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Singing the Body Electric: Improvised performance and/as te Singing the Body Electric: Improvised performance and/as te

Singing the Body Electric: Improvised performance and/as te - PowerPoint Presentation

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Singing the Body Electric: Improvised performance and/as te - PPT Presentation

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

electric body music performance body electric performance music history time tactile free hide seek objective musical audience community lost

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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.

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