Music as Performance: a place of fight and flight

Teresa Vila Verde, Portugal

www.teresavilaverde.com

Video 1. Trailer from Music or Performance? That is the Question by Teresa Vila Verde.

Envisioning music from a performance’s perspective represents an extraordinary platform to re-think, re-evaluate and re-enact music making in the present context. As Marvin Carlson said (2004, ix), performance is the process by which past forms of thinking and doing are adjusted and changed in the present, to answer the new motivations, needs and ways of living. To think about “music as performance” we need to challenge many ideas about the way music is typically thought, performed, perceived and studied by composers, musicians, listeners and researchers (a fight). But the benefits gained in this process are huge: we find a safe place to test new artistic models, new languages to represent ideas, new strategies to address the audience, and new modalities to interact with collaborators from a diversity of backgrounds (a flight).

As a musician with keen interest in the performance field, I will present in this paper my latest work, entitled “Music or Performance? That is the Question”, which intersects written and improvised music with live video, performance, theatre and autobiography. It involves the collaboration of five different-skilled persons, including a sound and a video technician, a light designer, a theatre director and a music performer, and aims to defy conventions about what a concert, a pianist and a woman is. 

This article is divided in three main parts: the first part intends to contextualize the work and give some information about my background as performer; the second part deconstructs the creative process of this multimedia work by describing, and showing through video, some of its relevant moments. The third part will address more theoretical issues regarding the philosophical nature of the event, the authorial relationship between co-workers, the mode of perception by the viewers, the strategies to document a live event for further investigation and diffusion, and the way it connects with contemporary culture and life style.

PART ONE: CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Figure 1. Photo from the Autobiology Moment section.

Music as Act

The work “Music or Performance? That is the Question” was commissioned by a Portuguese feminist organization, which asked me, as a musician interested in performance, to present an event at the first feminist festival in Portugal: feministizARTE. It was premiered in November 2009. After the invitation, I found myself with an exciting and, at the same time, frightening challenge to deal with. The first questions that came up to my mind were: 

1. What am I going to say about this? Which specific angle of this huge problematic will I tackle? 
2. How can I use music to make a personal statement about a social issue? 
3. Which kind of materials, skills, strategies and methods can I use?
4. And finally, what kind of impression or aesthetic experience do I want the audience to experience? How can I touch their patterns of thinking and of doing?

In sum, what I had to do here was a personal, a critical, a social and even political Act with Music. 

Performance is Action

This concern comes in line with my own research during the past six years, where I started exploring music from a performance’s perspective. Indeed, performance is, according to the Live Art Development Agency [1] and RoseLee Goldberg (2001, 9), an excellent platform to those artists who are not afraid to disrupt borders, break rules, defy traditions, and resist definitions; to those who are eager to find new artistic forms, new languages to express ideas; to those who wish to find new strategies for intervening in the public sphere; and to those who aim to draw freely from any kind of material as source of art-making (literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, architecture, painting, video, film, narrative, and slides).

Performance is about immediacy and reality. It takes the contemporary world as it is, and asks what does it mean to live here and now, and what are our responsibilities within it. By questioning the most unquestionable things, performance makes us aware of our socially shaped ways of thinking and of doing and, consequently, it naturally instigates us to change, to redefine, to challenge, to do, to act. So, performance is about (a critical!) acknowledgment and action. It is about fight and flight! And this passionate spirit fits very well with my temper as an artist and with my purpose at this specific event. Because, according to the Live Development Agency, the performance field has proven to be a powerful site to embody the struggles and expressions of those who are less visible, those who exist or work outside the mainstream culture, like many contested identities as women, gay, non-white people, and disabled artists.

Tools and skills at my disposal

Because of this specific context, I thought that nothing would be more natural than getting inside my own experience as a woman to build up my performance. So, autobiography would be at its heart. Moreover, it would be my chance to take further the experiments I had done a few months before in Glasgow at the workshop Autobiology: Biography and Biology in Live Performance. This workshop, designed by Curious [2], explored the visceral and the “gut feelings”, the connections between the body and the mind, biology and autobiography, and aimed to generate autobiographical material "straight from the heart". Here, I have been challenged to take off all ‘acting’, all role-playing, all artifice from me, and to present myself as I was, in real life. The purpose was not to make a poetical, rhetorical or metaphorical discourse, but to establish a strong connection with the audience, based on trust, honesty, straightness and vulnerability. These were completely new tools for me, as a musician.

Adding to this, I could count on my previous experience in jazz singing, in experimental music, in musical improvisation, in creative body, and in theatre, which I contacted informally along the past years. All these experiences enlarged my toolbox as a performer and changed completely my way of thinking and presenting music to others. Step by step, and in connection with my theatre colleagues, I started making short performances where written music was enlaced with a variety of theatrical and technical devices, aiming to assist the reception of more experimental music. By joining together all these experiences and know-how I started forging a purpose and a script of actions.

PART TWO: DECONSTRUCTION OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Figure 2. Photo from the Deconstruction of the piano - George Crumb section.

What to say?

After reading some books about the feminist matter (Beauvoir 1949, Héritier 2008), which basically tried to explain why Western societies were organized according to a male ideology and why women stood subservient to it, I decided to ask with this project if it was not possible to live in a world where no one tries to dominate the other, but instead people strive to achieve a common ground by maintaining, accepting, and dialoguing with their differences. In other words, what happens when typical opposing forces work together to reach a new form of order or a new kind of understanding? Why can’t individual differences, styles and expressions be seen as something exciting and even necessary to provide the world with more alternatives and solutions, instead of being considered as threats to the supposed “natural state of things”? By thinking this way, I could easily tackle the feminist matter using autobiography and music as the two kernel elements of the work. But to do this, I needed a theatre adviser, so I asked Vitor Alves da Silva to join me.

How to say it?

Most sections I show here have already been tested in public, mostly during my Master. I combined this existing material with new one created during the workshop, and reconfigured it all to adapt it to a new purpose, space and technical requirement. 

From now on, the reader must accompany the description of the following sections with the screening of the video “Helsinki, EoA”, available at www.teresavilaverde.com.

Section 1: Beethoven revisited by a clusters’ lover

Our first intention was to demonstrate, musically and visually, that a dialogue or even a fusion between two opposite languages was something not only desirable but possible and achievable. Secondly, we wanted to prove that it was an extraordinary path to discover new ways of expression, new kinds of meaning, and new sources of subjective experience, as John Tusa argues in his book The Janus Aspect (2005, 3). To articulate this idea we used a much known piece by Beethoven to illustrate the classical style and a chord taken from a composition of the American composer George Crumb to exemplify the contemporary style. As you can see in the video, there is a sudden intrusion of this fuzzy chord, which wants to play and dialogue with Beethoven’s piece. First, there is a surprise and a refuse to do that by the performer, but later, the initial fears are dropped and replaced by curiosity. Only then, music is free to happen. 

Our main purpose here is not to devaluate or destroy one style in order to promote another one, but to valuate all musical styles: classical, contemporary or improvised. Indeed, there is a mixture of these three elements in this section. So, this is not a fight between titans, but a game, a play between different personalities, which fuse perfectly with each other and create a new aesthetic object and experience.

Section 2: Deconstruction of the piano - George Crumb

In this section, we wanted to deconstruct the established assumption that the only sound sources of the piano are the keys. The fact is that this instrument has a powerful physical and visual potential that can and should be explored. More, its inner materials, its visceral space, its physical components can also be very rich sources of music. Of course this idea is not new, but it is still a prevailing assumption among those non-familiar with the experiments of the last 50 years, especially in America (e.g. John Cage and his followers). I simply used this historical fact or achievement to make my own version of what a total piano is. So, I decided to improvise with the opening theme of George Crumb’s piece called Gargoyles, taken from Makrokosmos II, which naturally drove me to play the piece itself and the next two ones [3].

The live video, here designed by Joana Fernandes Gomes, is used to explore visually the instrument. Indeed, the video is an extraordinary tool to (1) magnify the physical presence of the piano both on stage and on people’s senses; (2) to give to the audience information that usually they do not have access from their seated position; (3) to highlight the physical contact between the performer’s body and the piano’s body which is responsible for the sound they hear.

But its role goes farther than this, because the video has a poetic of its own. It generates a whole set of colorful, subjective, dreamy, and stunning images, which are tightly connected with the musical act, and which contribute to the aesthetical fruition of the viewer. And this closes the first half of the performance.

Section 3: Autobiology moment

The second part of the show begins with a kind of confession, where I describe myself as someone that did not fit into what others expected of her, both as a woman and as a pianist. I describe myself as someone that, at some point of her life, stopped forcing herself to meet the aspirations of others and started looking for her own expression and place in today’s world. This autobiographical discourse starts in childhood, by describing its natural fears, expectations and dreams, and ends presenting the woman I am now. 

The story of my life was delicately interwoven with improvised music, chosen after many intuitive rehearsals, where I experimented several ways to connect my life experience with music. Each rehearsal, each improvisation set, was tapped on my laptop and, afterwards, was carefully analyzed in order to choose the right words, the adequate music materials to enlace those words, and the overall mood to convey to the audience. After defining these parameters, I left enough room to play with them as I wanted at any time. Therefore, my score joins a strong structure with great freedom. 

This kind of method to find new formats of creative work is very similar to what happens with Meredith Monk’s style of working. In an interview that she gave to the Contemporary Music Review (Monk 2006, 25/5) Meredith Monk says that she is “interested in combination of freedom and rigor”. Like her, I have a kind of score, made of guideposts, to help me go from one point to another, but the way I travel that path, is always different in each performance, depending on my mood, inspiration and individual work at that time. 

Visually, we wanted it as naked as possible so that nothing would distract people’s attention from the musical-speech, so there was no video and the lights were as neutral as possible.

Section 4: ‘Round Midnight moment

At some point of my exploration for more flexible ways to make music, I contacted with jazz as a singer and later with more experimental ways to make music. To exemplify this, I did a very personal version of a famous tune of Thelonious Monk, called ‘Round Midnight: its beginning is shown in the video. 

To do such a thing with the voice, I must have absolute control over my body, my breath, and myself, but also over the sound that comes out from the loudspeakers. The sound I hear is mine but, at the same time, it is completely different from my acoustic voice, because of the technical sound effect added by the sound technician (João Dias Carvalho), which transformed my natural voice into a new instrument! Here, I simply played with this difference.

Section 5: I feel, therefore I am

Inspired by Antonio Damasio’s ideas about the links between body, emotions and consciousness (1999), in this section I intended to show what happens when we engage with the world in a conscious, curious and creative manner. It also helped me to reinforce the leitmotif of this show, which is to propose an integrationist, embracing, and holistic perspective, instead of a formalistic and hierarchical perspective, to understand the world we live.

Section 6: The grain of me

The final set of the performance was inspired by what Roland Barthes called ‘the grain of the voice’, which means the voice in its integrity, concreteness, and nakedness. In other words, he is interested in a vocal sound that was not attached to any word or concept, an idea very akin to what Meredith Monk thinks and makes creatively in some of her vocal works, as “Dolmen Music” [4]. The point is that both these personalities inspired me to build my own expression of music: an expression that mixtures voice and piano playing, sound and body movement, structure and freedom, composition and improvisation. And here ends the performance part of the video (edited by Priscilla Fontoura).

What about scenario and clothing?

The light designer (Margarida Alves) suggested creating a kind of “living room” on the stage, by mixing the lighting devices with furniture and lamps from our home. This way, the stage would be converted into a private and intimate space, where the most daring confessions, secrets and emotions could naturally flow. 

In terms of clothing, each section was symbolically closed by the taking off a piece of clothing. This action meant to undress the many layers that we acquire along our life; layers constituted by taboos, ready-made ideas, accepted knowledge and conventional wisdom. I believe that to find our own expression, we need to reconsider our past and to take off some layers that do not help us being what we want to be.

What about rehearsals?

Due to the very demanding technical requirements, there were no rehearsals before the show. Instead, there were a lot of talks during which we discussed technical and creative possibilities. Only on the day before the show we set up everything and did a long technical rehearsal. At this point I did not care about anything else except music. I gave my collaborators all the space they wanted to work and just expected from them comfort, surprise and beauty. And that is what happened! Naturally, this way of operating only works when you are surrounded by persons who are not afraid to take risks, who train themselves to make quick decisions and to adjust their actions whenever necessary; so flexibility is primordial within this context. I would never reach this point of nakedness and of safety without their suggestions and professionalism. And this opens the curtain for the next section that will address some implications of working like this. 

PART THREE: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS

Figure 3. Photo taken at the end of the show.

What about authorship?

Performance is basically a collaborative system. It challenges hierarchies and sees each event as a sum of contributions made by composers, technicians, producers, choreographers, managers, web-designers, public and media agents, as well as performers. Each of these persons is not just a doer, but is a creator, a composer of her/his own. 

Specifically in this work, everyone was stimulated to give a personal contribute to a common goal, and this contribution should be handled with the highest responsibility and engagement possible. So, we all were authors. Although we had great autonomy to work just as we wanted, we also had to work with each other, which meant that we had to negotiate constantly our space of action. So leadership was always shifting among us. At first I was leading the team, by being responsible for the main idea to convey and designing how to convey it; but the more we approached the live moment, the more I was directed by them. For instance, they decided about the scenery, about the visual imagery to explore, about my actions and movements on stage, etc. Therefore, authority was fluid; it was shared between us.  

Another important aspect to remember here is that, instead of looking for ‘perfectness’, we looked for something that would work in terms of event and of audience. The audience was a driving force for us. We constantly questioned how the performance could perform meaning to them, how we could reach their subjective world with a very person-based work, how they would perceive and experience the event. These are very interesting questions to me, as a performer, and lead me to a short commentary on musicology.

What about musicology?

Seeing music from a performance’s perspective can open a new set of questions in musicology: because performance puts emphasis not so much in the work/text itself but on the process by which it performs social meaning (Cook 2001); because it emphasizes the eventness of a musical event (Gritten 2006); and because it enquires how music interacts with the outside world, and how it relates with other disciplines and practices. All these phenomenological questions require new methodologies of investigation and are still out there waiting to be tackled by music researchers, performers and, possibly, philosophers. 

What about the audience’s perception?

Many seminal authors on Performance Studies, as Richard Schechner (2006) and Marvin Carlson (2004), have emphasized the idea that performance does not value the object itself, but how we ‘experience’ that object. Because performance highlights the ‘art experience’ and ‘presence’ it implies at least four aspects that I want to emphasize here. 

• Firstly, there must be a consciousness of what is happening at each instant, an awareness of the ‘art experience’ itself. In other words, the audience is invited to enjoy each moment intensively without knowing what will happen the second after. Consequently, expectation is always kept very high. So, performance calls for a moment-by-moment perception.
• Secondly, to understand and savour the event, to catch the maximum information as possible, spectators must activate all their senses, and both their sensorial and cognitive parts must work together in a very sophisticated way to understand what is happening. So, performance calls also for a synaesthetic or a multi-sensory perception.
• Thirdly, during several interviews choreographers such as Pina Bausch or the Portuguese Rui Horta pointed out that spectators can feel in their own body what they see other bodies doing on stage. For instance, when we see on stage someone touching someone else, this can trigger our own memory and experience of touching and/or being touched by someone else. They argue that there is a kind of kinaesthetic empathy between bodies, that there a close link between the perception of something from outside of us and our inner world, which is a very interesting point to being aware of, as a performer. Corroborating this empirical knowledge there are some philosophic and scientific studies, explored for example by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze, Jonathan Crary or Antonio Damasio (all quoted in RoseLee Goldberg 2004, 180), which show that the transiency of performance is nevertheless pinned down and fixed by the afterimages we hold in our memory.
• And fourthly, because of the ephemeral nature of the performance, Tim Etchells [5] proposed to change the spectators’ status: instead of being typical listeners or viewers, they should be considered more as witnesses of once-made actions (quoted in Heathfield 2004, 9). Under these circumstances, Adrian Heathfield (2004, 9) stresses that frequently the spectators are trapped between two desires: the desire to savour each moment with intensity, and the desire to save that moment long after it has gone. And this leas us to another central question of this conference: how can we preserve what is ephemeral by nature? How does an original performance change with documentation and its future representations? Is there any hierarchical relationship between them?

What about future representations of the work?

About this issue, I challenge Peggy Phelan’s opening phrase of this conference: “Performance’s only life is present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representation of representations.” I understand her position, but for me the ‘present tense’ is not enough; we must strive to go beyond it and to perpetuate in the future what we have done in a specific time and space. Performance can and should be saved, recorded, documented and, afterwards, transformed into something else, into a new composition, into a new creative work, no matter whether it is a video, an installation, a film, a paper, a discussion or simply an informal talk. Like the performance itself, all these reconfigurations require great amount of inventiveness, of creative energy and time, of theoretical research, of economic effort, and require the expertise of professionals to suit the original work to a specific technology or context.

Usually my performances are documented in video and photography. I do this not only to get different angles of the same event, but also because they are very rich sources for future representations of that event. For instance, I usually produce short videos, as the one showed in this article, to make my work visible to a wider audience, through Internet. Naturally these videos never follow the linearity of the show. They are something completely different of that work; they have a language and rhythm of their own, and an audience of their own. 

Another strategy of mine is to talk in conferences and, here, I try to transform my presentation in a performance itself. A performance where I use my presence, my body, my voice, my clothing, as well as the technology available at that place, to share thoughts and ideas about something I care about. 

Strategies as these substantially transform and extend the original event, creating something altogether different. For that reason, more than discussing the ontological difference between them, it is far more interesting to me to see how a single and pure moment can reconfigure itself into multiple manifestations, adapt to new contexts, reach new audiences, and keep instigating curiosity, surprise, engagement, and questioning on them.

Why is performance a place of fight and flight?

The performance history has shown us that it is possible to find in-depth expressions by working between, across, and on the edges of clearly distinct styles. To be a ‘crossing-over’, John Tusa (2005, 17) reminds us that you have to be ready to take risks and to harness techniques and materials that you have never used before, aiming to achieve the traditional ends of deepened artistic expressions. And because you are not following the mainstream culture, you have to grasp by yourself for venues, festivals, audiences, conferences, and collaborators that are willing to take chances in non-canonical forms of art. So, within this context, it is vital that you have a quality of fearlessness. You have to be a fighter!

But, on the other hand, this is the only way we can be ourselves in this fast paced and media saturated society that we live in, where there is no time to think or reflect about everything that happens around us. In an era of infinite (both biological and digital) reproduction, of globalization and of sameness, performance calls our attention for our individual agency, for our specific cultural baggage, and reminds us of our responsibility as future-makers. Given that performance resists repetition, premeditation, convention, expectation and normalisation, it gives us a chance to make a personal, critical, active and even political commentary to contemporary world. And this is, for me, a wonderful flight!

Figure 4. Photo from the I feel, therefore I am section.

Notes

1. See its website at the end of this article.
2. A UK based performance group formed by Helen Paris and Leslie Hill. See their website at the end of this article.
3. The pieces played were the nº 7( Tora! Tora! Tora!) and the nº 8 (A Prophecy of Nostradamus) from George Crumb’s Makrokosmos Volume II.
4. Meredith Monk expresses very well her point about this issue in a documentary made by Peter Greenaway in 1983, as part of the "Four American Composers" séries. This documentary is available on Youtube. See its link at the end of the article.
5. The artistic director of the UK theatre company Forced Entertainment. See its website at the end of the article.

References

Barthes, Roland (1977). “The Grain of the Voice.” Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana Press, 179 – 189.

Beauvoir, Simone (1949). Le deuxième sexe I. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. 

Carlson, Marvin (2004). Performance. A Critical Introduction (2nd edition). New York and London: Routledge.

Cook, Nicholas (2001). “Between Process and Product. Music and/as Performance.” Music Theory Online 7/2. Retrieved January 10, 2009, from

http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.html.

Damasio, Antonio (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. A Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 

Goldberg, RoseLee (2001). Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson.

Goldberg, RoseLee (2004). “One Hundred Years.” Live Art and Performance. Adrian Heathfield ed. London: Tate Publishing, 176 – 181.

Gritten, Anthony (2006). “Music before the Literary. Or, the Eventness of Musical Events.” Phrase and Subject in Literature and Music. Delia de Sousa Correa ed. Oxford: Legenda, 21 – 33.

Heathfield, Adrian (2004). “Alive.” Live Art and Performance. Adrian Heathfield ed. London: Tate Publishing, 6 – 15.

Héritier, Françoise (2008). Masculin/Féminin II. Dissoudre la hiérarchie. Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob. 

Monk, Meredith (2006). “Meredith Monk.” Contemporary Music Review 25/5, 525 – 530.

Schechner, Richard (2006). Performance Studies. An Introduction (2nd revised edition). London: Routledge.

Tusa, John (2005). The Janus Aspect. Artists in the twenty-first century. London: Methuen.

Websites

Curious: www.placelessness.com

Forced Entertainment: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/

Live Art Development Agency: http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/

Peter Greenaway’s documentary about Meredith Monk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Xj3ID-ybw&feature=related.