, the most close collaboration of my life. I wanted to make the orchestra speak. For a month or two they said they had no idea. Even the top scientists were baffled. This is the sort of thing IRCAM is good at. They are leaders in speech synthesis and analysis. I wanted to make the orchestra speak because I wanted an evolution myth, a being beginning to speak like a baby, or first man. Some people say there was a proto-language which came before music and speech bifurcated out of it. A unified expressive sound system. What is this point so far back where speech is music? We can analyse speech and write it out as music. This is what we decided to do. First movement is baby. Second movement is ordinary speech. Third movement is purification of speech. We randomly sampled all kinds of speech from the radio. We made musical scores of these segments by computer analysis. We used Melodyne - a pop music programme which analyses syllables. It has glissandi. With Open Music we used partial analysis. Shows fundamental and overtones, and printed a score. But no formants or timbre. That's where linear predictive synthesis programming came in. This analyses the timbre of speech. So when we say A E I O U these are fixed things no matter how high or low the voice - windows high up in the spectrum. Can change ten times a second. We got the computer to do it; play in a bit of speech; get the analysis of speech the timbre; the formants; then resynthesise it. We used the analysis to impose on the orchestra. So the orchestra is playing music, which comes in through mics. Treated by the flickering formant structures. Then out of the speakers comes the marriage of the two: the stored speech and the orchestral sound currently being played, you hear the orchestral sound live, and the speaking orchestra from the speakers. The orchestra is resonating to the formant structures. So there are several levels: the first was to write speech-like music at random. We recorded this with small instrumental groups and then treated the sounds through experiments; a wonderful collaboration. You can hear the actual transcription of speech (using , for instance, a trombone which can make glissandi); it's an objective computer transcription of Paul Schofield reading the Waste Land. You can also play the words using Midi, and move the sounds across the space, to create dialogues. The Royal Albert Hall was the first venue. At the end we arrive at the mantra which is a kind of purification of speech: OM AH HUM. The Mantra used is the most ancient, said to be the origin of all speech in Buddhism. That was orchestrated according to an IRCAM programme. You feed in my voice saying 'OM' and it gives you fifteen instruments to capture exactly that spectrum. I said it needs to get louder; so for each of the 22 playings more instruments are added. All done by computer assisted composing with unbelievable refinement. Just the sound of speech, not the meaning. If we listen to someone speaking an unknown language do we understand it as musical meaning? Often. Crucial imaginatively is the search for a lost past, or wanting a unity, we want to get a grasp of something beyond the four score years and ten that we actually live. Collaboration with IRCAM, the institution. My collaboration has evolved. It's always upfront in contemporary research. The early years were fascinating, everything was so new. But it remains fascinating. It's always a matter of people. If you have a good relation with people there, Gilbert Nouno in my case, then everyone is willing to give time. He's more of a jazz musician and improviser; very avant-garde in his thinking. He will improvise with the equipment for half an hour. And I will say ‘how did you do that. That's wonderful!’ He contributes a lot. The future is exciting. Real-time control of sound is more and more powerful. Spatialisation is exciting - you can control it in your fingers in real time. You can control complex movements of three spatialisations at the same time criss-crossing in metricised rhythms: all this becomes a new compositional parameter.

Wed 17 March. Caroline Wilkins.

Composer and theorist Caroline Wilkins discussed her projects: The Instrument in Space: on collaborations in the areas of music/sound theatre, intermedial, and radiophonic work.

Wed 3 March: Tim Hopkins

Director Tim Hopkins spoke about his current research.