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Draft 1.

I will meet with Richard at the end of this week to discuss what I have...


-KP

Hokey Pokey

Today in Eurhythmics class I performed the third movement of a solo clarinet piece, Genzmer's Fantasie. The piece is very rubato and marked 'quasi parlando'. The point of the exercise was to see how the students would react to the piece. They used their bodies to show what they were hearing and feeling as I played the movement. I played the piece several times and watched as much as I could.

As we talked about our reactions, they, as listeners, and me, as the performer experiencing their reactions visually in front of me, I commented that it was interesting that from the very beginning their actions were exactly how I felt the piece. Was I controlling them or where they controlling me? This is a question that I, as a performer, am very interested in. Is what I am trying to communicate really transferring that well to my audience? Do I have control over how they hear the piece? I will be playing this piece for the class again when we have more time and I will try playing around with my musical message and see how that changes the reactions of the audience.

This is an issue that I believe has great relevance in our classical community as well as for all the arts. We are constantly striving to increase our audiences and support. If we can understand how our communication is translated to the audience I think that we can continue to build a strong audience and gain more support.

This is a question that is also relevant in my personal growth as a musician. The sensitivity of expression is something that takes great care and control. This is something that I have been working on this year in my lessons. As I can gain more understanding of how the audience reacts to my expression I will gain more sensitivity and control. And understand more about communication through music.

And that's what it's all about.

-Joelle

Moments are tiny experiences. Small. Instant.

So, again, I was that kid on the plane, except this time I was flying back to “the burgh” as I so lovingly have grown to call it.

So here’s my moment;

From the work that I did during the week, I decided that even the gesture I had created was too much. It was still made up of fragments that were joined together to create a bigger idea. I threw around the idea of just using the circle or just the triangle to define as my moment, but part of the intrigue is that I want to see what happens when these artists have to deal with the manipulation of these two parts fused together and read as one.

So I just tried to think of as many ideas as I could to manipulate this moment that I had created. I altered orientation, the size of the dot, whether it was an outline or filled in, the dimensions of the triangle (expanded one way but remaining consistent in the other direction), etc. Here’s what some of my sketches look like.


Notable; just under the asterisk statement (yes, I did spell “realize” with an “s”, it is a habit I picked up from a year of study in the UK), I knocked the figure on its side. It looks so musical! I immediately read it and realiZed the image musically. Up until then, I had teetered around through a number of different realizations in different media, comfortable flowing around all of the performance options. Directly to the right, I manipulated the image in order to see if distorting it in some way would effectively move my brain away from the musical gesture. I still see a musical gesture, but I can also imagine extensive ideas in other media.
Additional sketches more focused on patterns, shapes, and connection more than one image with itself.

These images came from still thinking about this cell multiplication idea. I had done some basic research as well as some more in –depth basic research and figured that this might be a fun idea. How is it that one cell can divide into two which can split into four and nine months later there is a baby? It’s kind of a big idea to wrap your head around; that these tiny abstract pieces all form together and bond and grow and multiply and develop and then somehow there you are, standing there as a human, not what looks like 18 billion of these.

I took my cell division train and ran with it; this is the progression I came up with;


What I ended up writing on the page (mind you, still on the airplane. It was a long flight.) was the following;
“the fractal idea isn’t going to work. It looks too much like an image. Needs to be more abstract. More random? Be/Look formulaic without looking calculated.”

Oh hey, another can of worms. I think I’ll open it. Might as well. However, I’ll open it this week. This is where I am now, ready to open the can of worms of how precisely this all goes together. I think I understand how it’s going to go, I know what I want to put together to get to, where that point of arrival is, and how it should be orientated on paper. It makes sense on multiple smaller pieces of paper, but I need to brave the storm and just put it all together now. Take the big leap.

Before we get to that (it will be another post, another day), I wanted to let you know what I DID decide to do with my moment. I took that image and broke it down even further. I got frustrated with the fractal/cell division process because it looked too much like an image. There were too many parts creating this giant whole and the message got lost in the process. It’s like I was trying to make a statement in an argument and all I was doing was repeating the same thing over and over but louder and with different inflection. It wasn’t communicating the whole idea, the triangle/dot image.

So, I did this. And THIS I am pretty sure, is what I am going to stick with.

I have made it a point to keep most of this sketching process to myself, not showing any of the artists involved. Joelle has been very explicit about not wanting to see what I’m doing ahead of any other performer. I did however, show her this image today and she said that as a performer, the fragments that I had drawn, all working together to form a whole image were much more inspiring and “feasible” than that crazy sun-dial/tower I had drawn up above.

There you have it. I hope the next blog is an image of the score. Or at least a nice half way point of this score.

And a title. Ideas?

-Kate

Just Keep Swimming

So.
I keep using the word “gesture.” It seems to be the most effective way to communicate the parts of the score that I am trying to create. It’s not really a phrase or a measure, a note or a line, it’s a bit more abstract.
What does Merriam-Webster say it is?:

ges·ture
Pronunciation:
\ˈjes-chər, ˈjesh-\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin gestura mode of action, from Latin gestus, past participle of gerere
Date:
15th century

1archaic : carriage , bearing
2: a movement usually of the body or limbs that expresses or emphasizes an idea, sentiment, or attitude
3: the use of motions of the limbs or body as a means of expression
4: something said or done by way of formality or courtesy, as a symbol or token, or for its effect on the attitudes of others

I like all of these, but mostly entries 2 and 3 seem to capture what I am trying to put onto paper. Let’s hold on to number 2; “… that expresses or emphasizes an idea, sentiment, or attitude.”

Carnegie Mellon is one of a handful of universities (maybe two handfuls) in the United States that offers training in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. At CMU, it is required for all undergraduates for four semesters, but I have been taking it for seven semesters now(adding a semester in my senior year as well as both semesters this ear). Joelle has also taken two semesters of the course. I can’t really explain to you in fewer than six paragraphs what Eurhythmics is, and even then it will really only be my definition. However, one of the best partial definitions I can offer is that it involves the physical realization of the body and mind’s internalization of music. How’s that for abstract. We take music, something completely fleeting and intangible, internalize it, and then recycle back out through physical expression and abstract gesture. I’m hoping that once we get into rehearsals, Joelle will comment on her process of analyzing/reading the score and if Eurhythmics plays a role in that at all(I’m guessing it does.) In those classes, it is all about the gesture. What is it that the music is trying to communicate, is there a way to communicate that to yourself and others with your physical body as well? (Side note: there are extensive additional applications of Eurhythmics training to one’s development as a musician, but the one that most predominately affects this process is the idea of gesture.) Even in writing this piece, I am constantly moving around, physically gesturing in ways that another person might, looking at the shapes I have created. I even go so far as to think of what might happen if someone was given a loaded paintbrush and a canvas as well, and asked to dictate or trace their gesture onto paper. Just food for thought, I suppose.

In our meeting last week, Richard and I also talked about the process of reading from a part and playing in an orchestra. In this type of ensemble setting, you only have your information, and you assume everyone is also playing what is asked of them in their different set of instructions.
How does reading from a score change things? This allows you to understand visually what is going on with the other members of the ensemble without necessarily aurally engaging as much as you would with just your own part to read from. It also has the potential to enhance the musical experience as the performers each see how they fit into the overall gesture(there’s that word again) of the work.
What if everyone has the same part but they play it on their own instrument (their own form of media?) This was more of a hypothetical question. In the discussion of altering the abstract proposal to include a score that everyone reads from, I emphasized the importance of everyone having the same information to interpret. I am not going to write four or five or ten different scores to cater to the needs of each artist; the goal is to find a method which caters to the needs of all the artists in a similar fashion. While the interpretation of the elements may be different by each performer, each individual element is intelligible and useful for each person.

I’ve been working more with this idea of fractals, too. I’m not sure I can get it to work mathematically, but I do think that I will be able to draw connections between the smaller and bigger elements of the piece in a somewhat fractal-like reference. It will be interesting to see as an end result what might happen.

Audience experience: what’s it all about? Apologies, guys, but I haven’t really given any conscious thought to you yet. My first audience is my performers. Roger Sessions talks about some of this thought process in his book, “The Musical Experience of Composer, Perfomer, and Listener.” Who is most important? Who comes first? Is a Performer also a composer? Does a Composer need to be a Listener as well?

As a composer, I go through a process of recycling. Step 1: Get an idea in your head. Step 2: Get thought from brain to paper (there is potential here to lose the essence of what you’re trying to say). Step 3: Give paper to performer. Step 4: Allow performer to read and interpret what you are trying to say (potential for transformation here both in the player’s interpretation and the restrictions of their physical skills and capabilities). Step 5: Rehearse, sometimes with other people who will have their own comments. Step 6: Perform. This can go any number of ways depending on the day, time, what the player ate for dinner, if it’s raining out, etc. Additionally, the audience experience changes based on where in the hall they are, what time they woke up that morning, if they’ve heard the piece before, if they know anything about the composer, if they want to be there or not, etc. The list goes on. From the point of the creation of the idea to the performance for an audience, the piece has the potential to retain little of what I initially imagined. Most of the time, this is okay with me, even welcomed. I think the opportunity to really see what someone else gets out of my music when I hand it over to them is a gift. At Carnegie Mellon we are rarely allowed to perform our own music; we are strongly encouraged to find other players to perform what we write. This is to test our skills of composition as much as it is an opportunity for the performer to play new music.

Being in the academic bubble, I know 99% of the time who will be performing my music so I have the luxury of writing for a specific performer. I get to work with them and highlight their talents and perhaps brush past their less desirable skills(or lack thereof). The performer is the first person that sees my music; they are my first audience, so my thoughts usually go immediately to them.

Richard asked me in my meeting with him what I thought about the audience experience. What do I want the audience to experience? What do I want them to go through? Are they just viewing the performance or are they a part of the performance? Today, concertgoers attend performers with a certain apathy, rarely are they truly involved and engaged, something that is both the fault of the performer/composer and the audience member. How do we engage the audience? How can I engage the audience with my score? Are there directions I can provide that would involve the audience more directly?
Probably.

Any ideas? What if I place the performers in the audience space or place the audience on the stage between the performers? What if the audience is allowed to dictate certain parameters of performance upon their entrance into the space? All of these have potential, but I’m not sure how involved I should get with it. The direction that I would like to provide is to allow the audience to move freely around the performers, look at their scores and move around the stage to view the performance from different angles. As for other involvement in regards to the actual outcome of the score, I am inclined to leave the audience out of it. At some point, there is a line that could get crossed that renders me as the composer useless. I wouldn’t want the title; if all I did was provide directions but left the majority of the decisions up to performer and audience, then maybe I am just winding up the clock and letting it go. When does the piece fall out of my hands as a composer? How far does it go?

-Kate

"It's about the journey."

I had a meeting with our adviser before we left for Spring Break; that interaction left me mostly hopeless but also timidly inspired. Granted, I didn’t have much to bring him, and what I did bring him I thought would be sufficient; in my frustrations of trying to put this score together, I figured I should do what I know, which is write pieces for my standard-notated, classically-trained bubble of academia. I started with a big picture drawing, over three or four 8/5 x 11 sheets of paper. I had come up with the structure of the piece, and even how I wanted this little cell I had conceived of in my brain to develop. No such luck. Richard wanted to know what was in the cell. (Beats me, that’s why I left them blank.) We did discuss the process of how the piece was going together, but it was stressed to me that I needed to be thinking about this cell and what I wanted to say with it. It’s all about the moment. So, I had to work on what I wanted my moment to be; what was the minute gesture that was going to make up the entire piece? (Sidenote: this meeting became hugely ironic to me when, the next day I had a lesson with my composition teacher. I am just beginning to write miniatures in my studio lessons, and so the pieces are all about how you take just ONE idea and manipulate it in many different ways. I’m happy that these projects are currently paralleling each other in some way.)

I also expressed my fears, fears which run through my studio composition as well; I worry that what I want to say won’t get translated onto paper properly(my fault), what I want to say won’t get interpreted the same way by the performers(again, partially my fault), or the audience won’t get the same interpretation through a combination of my composing and the peformer’s interpretation. Richard wrote the word “Duck” on a piece of paper and asked me what I would do if I was given that set of instructions. I told him that if I was the dancer in the project, I’d physically duck, if I was the actor, I might quack, and if I was the musician I would most likely imitate a duck sound in some way. Exactly. One word, one image, one cell, is going to create three (or more) different interpretations, depending on the kind of skills you have and limitations your art provides you with. So it’s not so much about what I specifically can convey, but the big picture that I can inspire within the manipulation of these tiny cells that I have created.
It’s spring break this week and so amidst my skiing in Montana I am working on this piece. On my flights out West, I was “that kid” on the plane, drawing all sorts of silly images and making notational notes, scribbling on half a sheet of bright yellow paper. In thinking about my moment, I imagined a gesture that I would want to see created by many different people. I started off with what I knew, what was most comfortable; a musical gesture:


I knew that I wanted it to have a definitive shape, and hit a “high point” in a low register/space. I then tried to create the same idea in a more abstract gesture. (Interestingly, what is more abstract than music notation? Or, even further, what about written language? Many languages use arbitrary symbols to create reference to words or letters; the letter “a” does not look like the shape we make with our mouths to produce the sound. Who decided that this shape was going to produce that specific sound and that, depending on which other symbols it was placed next to, the sound would change? It’s all abstract. So I suppose finding a more abstract gesture is not the right turn of phrase. Perhaps it is finding a different abstract gesture, or a more musically abstract gesture.)

Regardless, this was the first thing I came up with:

1.










Which became:
2.



Which I also tried to create as:
3.


None of these gestures seemed to be portraying what it was I wanted them to. #1 looked too much like a duck, which was ironic because of my conversation with my advisor earlier in the week. #3 looked too much like a blob and didn’t have any direction to it. #2 was perhaps the most accurate, but the gradual process of either pitch or volume could have been lost with that initial right angle.
I drew this:

This was essentially a way to indicate the gesture I wanted in my initial musical example without the constraints of pitch. I thought about what I might do as a dancer or artist if I were to see this and decided that the similarity between projected responses was much more appealing than either of the three gestures created above.

While I had not in any way really come up with my “cell” yet, I had gotten my brain over a few initial hurdles.

Next problem: what is my moment? In this process, I had created a gesture, but this existed over a span of time; in my mind, somewhere along the lines of five to ten seconds, but perhaps in the minds of other performers, this could happen over a minute or be the gesture of an entire section or even the whole piece. Hence another word written on this airplane paper: “fractals.” I had always been amazed by fractals when I was a kid, and thought that perhaps I could create my moment out of the bigger gesture I had imagined in the outline of my piece. More on that later; I only wrote the word down to remind myself what to look at next after I had figured out my moment.

Looking at the “no notes” gesture, I isolated the last portion of the gesture to call it my “moment” and do some exploration. This is what I came up with:




I imagined what would happen if any number of artists were to interpret this symbol, my version of the word “duck” if you will. The possibilities seemed much more endless than what would happen with my standard-notation musical gesture, as well as any of the more shape-like images I had created. Had I found my moment? Not definitively, but I will be using this as the inspiration for what my cell turns out to be.

-Kate

If A Tree Falls in the Forest…

Is it a Performance?

We had our first official meeting with our advisor (Richard Randall) this past week. Joelle and I came in with a paper full of questions and left with all of them answered; mostly with more questions.
We explained our project in greater detail, and then went through a list of questions that we had, including;
How long should the performance be?
How many people is too many?
Should we have a pianist play?
Can we blindfold the actor?

The list goes on and on. Our advisor mainly just said things like “sure” “you decide” and “go for it”. It became very clear to us that this project really was completely in our hands; he is there to make sure we don’t break any laws or cause anyone permanent damage. It’s like our own little cheering team in a game that’s impossible to lose. This project is all about discovery, observation, and learning. There is no final exam at the end, no note taking or cramming that we can do. It’s all about the process.

So here I am, stuck in the process. I’ve been slowly picking away at this score, a little more intimidated than I had planned on being. I have been looking at graphic scores (ones like Robert Moran's or Earle Brown’s December 1952). Scores like George Crumb’s are so artistically created that I am finding myself hugely intimidated by what I have to live up to. I am not an artist(in the visual sense), so creating a graphic score seems to highlight my lacking artistic prowess. I am also curious as to how I’m going to pull off a score of this magnitude solely by the skill of my not-so-artistic hand. Does anyone know of any computer software that I might be able to make this graphic score in? I’d love to have a digital version I can manipulate. It will make edits a much more bearable experience.
I think I’ve decided (gosh that sounds real convincing) that I need to go about this project just like I would any other composition in my studio time. I need to figure out what I want to say and then how to say it in a way that people (performers, audience) would understand. However, what happens when I give the score to the artists and they aren’t even close to what I wanted? Perhaps that’s where this process differs from my studio composition time; it’s in the afterthought, the performer to audience process that things leave my hands. That’s the point of the independent study anyway.
So what is it that I want to say? I want to explore the idea of taking a small motive/image/cell, and watching it expand into something much larger in an ordered, almost formulaic manner. After the high point of the piece (where the cell reaches maximum capacity), I will offer two methods of deconstruction, formulaic again, or a more random, aggressive, breakdown of the larger image.
Joelle had suggested doing something with a circle broken into four parts; pages that you could turn and perform in any orientation and order that you wanted. I am still toying with that idea, seeing if there is a way to work it into the piece I am currently conceiving of. It could be interesting, and allow for a much more varied performance, but I think that at this stage, with the huge array of performers that we are using, varying the orientation of their score might make things more unconnected than is necessary. Plus, I would like to see what happens if everyone has the exact same set of information. (Another project for another day, perhaps.)

-Kate