- when it's a Diamond Curtain Wall, obviously.
Let's see... walls divide. They close off structures, forming hard boundaries; they prevent free movement.
None of that applies here, of course. Here the "wall" is more of a backdrop, against which any number of extraordinary unplanned events might take place.
I have been listening to - among many other things - the monster NBH set 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012*. What this set shows us, above all, is that the traditional format for one of these meetings - a trio, or possibly a quartet** - is really not necessary. Two players, plus the interactive SuperCollider software, are the only essential ingredients when it comes down to it. For whatever reason, it took several years for that to be understood; and this is not to say that there is anything wrong with having trios or quartets use this musical strategy (far from it) - simply that, if it had been assumed for the first few years that three was the minimum number of players required to exploit the model successfully, that turned out not to be the case at all***.
[Actually, there is probably no reason why a soloist-plus-SuperCollider setup wouldn't work... I just don't know of anyone having tried it yet. Still, that does become something essentially different at that point because it would no longer be based around human interaction.]
What you do need, in principle, is voices which have a good timbral range - hence two of the duet partners in this expanded set are fairly obvious choices: a vocalist (Kyoko Kitamura) and a violinist (Erica Dicker). The third choice is rather less obvious, though hardly unexpected: bassoonist Katherine Young had played in DCWM groups before, so had prior familiarity with the system's possibilities; it's just not the most... expressive instrument in any orchestra#, being rather a voice which is deployed typically for the one timbre it can naturally produce, the distinctive purring/buzzing tone (which other woodwinds don't normally have in their range, although as we know, saxophonists with enough technical skill can manage it). A brave choice, for this project? Let's find out.
It's worth just pointing out something very obvious here, as well: that's right, all three duet partners were female. B. has made a real manifesto point of wanting to encourage more female practitioners in creative music (as in other walks of life), and in the case of this project, all he was doing was giving extensive opportunity to three musicians whose skills and abilities he already knew well - they just happened to be women. So it both is and isn't a social statement: insofar as the decision fits a previously-stated intention, it can be interpreted as a sociopolitical act, but really I think it's more just a case of trying to normalise something which B. feels should never have been anything other than normal in the first place. A series of duets with three female players needn't be any more remarkable than the same with male players, after all. (And DCWM meetings with all-male personnel do exist.)
Something else of note about the recordings in this monster set - something new to me, at least - is that in certain cases the software is used to create a "non-standard" backing. In its earlier days - and pretty much ever since, for that matter - SuperCollider had a fairly typical sound to it, mainly seeming to consist in simultaneous electronic pitches which may resonate together... or may clash, sometimes with head-splitting results. The software is interactive - whatever that really means in this context## - and does change subtly during the course of a performance; and live sets of this stuff typically last around an hour, the same as most GTM concerts did by this stage (by which I mean the second half of the 2000s). But here, in the case of several of the twelve long explorations, what we get instead is a decidedly non-varying soundscape, based around a specific "envelope" or sound, creating its own distinctive ambience which is notably different from what we would usually get. Tracks three and five, for example, feature low, rumbling vibrations which never really change very much but unfold like distant storms. (If this sounds dull, it isn't; rather, it's extremely effective.) Track six uses a mixture - from the outset - of typical frequencies and blarts or squelches. Track seven uses a "bubbling" sound, which at times comes across as like hearing an explosion in slow motion. The two most experimental approaches, perhaps unsurprisingly, are saved for the third duo, where the two woodwinds are backed on track ten by sped-up echoes of themselves, apparently - the overall effect being akin to spending the best part of an hour on the edge of a swarm of bees, or inside an insect hive - and on track twelve by sped-up human speech, incomprehensible but identifiable as such. This enhanced backing does work particularly well with the bassoon, but in truth, although the latter instrument might be thought of as a useful addition in a quartet, but unsuitable for a smaller grouping, I didn't find any of the twelve performances tedious or lacking in variety. Like I say, two players is all that you really need...
Now, what I really haven't figured out at all is the way(s) in which the scores/territories are negotiated. In the "old days" - where we got the details of the composition at all - it would be just one opus number, always subdivided by a letter: Comp. 323a for example, or 323c. I never had more than a hazy idea of what that actually meant: was 323 a series, like 40 or 69 or one of the solo books? Or was it essentially a single territory, through which a number of different paths could be taken? (That was always a possibility, even if the "different paths" aspect was always also true of GTM, for which the opus numbers never have letters affixed to them.) Later on, this got enhanced - and complicated - by the addition of second, third, fourth... territories: I first became aware of this only last year, as far as I remember, when I heard the Brazilian release
Ao Vivo Jazz Na Fábrica, in which the two main sets each incorporate five territories. In each case, one of these five is a non-DCWM piece; but the others... well, this is where it really threatens to become very messy because if the release information ("track listing"###) is correct, set one took in four different subdivisions of Comp. 366 (plus the GTM structure 214^)... and what does that actually indicate? Four different (semi-)prescribed paths through the same giant territory, or shorter readings of four different compositions? Even knowing that 366 ran as far as 366g in terms of its variants, I was already reluctant to entertain the idea of these representing separate, full-blown compositions...
... and by the time I got a proper look at the NBH box set we are dealing with here - where some of the subdivisions run all the way up to 364j, 365k and even 366m - well, surely even a composer as driven and prolific as the maestro can't have been writing parallel sets of up to thirteen different full-length compositions (knowing that not all of them would even get played, necessarily). Or would he?! I simply don't know. All I can do is guess -
- nor does even the above set out the entirety of the problem. You see, we also have at least some of the opus numbers interpreted by Falling River Music quartets - and these look horribly familiar. Admittedly (as I have lamented previously) we don't have proper titles for the two official FRM sextets; but just the four sets for which we do have titles present an enigma. If we are to believe the information on the official Bandcamp page(s) - and I shan't take it as gospel by any means, but it's all we have to go on for the time being - then Vol. 3 of the FRM quartets is Comp. 365a, which is also the primary territory for track/disc 9 of the Duets box. Even if we did not have this dead-on match, just the knowledge (...) that Comp. 365 (for example) may be used for two entirely different and distinct strategies - and the FRM pieces do sound completely different - is enough to confuse matters a great deal further. Regardless of how much of the score is in graphic notation, we know that any of these longer works contains a fair proportion of written lines, and the times at which players combine their attacks to play the same line confirms this; so it's not merely a matter of an amorphous, pictorial score which can be read one way if the strategy for the occasion is DCWM and another way entirely if it's FRM. No, much as it frustrates me to have to admit it - at this point, fifteen years after I heard DCWM - all I have is questions and more questions when it comes to this stuff.
These are not even the only questions; also, while I'm at it, the secondary/tertiary materials for quite a few of the DCWM sets are GTM pieces, but I can't say I was ever really aware of that while listening to them (even if my attention was rarely undivided on these occasions). Which aspects of those scores are being deployed? Even yet still further questions... but... nevertheless... it's not quite true to say that all I have is questions. There is always the music, after all. Immersed in that, I don't find myself worrying over details so much. And that's just as well, since I have no intention at this point of delving into any of these twelve readings with a view to unpacking the details..! No, but I have really enjoyed hearing them and I'm sure I shall do again. C'est cela qui compte, enfin...
* I don't have the physical box set, but it's not yet sold out... more realistically, it's available for download via the Bandcamp page; in the meantime, if you can't find them on the usual platforms, the tracks can be streamed from Bandcamp (though perhaps not indefinitely)
** I'm not aware of any DCWM group larger than a quartet. Anybody?
*** After these performances were recorded, the duo experiment was repeated at least once... not quite a case of the genie being out of the bottle, but at least it had been established beyond doubt that it would work...
# Hence I suppose the scarcity of jazz.creative musicians on this instrument, despite the pioneering example of Karen "Mrs Lyons" Borca.
## If I seem to be casting doubt on the idea of "interactive" software there , all I mean by that is that the sound doesn't generally seem to vary much. Rather, we get this inherently quite complex backdrop against which the instrumentalists navigate the score(s) and improvise, but it is seldom (if ever?) the case that the backing alters significantly in the light of what the humans are playing.
^ Comp. 214 was the last of the Yoshi's "ninetet" compositions. It's been used - or parts of it have - in other contexts since then. Of course, any piece can be made to fit anywhere - this much, at least, we know...
1 comment:
Something I forgot to put in this post - yet another unanswered question: like McC S (in his last post), I wouldn't say I could aurally tell the difference between one of the new Lorraine pieces and a DCWM performance. The trio concert
with Adam Matlock and Susana Santos Salva from Prague, 2021 linked in that recent post is billed as DCW, and certainly sounds the way we might expect music in that category to sound; but then, as I just highlighted, not all DCWM sounds like "classic" DCWM. When was the last time *before* 2021 that B. gave a performance of this type? Is it not more likely to have been an early version of what turned into Lorraine? Just more questions, like I say. (In my case at least, the blog is still to a large extent the work of someone trying to learn about the music JUST by listening to it... that does tend to leave a lot of questions!)
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