I have several things in the pipeline right now, including not one but two follow-up posts relating to specific aspects of the Thumbscrew album (the gift that keeps on giving...); but most of these are stalled in the planning stage, as I keep running into the same obstacle... or series of obstacles.
If a listener/collector is presented with, say, a live performance by an artist and is told only that it contains a number of different themes by Monk, it won't generally be too difficult to nail down the specifics. Indeed I remember doing just that, once upon a time, back in the Golden Age of Music Blogging: this was a time when I (along with numerous others) was online every night, feverishly exploring the new music blogs which were sprouting seemingly on a daily basis, trawling for downloadable goodies... and I came across a set which was listed very much as in the example above, a live performance (can't remember who by) in which the pianist ran through 15-20 different Monk themes in pretty rapid succession. Someone had posted a comment asking for help in identifying any of the themes, and as it happened I was ideally suited to this task at the time: I recognised all of the themes, could identify over half of them straight away and was very quickly able to pin down the others. With the right degree of familiarity, one could do the same with Ellington... Parker... Mingus... and so on.
Attempting to do the same thing with a performance based on works by Anthony Braxton is rather harder, in a sizeable proportion of cases.
Generally speaking, it's not overly difficult to do this with sets based exclusively on compositions from the four creative ensemble books - the 6, 23, 40 & 69 series - as most (if not quite all) of the pieces in question have readily identifiable written themes, which will always be quoted in such cases, however free the subsequent interpretations might go on to be. Some of the pieces turn up more frequently in the recorded canon than others; any friendly experiencer can probably identify Comp. 23d or Comp. 40f, but these have become almost staples. Some of the pieces are a lot more obscure; and some of them are teasingly similar to each other, so that even a listener with a fair degree of experience might end up confusing, say, Comps. 40b and 40m. But most of us have probably got enough recordings easily to hand that we can check this kind of thing pretty fast, and obtain a definite match.
This is by no means the case with all of B's work (just in case anyone was wondering).
I mentioned last time that I'd bought an online copy of the Leo release Ensemble Montaigne (Bau 4) 2013. This arrived after the Easter weekend, at which point my hopes were dashed for detailed liner notes explaining which territories were used in what way, etc (the main puzzle being the fact that Comp. 174 is listed first on the album, it being a piece written (primarily) for ten percussionists - and whilst the 2013 album does indeed feature ten players, that breaks down as five strings, four woodwinds and one brass, with nary an idiophone or membranophone in sight). There are liner notes, but they are pretty brief and go into no real details at all. As it happens, I don't have the official recording of Comp. 174 in any form, so I stand no chance of recognising it, or not without further research; but, again as mentioned in the last post, the other works which are listed in the performance include three which I had only very recently listened to - Comps. 94, 96 & 98, the same "highlights from the 90s" which I had written about briefly just before - and in principle, one would think I would at least be able to identify these in the 2013 performance.
Wouldn't that be nice? In practice, alas, I am some way away from being able to do any such thing. (I can at least say with certainty that at one specific point, the ensemble is clearly working from Comp. 96; I couldn't say for sure that the other two make an appearance, I just have to take that on trust for the time being. It's rather ironic that video performances of Comp. 98 can be confidently identified without hearing a note, just by observing the players and their relative positioning onstage; but it's much, much harder to identify musical interpretations of parts of the score, given a work of such length and complexity.) I mean, I may or may not ever be able to do this; possibly it will depend on whether I eventually learn enough music theory to be able to comprehend what I am hearing not just as organised sound, but as structure, capable of being transcribed.
The inherent difficulty with the three works named above is the same in each case: these are all long and complex compositions with multiple sections or phases, and without being told which parts of the scores were being utilised, it really would be some task to know when they are being "quoted" - or even whether they are, in fact, being quoted at all. Mistakes, you see, do also get made: this is the other big problem, the one nobody apart from me really wants to talk about.
Still, I thought, I might at least be able to identify the other named element of the performance, with a bit of research: Comp. 136. This seems to turn up a lot in the discography, especially in duo recordings, and I had already noticed that two albums which I bought last autumn both include it; surely a quick comparison of the duo interpretations with Reichman and Robair would sort that out for me? While I was at it, I could also see if I couldn't pin down Comp. 86 for future reference, even though that one is not incorporated into the Ensemble Montaigne recording.
But... Comp. 136 lasts just under seven minutes in the studio with Robair, despite being collaged with (of course) Comp. 96; live in concert with Reichman, it lasts almost twice as long - and it's not straightforwardly the case that the two performances are identifiable as the same primary territory. I need to go back and listen to those again, much more carefully, before I attempt any proper analysis of the 2013 piece. As for Comp. 86, there is no certainty that this is even the same piece on both duo albums, although that is what the track listing says in both cases; the graphic titles, however, say otherwise: they are not the same! One could go mad here. (Not even Jason Guthartz had picked up on that discrepancy, as far as I can tell: he had pointed out that Comp. 136 was misidentified as "Comp. 134" on the original vinyl issue of the duo set with Robair, but does not appear to have noticed the issue with Comp. 86, on one (or potentially both) of these albums*.)
Anyone who has read this far, then, has a pretty good understanding now of what I'm up against. The composition notes, where these are available (and Book E stops before we get anywhere near as high as 136 in the numbering system, though I can at least look into the question of Comp. 86), sometimes shed some light on proceedings, but in a lot of cases they basically serve only to deepen the confusion, since they - like all of B's prose writing - are written in his own philosophical language, which requires its own (quite difficult) work to penetrate. [There is nothing inherently wrong with that, B. having studied philosophy for his own degree - but it does mean that anyone heading for the composition notes in the hope of making things easier to understand is in for a bit of a shock.]
It's a bit of an uphill struggle, shall we say. That won't, however, stop me from making the attempt...
* Usually in such a case one would blame one or other of the labels for making a mistake... but with these two duo albums, it was the same frigging label - Music & Arts - which released both! Although... the Robair album originally came out on his own label, Rastascan (and the vinyl issue is credited to Robair/Braxton, not the other way round as was the case with the CD reissue)... perhaps here, then, is where the mistake was made? I should know more when I have a good look at the notes for Comp. 86, which should at least clear up the matter of which album carries the correct graphic title...
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