So….here we go! The website is live and now – so is the first ‘journal’ post! What is this page for you ask? Well….I guess I am still sort of working that out, but I imagine it will host various updates about the project, random thoughts, films, audio, you name it, you can get it here. Or maybe not….
Anyway, the project officially started back in July, and Cath and I have been working on the compositions, which we are then going to rehearse in November. The composition process has got me thinking about, what exactly am I trying to do with the composition? What is this project about? And I guess more widely, how should I be working on this?
I guess the underlying question is – what is artistic research? I don’t profess to have a definition of it, and don’t plan to make one, but for me the difference between artistic practice and artistic research is not huge – now this could be to do with my general style of working, but I think there is something a bit more universal here. The artistic process often starts with a question, perhaps not formulated as such, but that doesn’t make it less of a question – what happens when I do x or y? Even in improvising, while we may not be thinking it, at least not in the way we tend to think of conscious thought, there is an element of, what happens when I play THIS? Now the artistic research process tends to follow this through to a written conclusion, whereas the artistic process in music is usually just an aural one. I am trying to show the value of both: if you want to access this project in a purely aural way, and are not interested in the writings about it – that has value too! My interpretation about this process is not the ONLY interpretation, and you can take your own realisations about group language and its separate impact on the two bands from just listening to the music…I digress…
Anyway, what am I getting at – well, I guess the point is, in the process of composing the music, the question comes up for me – how much “science” needs to be in the composition process? What do I mean by that, well I mean, how much is this project an experiment – with a hypothesis and variables, and trying to keep the controls of the experiment the same? In this context, I mean that no group is “advantaged” by a certain composition. What do I mean by advantaged, well, in the context of Anthropods, I have written pieces before that are written for 4 non-specific instrumental parts before, like this:
You can listen to the results here!
So, when I give them something like this – a part of the new composition
It doesn’t need much explanation. Not just because they have done it before, but because this style of working grew out of the way we were working already. There is an implicit band understanding of what these notes on the paper are meant to do. In improvised music that has composition in it, there is a negotiation between the composer, the composition and the people who are playing it. Sometimes the composition takes precedent over the people playing it….but in general, I am more interested in what happens around the composition. I was listening recently to this podcast with Raymond MacDonald, and he was talking about, what I think he described as the “priorities of the moment”, which is a really succinct way of putting it….I have given you this composition, which I DO want you to play, but if the priorities of the moment dictate that it should be played completely differently, or not played at all, that’s also ok with me….but it takes time for an ensemble to understand that a bandleader/composer REALLY wants this…to trust that their understanding of the composition and the improvisation around it are more important than their understanding of what they THINK the bandleader/composer wants.
But coming back to the science question – there are so many variables that trying to pretend that this is a chemistry experiment is silly. But finding ways to try and bring each band onto as level a playing field as possible is a good idea. The compositions as I present them normally to Anthropods would probably be fairly unintelligible to a group of any 5 musicians, so there will be a certain amount of extra explanation needed, and part of the process is figuring out what that explanation will be, but also figuring out how to get the musicians to trust that whatever it says on the paper, the priorities of the moment are more important!