Marc Duby Dept of Art History Visual Arts and Musicology University of South Africa dubymunisaacza Free improvising ensemble in 1990s Johannesburg consisting of Bruce Cassidy leader trumpet EVI ID: 484595
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Slide1
Singing the Body Electric: Improvised performance and/as text
Marc Duby
Dept. of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
University of South Africa
dubym@unisa.ac.zaSlide2
Free improvising ensemble in 1990s Johannesburg, consisting ofBruce Cassidy: leader, trumpet, EVIRashid Lanie, David Hoenigsberg, Marc Duby: synthesizers
Rob Watson: drums
Mostly spontaneous music with some notated elements based on Hindu mantrasPerformed concerts at the University of the Witwatersrand
Situating the Body Electric: a brief historySlide3
To consider what perspectives might enhance (or not) our understanding of two instances of the band’s freely improvised material:
1) The original concert
2) The YouTube version Body Electric at Bozzoli 1994
Aim of this paperSlide4
“The history of reflection on the nature and value of music is a game of hide and seek: hide the body and its materiality, its subjectivity, its temporality, and its specificity; then seek compensatory value in characteristics deemed durable, objective, and trustworthy ― the formal, the structural, the ideal.”
Bowman and Powell (2007:1087)Hide and seekSlide5
Unlike typical jazz, free improvisation tends to eschew “the structural,” and may only flirt with ideas of structure and form
It follows that there can be no “…compensatory value in characteristics deemed durable, objective, and trustworthy.”
Rather, the musical conversation is fluid, capricious, playful, kaleidoscopic, and the persons (musicians and audience) involved focus on “micro-processes of interaction” (R. Keith Sawyer)
Problem of “the structural”Slide6
Insider’s perspective(“How did I experience this event?”)
Real-time, fluid
Embodied, tactile experienceCollaborative, co-creative (in the moment)
The original concert performanceSlide7
“The challenge facing the human science researcher is to describe things in themselves, to permit what is before one to enter consciousness and be understood in its meanings and essences in the light of intuition and self-reflection.”
Clark Moustakas
Focus on one’s perception of the unfolding eventCreate the music as it happens
Keep it open; use the “Yes, and…” gambit
Musical relationships understood as shifting lines of force
Real-time, sonic fluiditySlide8
Playing instruments: touch, then soundMuscle memory: habit (acquired understanding of “where things are”)
Merleau-Ponty 1962 167ff: discussion of organist’s performance
“…Habit has its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as mediator of a world.”I consciously chose to play analogue synthesizer, not my more customary acoustic or electric bass: to subvert/circumvent this habitual framework
Embodied, tactile experienceSlide9
Work together to create the musical eventNot exhibit technique for its own sake
Listen carefully as things unfold
Avoid competition so as to favour conversation: “let the music speak”
Collaborative, co-creativeSlide10
“Prosthetic technologies are materials that extend what the body can do ― for example, steam shovels, stilts, microscopes or amplification systems enhance and transform the capacities of arms, legs, eyes and voices. Through the creation and use of such technologies actors (bodies) are enabled and empowered, their capacities are enhanced.”
Tia DeNora: “Music in Everyday Life”
Extending the body electricSlide11
Invented by Nyle Steiner, the EVI is an electronic wind controller which generates MIDI data such as pitch, volume, vibrato, and so on. Designed to be connected to a synthesizer for sound production, it is capable of producing a theoretically infinite variety of timbres and has a far wider range of available notes than its acoustic counterpart
Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI)Slide12
Outsider’s perspectiveOnce a given performance is recorded, theory has it that it takes on the status of a “text”
Susceptible to analysis, located in the public domain, objectified/reified
Musical and social interactions as seen from the film-maker’s perspective
More
participative for the viewer (change volume, change the channel, turn it off, etc.) ― illusory freedom of choice
YouTube archive versionSlide13
Improvised performance as text
I Sing The Body Electric:
Walt Whitman 1855
I Sing The Body Electric: Ray Bradbury 1969
Weather Report 2nd album 1972: like the Body Electric, also featuring electronics, free improvisation, and sense of the spatial
Notions of intertextuality tempt us to make these links, but emphatically
d
enied by BC (Skype interview June 2011)Slide14
From a performer’s perspective, I tend to treat with caution this particular event’s elevation to textual status, as reduced to two dimensions of sight and sound, digitised, flattened out.
Posted on YouTube for public access, the video clip may serve to remind us of the unrepeatable immediacy of the original performance, “through the wrong end of the telescope of time.”
Conclusion 1: “Signifying no_thing”Slide15
“The paradox of contemporary times is our belief that technology can restore for us lost immediacy: lost because we live in a complex and separated community. It seems to us that modern
technology
― air travel, the phone, the electronic chatroom* ― is able to bring us back together. But we never had the full community we think we lost. We were always at a kind of distance (geographical, emotional, political, generational, cognitive) from each other. And we never accomplish the instantaneity we think is promised by new technologies.”
Penelope Deutscher 2005:63
(* or the Internet)Slide16
Trusting in what it felt like at the time and depending on the mysterious processes of memory, nostalgia, the evidence of the tactile and auditory, ethnography (conversations with ensemble and audience members): is this not perhaps how we
might “
make history”?
Conclusion 2: “Being there”Slide17
At a unique moment in history, on the eve of the first democratic elections in South Africa, a group of musicians created a specific series of musical events in a particular space.
This
quasi-ritual, as it unfolded, had the effect of creating a temporary sense of community between players and audience:
In sum, a glimpse of the fragile wonder of what it is to be human, and alive.
“Don’t
explain, describe”Slide18
IASPMUnisa
This work is based upon research supported by the National Research Foundation and any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and therefore the NRF do not accept any liability in regard thereto.
Thanks