I wrote this on Monday night but because it's the last week of classes and my life is moving a little too fast right now, I didn't get my act together until just now to type it and post. We will be posting journal entries from all of the performers in the near future as well as photos and videos from the evening.
In my opinion, this project was a huge success. HUGE. I can't believe how geeked out I was on Monday night during the performance, how into it I got, just as an audience member. It is always wonderful as a composer to see your ideas come to life, even if the mediums are different and well... they really weren't your ideas anymore. It's like I built the fire and then gave someone the match. (Bad metaphor. I'll work on that.)
Regardless, here was my immediate response to the evening:
Tonight we had a performance of our Independent Study project that Joelle and I have been working on, the BAR Project. I had created a graphic score and given it to a percussionist, two artists, a clarinet player, an actor and a photographer for interpretation. While I could go into extensive detail about the process for me or the performance theory that I discussed with my advisor, the important part of the reflection comes from the actual performance, which was attended by me, our advisor Richard Randall, and another friend if a performer, a writer. We had invited Noel Zahler, Stephen Neely, and a few graduate composers who I thought would be interested in attending. Unfortunately, schedules at the end of the semester are hard to get around. Regardless, the performance was in a classroom on Monday night and I don’t think I could have been happier with it; we had initially proposed two public performances, one on campus and one out in the community, but the project evolved in a manner that a smaller private performance was the most effective way to go.
When everyone was gathered in the room, I tried very hard to stay out of the performance process. The artists decided amongst themselves the order of performance. Marcus went first, performing for about five minutes on six cymbals and six woodblocks. He used drumsticks, mallets, and paperclips to strike his instruments. His performance was impeccable, controlled, and creative. When we talked about his choices, he mentioned that the paperclips corresponded with the concentrations of small dots throughout the score.
Lizzee, a sophomore art major was next to perform. She sat in front of us and drew on a piece of paper for about four or so minutes. I thought that I knew what she was drawing, just by looking at the orientation of her hands and how they were moving in relation to the paper. She spoke afterward about how awkward it was to have people watching her draw; she felt as though she needed to produce a certain level of finished work as well as to do it with a bit of flair; “after Marcus’ performance, I thought that maybe I should draw with two pens in each hand.” Her creation was a kind of creature, based on the orientation of the dots I had drawn on the score.
Ian delivered his monologue next. He expertly toed the line between performance and reality; both with the words that he had chosen as well as the topic he delivered. The intimacy of the performance based on environment and our proximity to the actor provided for an experience that I as the composer was looking for; I wanted the audience to feel as though they were pushed into a performance space only to be pulled out immediately, put in the theatre and then had the house lights turned on. Ian essentially performed his process of interpretation, going through the score and struggling with what exactly he should be saying. Ian spoke after the performances about his process; he had come up with multiple good ideas weeks before the performance, and then decided the night before that what he wanted to do something different, that his previous ideas hadn’t worked at all. His final portrayal was a combination of his previous ideas and his Sunday-night experience of his nerves having the potential to get the best of him. He used phrases like “broken” and “shattered”, talking about broken pieces coming together to a whole only to fall apart again in a different way. It was emotionally intense, and very well performed.
Soojin was next to go. She is a freshman art major who was the second person to draw. As a non-drawer, I don’t know how influenced one can be by another visual artist, but if the tables were shifted to musicians, if I as a pianist saw another pianist improvise a piece, it would most definitely influence me. Soojin said however, that Lizzee’s drawing did not influence her. She had come in with her own inspiration and influence and her product was very contrasting from Lizzee’s. Soojin focused on the angular nature of the score and created a three-dimensional, jagged interpretation.
Joelle, a second year masters student in clarinet performance, and my partner in crime, was the penultimate performer. Her interpretation of the score was musically creative and as a musician, what I was looking for. The three-note motives she played were strong in their portrayal of the triangles and their orientations on the page, and the registral motives she implemented were effective and creative. Interestingly, Joelle interpreted the high point or the focal point of the piece to be something other than what I had put on paper. There is a large black dot to the left of my intended focal point that Joelle focused on as the apex of her performance. I was surprised to hear her say this; I thought that my focal point was clear beyond a doubt. I was not disappointed by her interpretation, in fact it was quite the opposite, I was excited by the fact that my score had created a wide array of methods of reading.
Erika, a photographer was last to perform. She had posted progressions of images all focused on potholes around Pittsburgh. The presentations were following cracks in roads, chalk outlines around manhole covers, and large potholes in the area. It is difficult for me to describe the images, but it was interesting to see her interpretations of the score. The photographic “phrases” seemed to follow trajectories similar to ones that could have been mapped out from the score.
It was fascinating to me to experience the realizations of my graphic score in a form other than music. Because of my background in music it was easy to imagine what the musicians’ performances could resemble, even if their performances weren’t exactly what I had imagined. What was more fascinating to me is what happened with Ian who had to bring words and plot into the score with no verbal or vocabulary cues in the piece to guide him. I was additionally excited by Lizzee and Soojin who talked about how they’ve never been asked to create an image from an image. Occasionally they will recreate an apple that is sitting on a desk, or look at the human form and draw it on a piece of paper, but this request is something that has not been asked of them yet. For Lizzee, this was something that she had always wanted to do, and so she was very excited to experience it. I was additionally intrigued by the fact that the two interpretations within the same medium were so contrasting. Erika’s photos seemed to me to be a combination between Ian’s acting and Lizzee and Soojin’s drawings; she was combining real life with the visual “abstract” into the composition of her photography.
Each artist got to experience what it was like to be a composer for this project, a role that they are rarely put in. Additionally, I really feel as though the artists got a chance to experience what it was like to be a performer, a role they don’t necessarily play in the same context that they did on Monday night. There was a certain amount of anxiety involved for all, sometimes it showed through to the audience and other times it did not, but it was important to me that the artists explored aspects of their creation and their medium that they had not previously explored whether it was because they did not have the opportunity or because they simply chose to avoid it.
In my opinion, it was a highly successful performance, one I could discuss for hours on end; it opened my eyes to different forms of art, interpretation, and definitely caused me to stretch my compositional boundaries.
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