Reflections on "War Tuba" set and performance

Set list:

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Horn intro
Drone
Harmonics
Thermal Fantasy
Chopin
Ending 

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Reflection:

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With this showcase/set/recital, I’ve started really considering my identity as a performing musician. The list seems innocuous enough—an intro and ending piece to bookend the set, and then a variety of different exercises in performance and improvisation: a fairly standard improvisation based on a drone, an improvisation focusing on the harmonic series of the horn, a quasi-improvisatory performance of Jason’s Thermal Bloom (I conceived of it as an improvisatory “Fantasy” on his work, rather than a strict performance of Jason’s piece), and my thought experiment (thought composition?) on Chopin’s Nocturnes (first performed/realized at UTSA Underground in 2016).

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Obviously, improvisation plays a huge role in my performance practice. After all, I consider it the ultimate manifestation of musical play. But I also want to consider more specifically what techniques and influences tend to manifest in my music. In many ways this setlist encapsulates much of my performance philosophy—from that which might be somewhat apparent on the surface, to that which is hidden since it cannot be heard.

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The Horn intro was played on my actual pseudo-shofar, a drinking horn I purchased at a Renaissance Festival some years ago. It is more of a novelty instrument than anything—it is not properly tuned, and really only has one solid note (the first note in its harmonic series). While I can somewhat play the octave above, the tone is lacking, and, frankly, I usually cannot center the pitch. Less important are the notes it can play, however, and moreso what the horn symbolizes: the history of the modern instrument. Indeed, using this horn to start the set for me recalls this primordial essence of the modern day horn, in terms of its communicative and ritual function. I have been interested in this history for essentially my entire musical career. My first “composition” began with a horn call and the rest of the piece traced a kind of imagined history of the horn qua instrument. In terms of the improvisation I performed, I allowed myself to experiment especially with tone. When limited to one, sometimes two notes, I worked on bending and scooping into the note(s), allowing myself to properly feel each note and where it lay on the horn.

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The second piece I played was a meditation on an F cello drone. As one might expect, the pitch center of F (or horn C) played a critical role in this improvisation. The meditative side of this played out in terms of microtonal tunings of notes (otherwise possibly conceived of as an ontology of “the note”), and manipulating pitch collections (scales) that included the pitch class ‘F.’ In terms of the former, I started the piece by first feeling and centering the horn C against the drone. From there, I began experimenting with different fingerings of the note: open F horn, “open” B-flat horn (depressed trigger), T13… Each of these notes, of course, has its own tuning. As such, I was sometimes out of tune against the drone (more generously, I was providing different shadings to the drone). Responding to this tuning set the stage for the pitch collections I was playing with: C major, C minor, E Phrygian, C Phrygian, D-flat major, and B major (in horn pitch, and roughly in that order). The first manipulation was a simple matter of mixed modality—it might be more precise to simply call it a C-centric collection. E Phrygian, of course, uses the same pitch collection as C major, though shifts the pitch center to E. After returning to a C-centric collection, however, I maintained the Phyrgian note-to-note relationships. The D-flat “flat two” of the collection became the lynchpin for the rest of the performance. I used it primarily as a source of dissonance against the drone, though the majority of the aggregate notes in the two following pitch collections were consonant against said drone—it was only the governing notes, D-flat which then enharmonically stepped down (from C-sharp) to B, which were grossly dissonant against the drone. Unfortunately, the drone ended before I was able to complete the improvisation. Initially, the idea was to finally resolve the half steps (one on either side of the horn C) to the final note, and resting on the drone’s F. As I was still improvising, however, I left it open so I could return to it later (discussed below).

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With the third piece of the set, I chose to focus on the horn’s harmonic series. In a lot of ways, this should have followed the shofar opening. But I was set on trying to balance electroacoustic pieces against strictly acoustic ones. While I played exclusively on the open F horn in this improvisation, I made use of more extended techniques, especially multiphonics. Further still, I tried to avoid defaulting to (horn) C as my center. Instead, I tended to dwell on the E above it and the B-flat “blue note” (the fifth and seventh partials, respectively). To organize the improvisation, I focused on gestures (a la Robert Hatten) associated with each note—a growl and dissonant multiphonics with the E, and an ascending slur to the B-flat. I developed and wove these gestures together over the course of the improvisation, in a sense similar to Schoenberg’s so-called developing variations. 

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Following this pure improvisation, I stepped towards a more work-centric performance, playing (or perhaps more paraphrasing) the piece Jason [Holt Mitchell] wrote for me. Rather than a strict performance, I instead allowed myself to improvise over stretches of the piece. Jason’s stereo accompaniment remained unaltered and was thus ontologically sound; but the written sheet music was only used as a kind of guideline. While I stuck to the written music generally in my playing, I was especially loose in terms of the specified timings. Thus, this was not a strict performance of Jason’s work—more a pseudo-improvisatory paraphrase of it (though I called it a “fantasy” while planning my set list). 

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The penultimate piece on the program was a realization of a thought experiment I first conceived of a few years ago. With it, I took Ivan Moravec’s recordings of Chopin’s Nocturnes, and digitally layered all 19 Nocturnes on top of each other. The result is a chaotic assemblage of (dis)organized sound. And yet, across this soundscape of discord, certain fragments from individual Nocturnes float across the surface. I took these emergent gestures as guiding points and connected them with improvised links. Because the individual Nocturnes have varying lengths, they drop out one by one over the course of the piece, until only one remains: Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat Major, Op. 27 no. 2. What was chaotic becomes placid, ending on a serene D-flat major chord. Gestures play a defining role in this piece (as it did in the natural horn improvisation), as does this notion of assemblage—an anti-Hegelian notion first hinted at by Guattari and Deleuze, but more fully theorized by Manuel DeLanda.

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In the final improvisation, I borrowed elements from across the set and connected them together as best I could. I began sans-bell (a favorite performative act of mine) and muted, with a fanfare-esque opening. After a brief opening on this fanfare gesture, I turned the drone on again. I again experimented with microtonal tuning throughout the improvisation, though focused more on half-step relationships with the pitch collection I made extended use of: C – C-sharp, E-flat – E, F-sharp – G – A-flat. I also included a number of gestures from the set back as well, most prominently the opening gesture from the Chopin assemblage and the natural horn blue note gesture. As with the first drone improvisation, I eventually started shifting to half step relations against the drone in order to resolve them. I successfully closed the problem this time, yet had to contend with microtonal iterations of the final C before I was able to completely let the improvisation rest. (I.e., my tuning against the drone had shifted upwards due to the variety of techniques I employed, so I had to work to bring the pitch back down to be consonant and in tune with the drone.)

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These, then, are among the points that govern my musical sensibilities most: improvisation, history, tuning, the gestural, paraphrase, sound mass and assemblage, and cohesiveness. I do not believe these governing traits to be especially novel. I can trace a few of them directly to specific sources: improvisation to Steve, tuning to Ben Johnston, paraphrase (and resultantly, ontology) to Eric [Drott], cohesiveness to my general Romantic sensibilities. Even sound mass and layering have precedents in Ligeti and the current YouTube phenomenon of layered composite repertoires (though I will say I had this fascination prior to encountering these two), and it also speaks to my interest with assemblage theory (a shared interest with both Eric and Mark [Butler].

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I initially imagined I would have a somewhat grand Ars Musica at the end of this reflection. Unfortunately, it took longer to finish than I expected, and I’m not sure I have any sort of definite manifesto with which I could conclude this essay. I might conclude with my appreciation for Steve: for inviting me to play, for praising the performance (in his words it was “cohesive” and “sophisticated”), and for gift he would give me at its end: one of his works from the show itself. By way of conclusion, then, I might end with an far-too-simple “thank you, Steve, for everything.”

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Written: 31.VII.2019
Edited: March, 2020