ARTICLES

Researcher, Artist, Mediator and Idealist…

Each performer in the field of new music has their own reasoning as to how we arrived at the current juncture in new music:
lack of funding for contemporary arts, little interest from the public and a seeming ambivalence towards modern art forms in general. But, rather that offer my opinions on this matter (that would merit another article!) it may be more constructive to provide my reasoning to those who are intrigued to know more about performing avant-garde music, alternatively, musicians who would like to be more involved in the contemporary arts but have not found an approach or a method in which they can integrate this into their own work. What follows is merely my perspective of performing new music and the intriguing process that it entails.

The avant garde can no longer be casually grouped into schools and the fragmentation/mutation of music is a reflection of the diversity of our culture today. For a performer, exposure to this can be either a bewildering or liberating experience, and to invest ourselves in a work that we are not famliar with or a project involving a radical re-think in playing techniques requires us to put aside elements of the classical tradition and start afresh. Although some may find his thought a terrifying prospect (the fact that we don’t know ‘how it goes’) I believe that it is a situation that presents us with a challenge (!) as well as an opportunity to engage our musicianship to a level that goes beyond the cultural safety net provided by standard repertoire.

As a performer of new music, I have found that the individuality of an interpretation is a defining factor of a successful performance. To be precise: how the executant negotiates and internalizes the specific language of each work and communicates this is a critical element of new music. Ultimately, modern compositions rely on the individual approach of each performer who accepts the work, relaying a new meaning with every performance, both in the physical and musical sense. In essence, this one of the strengths of new music: the transparency of human endeavor, as well as failure; the failure to adequately capture the human experience in art and in each attempt we make to re-define this in our work, the greater potential there is to understand the experience and ourselves.

The technical requirements to perform new music are often regarded as unrealistic by some musicians involved in mainstream classical music, some believing that it helps to dismantle a classical technique. In answer to this: it can only be of advantage to have a greater understanding of our instrument, of composers and of the relevance of new music. It is apparent during the refinement of our skills when acquainting ourselves with new music we find the depth of expertise needed to be a musician today: researcher, artist, mediator and to some extent, an idealist.

Paradoxically, new music techniques could not have existed without a classical grounding, and therefore, I believe they can co-exist in a performer to the point of enriching each other. Although, one element that performers find difficult in new music is the time that is involved in learning a work of ‘complexity’. When we study a classical work, we have the support of our teacher and numerous recordings that can automatically condition (standardize?) our response to the music.
With new music one finds that we are forced to find our own solutions and interpretations- something that is not often supported in classical music-and so the experience of learning a new work (deciphering the symbolic nature of the score, discovering the boundaries of the instrument and technique) is a slower process involving research, intuition and persistence, as well as being a cognitive episode in every conceivable way-the summit of which is the performance. The latter is far from the ‘end of the road’ in this multi-faceted experience: on the contrary, we can then re-examine works in a new light with the intention of unraveling the numerous meanings behind the tangled mass of human experience/perception and it’s manifestation in the score.

A major turning point in my understanding of new music was to consider sound as an entity of it’s own accord and to accept the natural tendencies inherent to our chosen voice, considering textures, shapes and consistencies rather than the parallel and horizontal.

“At the centre of my composing lies the idea of considering sound as a material into which one plunges in order to forge its physical and perceptive characteristics: grain, thickness, porosity, luminosity, density and elasticity. Hence it is sculpture of sound, instrumental synthesis, anamorphosis, transformation of the spectral morphology, and a constant drift towards unsustainable densities, distorsions and interferences..”

Fausto Romitelli

Despite the rather simplistic notion I have used, there is a phenomenal amount of information (energy) fused into a single note (harmonics, quarter tones, macro harmony) and many modes of delivering this energy, all of which are worthy of consideration before we even embark upon forming the Western conception of larger combinations of sounds (melody, harmony, dissonance). This is particularly relevant when we hear works from the Spectral School (Grisey, Murail, Radulescu) as well as composers such as Xenakis, Scelsi, Messaien and Stockhausen among others, who, although not all of which refer to the actual physical structure of sound, started to ‘sculpt’ sonorities and appreciate the sensation of specific combinations of sounds and phenomena. This mode of perception then refreshes our understanding of new music (and indeed the classical repertoire) into a much more potent art form.

In our desire in to ‘even out’ or somehow ‘culture’ the natural tendencies of instruments to accord with the Western concept of art music (although it is without doubt that we need an acute awareness of posture, intonation and sound production, but not at the cost of individuality and inspiration) we have also removed the human, fallible element of music and performance- an aspect which helps us identify with the performer. In tandem with this is the physical presence of the performer, and in some cases the overt physicality of the music with theatrical movements written into the score.
Performing new music provides us with the opportunity to shape this phenomena and communicate to audiences the fragility and energy of the human creative experience into an art form that is relevant to us today.

R.C.