‘An expansion of the admissible‘: the embodiment of music / sound within a shared intermedial performance space
Caroline Wilkins, Composer/performer/PhD candidate, Brunel University, W. London.
Introduction
The title is taken from a quotation by the composer Jonathan Harvey: “With live electronics… two worlds are brought together in a theatre of transformations. No-one listening knows exactly what is instrumental and what is electronic anymore. Léger de main deceives the audience as in a magic show…When they lack their connection to the familiar instrumental world electronics can be inadmissibly alien, other, inhuman, dismissable (like the notion of flying in a rational world). When electronics are seamlessly connected to the physical, solid, instrumental world an expansion of the admissible takes place and the ‘mad’ world is made to belong”. [1] This phrase, the ‘expansion of the admissible’ refers then to a ‘potential in combination’, an ‘extension of possibilities’. To ‘admit’ means to let in, allow, accept as valid, acknowledge, leave room for. So this begs the question - who admits?
Let me begin by asking what happens in the shared intermedial space of performance? I’d like to show an excerpt from a video of a collaborative work ‘Zaum: Beyond Mind’ [2] (see Figure 1.) created by two composer/performers – myself and Oded Ben-Tal, a specialist in electronic music who is currently lecturing at Kingston University in the UK. It involves voice, bandoneon, interactive electronics, choreography and lighting. This excerpt reveals clearly the performance situation of live electronics and acoustic sound, the moment of performance.
Figure 1. Photo from ‘Zaum: Beyond Mind’ showing wireless & contact microphone leads.
Stemming from Old French the term ‘par fournir’ means ‘to furnish’, in Anglo-French ‘parfourmer’ implies ‘to execute, go through, carry into effect, be an agent of, a practitioner’. It is, then, an incarnation of the performative, an ‘event’ as opposed to a ‘work’. With regard to the audience, who are clearly visible in this video excerpt, their audio-visual perspective within this ‘ambient’ space is shared with one of the performers. Seated on comfortable floor cushions with a glass of wine in the middle of the performance area, they are situated in a comfortable, participative environment in which their perception will shift constantly. The public is then engaged in creating its own personal version of the work. My co-author and performer Oded, who enters the space at a later moment, is not only concerned with synchronising and timing the live electronics and making live modifications within pre-written parameters, but also engaging in active listening and eye contact with myself. There is a conscious play of tension between our two characters throughout the piece, a play of power and control over our theatre of sound.
From my perspective, the process of performance involves interacting with live electronics in an embodied form. Working closely with responses to one’s own generated sound became a fascinating and highly complex affair, demanding a strong sense of timing, of acting and reacting to my electronic virtual ‘counterparts’ in a constant flow of dialogue. There is also an inherent sense of ‘play’ with the live electronics, of imitation and variation, an interaction between playing an instrument or vocalising and ‘rebounding’ from the response. As a performer I have a sense of control of the result, although there can, and should be, some unexpected results. But this live situation demands multiple listening and responding tasks. Because of the nature of the modified sound source a certain ‘distancing’ takes place when I hear it in relation to my own sound. This spatial-sonic voice/instrument is strange but somehow related. I am communicating with a familiar source that has become an ‘other’; displaced, altered, its changed character has taken on a fragmentary, other-dimensional aspect as the ‘electronic woman-voice/instrument.’ Interesting is to further delimit that borderline during performance and modify the already modified live electronics, this by slight shifts of instrumental and vocal colour, so that the resulting sound sequences are constantly changing, subtle, complex, like multiple mirrors. However, it seems vital to maintain an observable connection otherwise the dramatic relationship will be lost to the audience.
It is necessary to include the ‘extended’ instruments in space - in this case the electronic bandoneon and the electronic voices - in relation to those of the performer: virtual instruments that interact with the two live components in real time, virtual extensions of the performer. Their relation is once-removed, alienated by a process of modification of the original sound source. This dissimilarity allows for more ‘play’ on the part of the live performer, freed from any constraints of direct imitation or variation and faced instead with a palette of possible responses, some of them unexpected. Important is the sense of ‘local control’ on my part, which means being able to hear the balance between my own sound and that of my counterparts. Another factor is ‘gestural nuance’, allowing interpretive subtleties which bring an inherently human aspect to the relationship. There is a close dialogue between the multiple instrumental ‘bodies’ breathing, the one physical, (voice / bandoneon), the others virtual, (their electronic counterparts). In a sense the live body becomes ‘animated’ by the virtual in a chain of overlapping sound stimuli, so that their borders cross in a constant flow of multiple layers.
So where does ‘authority’ stand in relation to this performance situation? (on a practice-based level). The Latin origins of the word ‘author’ – auctor, augère, auct – mean to increase, originate, promote. The answer lies in collaborative ‘play’ during both preparation & performance processes. Here are some examples of tools, notes, analyses, recordings, inter-disciplinary notational methods & terminologies used in order to realise & develop our creative work, which has been made possible by technology. These range from recorded improvisation, to the ‘sound patch’ as a performance tool, to the analysis of interaction between electronic /and acoustic sound.
Figure 2. Notated analysis of interaction between live voice & electronics.
Figure 3. Text dramaturgy, A Landscape’ from ‘Zaum: Beyond Mind.’ taken from the Russian Futurist poetry of Alexei Kruchenyk entitled ‘Zaum in Tiflis’ (1919)
Figure 4. Gestural and vocal notation with actions & indications of expression.
Figure 5. Sound/space dramaturgy indicating performer/audience relationships. Reproduced with permission from Living Electronic Music, S. Emmerson, Ashgate 2007. Page 96.
“Embodiment mediates between technology and discourse by creating new experiential frameworks.” (Hayles 1999, 205) A dynamic partnership of humans & machines replaces the domination of the autonomous will; material becomes shared data, distributed cognition. This indicates a method of working together creatively as authors; as Hutchins (1995, 291.) points out: “former internalisation of thought is transformed into organised properties across malleable media.” According to Brandon LaBelle (2007, 289) authority stands aside: “Interaction is built on the belief that to remove the hand of the artist is to invite unexpected results.” During performance there is a ‘play’ between a live sound source, the electronics and the rebound, whose nature of interaction is so fast & spontaneous that the transformations themselves lead to new surprising areas, indicating a third element that goes beyond the determination of either collaborator. The role of embodiment in inter-disciplinary practice seems vital, offering a contextual, global approach, an inner ‘horizon’ and an acceptance of unconscious knowledge. In his ‘Outline of a Theory of Practice’ Pierre Bourdieu underlines the problem of an analysis that changes the kind of knowledge acquired. Fluid, contextual interconnections are formed into entities, sequences and instructions, the very nature of which are abstract. Instead he cites the possibility of understanding embodied knowledge without it having to be cognitively recognized as such. Its qualities of openness, ambiguity and change defy definition, pointing to a parallel problem in the analysis of inter-disciplinary work where existing paradigms are not always suitable in their application. Moreover, practice as research in hybrid forms of performance, media and technology is often concerned with new, un-nameable ground that demands spontaneous and appropriate invention skills in order to fully receive and understand the knowledge acquired.
So is this the unrepeatable, elusive, unique performance situation that goes beyond its authors or creators, in reference to Peggy Phelan’s belief that performance’s only life can be in the present? Yes, as an event it assumes its own authorship, changes each time due to chance constellations, and suggests future possibilities from that present (meaning instans in Latin.) Instantiated materiality and the interplay of practice & signs go to make up incorporation or embodiment. Michel de Certeau speaks of the relation between the individual and their appropriation of culture as articulation. Embodied articulation is inherently performative, reflecting the circumstances of the occasion and the person. It cannot disappear into information. Whereas the body is naturalised within culture, embodiment becomes so through an interaction with concepts of the body.
There has been a fundamental shift in authorship, where the subject is emergent, and which points to a shift in form with regard to the role of the musical score. Following on from the term Performance Writing I would like to propose that of Performance Composition, a form that serves as an inter-disciplinary performance text or script for others, such as the production team, to enter into. One that remains malleable, allows for (admits) changes without losing its intention and artistic integrity, and is based on the experience of multiplicity involved in the act of performance. It lies in a different time-space to that of the ‘vertical’ event, encompassing another horizontal plane that surrounds it. Here’s an example from one of the ‘Zaum: Beyond Mind’ songs:
Figure 6. Score example from ‘A Story’, the 1st of the songs in ‘Zaum’.
Conclusion
Given different performers, the working text is an important reference regarding the history of intentions behind its event. Thus the performance is allowed to change, to become itself ‘an expansion of the admissible’ authorized by all involved – performers, audience, composers & production team.
Caroline Wilkins, September 2010.
Notes
- Harvey, Jonathan (1999). The Metaphysics of Live Electronics. CMR 18/3, 79-82.
- see - http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/music/areas/intermedia/zaum
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~oded/Zaum/zaum.html
References
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: U.P.
de Certeau, Michel (1990). L’invention du quotidien 1. arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How we became Posthuman. Chicago: U.P.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge: MIT Press.
LaBelle, Brandon (2007). Background Noise. Continuum.
Phelan, Peggy (1993). Unmarked: The Politcis of Performance. London: Routledge.
