in 2011, i performed at the crawford gallery in cork ireland with "strange attractor" - anthony kelly, danny mccarthy, irene murphy, mick o'shea, and david stalling. when it came time to produce a catalog, i was invited to write a text, and unfortunately, the last third of my text was accidentally deleted, and hence the text was printed incomplete... a year later, this third section seems very relevant to where my work has been moving, and i like how it lays bare my relationship to scores and improvisation. over the past year or so the whole idea of what be a score has been a large part of the work - not just in terms of making music, but paintings, writing, film, etc... so here is what was left unpublished (and if you are curious about the references to melville, the entire text is available here)
three:
for years i have used chance operation and found information
(from books, musical notation, maps, lists, etc.) to generate scores.
sometimes, like my collaboration with melville, i simply cut something away
from its source with the hope it might speak differently, potentially offering me to me some
un-thought-of moves. other times, a source might be broken down into pieces
that would then be reconstructed into a new word or form. once a thing is
changed in such a way, it can be read incorrectly, enabling it to speak towards
thing it never intended.
last year, while i was an artist in residence at the chinati
foundation, i wanted to use a small battery powered synthesizer in one of the
large former military barracks not only because it held 50 pieces of sculpture
by donald judd, but because it was also incredibly resonant. i woke up one
morning before sunrise, crept quietly into the building, and sat on the
concrete floor with my synthesizer. as i was about to begin to perform for the
room of sculpture, i realized i had no idea what to play. improvising alone in
a purely intuitive manner has always been difficult for me, and i generally
need to find something to bounce off of, to create some kind of tension or
discomfort. like cage’s use of chance, i am interested in how certain
confrontations can open doors to previously unknown places... places that i have
never been able to reach through intuition alone.
in this case, i had been given a text by judd upon my
arrival, and thus while i was sitting on the floor, i read through the text,
extracting all of the letters a - g. i then followed the letter sequence on the
keyboard of my little synth. like melville above, judd was suddenly making
suggestions. because this was not a one way conversation, judd and i eventually
split the duties - he determined the notes to be played, and i determined what
to do with them (how long they last, if they overlap, could they be played
together, the pauses between them, etc.) and so, like melville’s book, judd’s
text also became a kind of oracle - offering me information and provoking me to
find my own way of reading and using it. i believe there is a huge difference
between the questions “what does it say?” and “what can it say?”
in my painting practice, scores are most often used to
determine actions. often, information is reduced to a series of numbers related
to the alphabet - such as a = 1, b=2, c=3 and so on. these numbers mostly
determine formal decisions such as color choices, lengths of lines, number of
elements and also an amount of time to be spent on an area. i’ve been working with letter/number
scores in this way for awhile; and as with the difference between performing
solo or improvising with folks you’ve never worked with, my interest in
creating things in any form is still rooted in the idea that something new can
always be learned during the process of making, if one can manage to
continually shift or renew it. for me, it comes from a constant attempt to
re-interpreting what something might be telling me. in such cases one must
continually ask “what can it say?” so that the information can continue to
unfold and reveal.
a few years ago, i began corresponding with belgian
choreographer sandra vincent. our initial conversations had nothing to do with
improvisation or scores, but tended towards more ephemeral things, such as
sound and movement, essences and intuition. at one point sandra sent me a note
describing my soundwork with two words: infinite intimate; and it set me
thinking. a score had always been something that could be broken up into a
series of rules, constraints or parameters, and usually existed as a
substantial list of things (a kind of “to do” list of actions), and so i
started to wonder about a score that was simply two 8 letter words.
a month or so after i received sandra’s note, i was invited
to perform without the use of electronics. this was something i had been
thinking about for several years but always felt too uncomfortable to attempt
it in front of an audience. in trying to find a starting point that might
distract me from a feeling of nakedness. and so, in the midst of gathering a boxful
of small acoustic objects, i also grabbed a small piece of thick paper about
the size of a postcard, and wrote “intimate” on one side and “infinite” on the
other.
during the performance, i looked down at my table of things
numerous times to decide what small object to activate - and each time i was
confronted with whichever of these two words was face up. when i started to
feel too comfortable with the word, or felt i was falling into familiar
territory, i flipped the card over in an attempt to disrupt my focus. in the
end, it became an exploration of the various ways i could apply these words not
only to actions, but to states of listening, focus, etc.
ever since that initial performance, the card has become an
important tool, and so i brought the “infinite
intimate” card to cork and i used it throughout our strange attractor
performance. during the hours we improvised together, i must have flipped the
card 30 or 40 times, attempting to allow each visible word to influence what i
was doing - sometimes it necessitated walking around with a small bell, at
others simply sitting and listening. of course, no one else in the room was
knowingly working with these two words; but because the words influenced my own
sonic choices, i can’t help but think that my responses to these words were
transferred to everyone else - for improvising together is a continual sharing
of inputs and outputs.
in the end, i see this as a kind
of alchemy, where two words are transformed via readings, responses and
soundings into a kind of audio firmament, hovering over us like shadows, and
resonating within us like beams of light.
