Sonic Images, Dreams, and Hallucinations

CAROLINE WILKINS

Independent composer and researcher

The musician’s body is an instrument that communicates via its extension in whatever form, translating sensory perception into musical thought. Crucial to this development is a capacity to be open and a willingness to learn both historical and contemporary skills, techniques, and knowledge during training. This includes an awareness of emerging music technology, audio electronics, and sound art. Knowledge of these fields and their application to one another brings the advantage of fresh interpretations within diverse music and sonic practices. Increasingly, possibilities exist for the promotion of an all-round music/sonic education, one that no longer focuses on oppositions between a traditional conservatoire approach and music technology, for example.

The training of musicians can be likened to that of other physical performers such as dancers and actors, involving trust, breathing, and alignment exercises, for example. Communication occurs between performing bodies on multiple sensory levels, ones that extend naturally between vocalists or instrumentalists; body one is the musician’s physical impulse and body two the sonic instrument. Choreographed movement becomes an extension of this in terms of gesture. With regard to technique, such an approach can open a path towards a wider concept of music-making from an improvisatory, sonic perspective. Less emphasis is laid on standardisation, note-reading, or instrumental specialisation. Familiarity with the use of technology, such as amplification, can occur at an early stage. Experimentation can take place in the form of sonic extensions, such as preparing one’s instrument, or rediscovering intuitively its particular sound qualities, something that was heralded as the “new virtuosity” by David Tudor. ¹

Indeed, the pandemic-induced shift towards virtual means of music-making in 2020 forced a necessary development. In this light, the creation of digital instruments and their adoption as an early music-educational activity in the school curriculum has been encouraged. Integrating the arts as a framework for music study brings wider possibilities, openings, and understandings to a musician’s future. Creativity in performance is encouraged rather than interpretation. Music is understood within a wider context of its relation to other art forms and their application to future professional openings.

Within this climate, this chapter articulates a rounded approach to musical practice typified by radical openness to a sensory crossing of paths into the irrational and the unreal of imagination. Centring a creative approach towards temporality, I cover areas such as interdisciplinarity, a broad definition of the term performer when applied to musicians, and the play of time between the historical and the contemporary that exists within musical practice. I focus on two studies: the first looks at an orchestra that defies all traditional formats while engaging with a whole gamut of music-making; the second considers a recently-constructed instrument based on historical Baroque design, played using non-traditional techniques and performed in conjunction with a contemporary dancer. Both examples, while existing within the present time, reach out to other temporal influences within a creative space that imagines new aesthetic connections and goes beyond pre-conceived cultural norms.

The artistic outcome of such an interdisciplinary approach towards music education can be witnessed in the work of ensembles such as the Stegreif Orchestra, based in Berlin, which successfully combines multiple performance skills, as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1. Steigreif Orchestra, publicity photo, © Bernd Schölzchen.

As an example of collaborative musicians with feet in diverse backgrounds, I present a brief case study of the working processes involved with the Stegreif Orchestra. Here, differences of musical direction are brought together in a training process akin to that of physical theatre.

Figure 2. Steigreif Orchestra, publicity photo © Andreas Beetz.

Musical elitism disappears as these instrumentalists take on specific roles. The orchestra’s overriding question is, how can classical music reach young people? In this endeavour, it is important to retain a sense of authenticity, to memorise the music performed, to improvise, and to view classical music as an essentially human exchange. Educational projects take place involving young people in open, digital spaces that participants are encouraged to experience without self-consciousness. Group relationships remain transparent and listening retains a central role, whereby music-making and a way of life become one. As an orchestra that is constantly researching its material, this is a timeless artistic project that continually reignites its existence and concentrates on a wider basis for music-making, opening up a new future world for young people.

A recent production, #bfree, is described as a performance by an orchestra of young musicians playing without scores, a conductor, or chairs. Freedom and space are provided for improvisation and movement, in which everything becomes the stage. Here an equation is made between the values of Europe and its cultural richness in a European symphony connecting the continent’s countries through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Throughout the working process, members took on the roles of recomposers or arrangers, while others were engaged in the orchestra’s direction and choreography. An earlier production, #freebrahms, crossed music from a classical symphony with other genres of contemporary music, such as Latin American samba and diverse improvisational styles.

Figure 3. Steigreif Orchestra, publicity photo © NAVINAFOTOGRAFIERT 2.

Reframing musical practice as an open, malleable platform does not necessarily involve a loss of respect for the aesthetic qualities of each genre. Rather, it is an investigative re-embracing of musicking from a wider perspective that crosses traditional temporal borders. By loosening the requirement to adhere to the compositional or performance style of a particular period, previously unimagined connections can be made between different eras of music; the historical is re-examined in relation to the contemporary, and ways are opened up towards future possibilities of composing or performing via new technologies that introduce, in turn, a new aesthetic approach. These experimental processes involve not only musicians but also audiences, who currently rarely attend performances in which different genres of music are played at the same time, as they have not been encouraged to experience or imagine any contextual relationship between styles. Thus, separations between performance practices, as well as the conditions in which they occur, both limit and control our ability to envision how music might be made.

Crossing time borders in performance style can be achieved by redressing the traditions of previous historic practice and transforming them into an open, malleable form that extends into the future, one that can change with each performance. Loosening adherence to a repetition of the time of the compositional or musical style allows a bird’s-eye view of musical practice from different eras to be imagined. A mutual enrichment ensues for performers and audience alike, one that stems from the perspective of a particular musician’s human experience at a point in time. In his essay on Glenn Gould, Edward Said encapsulates this approach when he expresses the need to “expand the confines of performance to reveal music’s motivic mobility, creative energies, and processes of thought constructed by composer and performer.” ²

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My second case study explores this very theme in the form of in audible: The Baroque Cello Project (figure 4), which reinvents the instrument as a material body and sound source during its period of construction.

Figure 4. in audible: The Baroque Cello Project logo.

The project culminates in a unique music and dance performance that combines the control and precision of Baroque arts with contemporary experimental techniques, resulting in a finely sculpted interaction between sound and movement, silence and stillness. On the basis of sound recordings made during the hand-crafting of a Baroque cello, live performance is interwoven with images and materials taken from the instrument-making process.

Audio example 1. Soundscape extract, baroque cello.

Figure 5. Baroque cello in the making.

There are parallels between the development of the musician who will play this instrument and that of the cello itself. Musicians are always on a learning curve and experimenting with new ways to do things, sometimes even while they are performing. Likewise, this musical instrument will continue to develop for as long as it exists, through further human interventions and natural changes in the wood and gut.

As musician Siôn Dafydd Dawson describes, the Baroque Cello Project offers

Figure 6. Siôn Dafydd Dawson and Laura Moy.

Thus, a widening of audience appreciation occurs as it connects seamlessly with an other music. Cultural barriers of understanding are broken by a spontaneous, sensory approach to sound rather than any pre-ordained expectation. The historical is heard in relation to the contemporary and to the future. A relationship between audience and performer is established via the musician’s body as an instrument of perception, one that works through the senses. This body communicates via the body of the musical instrument and translates sensibility into musical thought. Such a process becomes more apparent if the environment is flexible enough to allow that transparency to exist.

This leads me to some thoughts on the reception of live musical performance in general: Music and sound travel in the imagination across time. Our capacity to fantasise about wild connections between them is unlimited. Traditional historical performance practice often aims towards a philosophically transcendental, quasi-religious experience through the presentation of music as something that goes beyond the self. It can be challenged by an ontological approach that allows for lateral openings between times, genres, and thought, so that “lines of flight” occur between them. ⁵ Music performance can be likened to assemblages combining multiple elements and involving different times: “a horizontal flow of energies produced by moving bodies and motile thoughts” rather than vertical structures. ⁶ Spatial-temporal dynamics in performance can take on new shapes, movements, and roles, emphasising the protean quality of a performer in an affirmation of their own larvality as something that can change its identity. A strong parallel exists here between a dancer’s and a musician’s body.

Deleuze refers to the Aion as an instant of time: “the present” of a performer “without thickness,” the pure moment of “counter-actualization.” ⁷  In this light, music performance can be equated with a creative act, its intensity forming moments that remain over time, the force of the event connecting across time. Indeed William Teixeira and Silvio Ferraz describe musical performance as an extended present, a synthesis of past and future in the performative act. To them, a musician participates in the listener’s experience and understanding of time itself. ⁸

Differences of reception on the part of an audience, evoking individual creativity rather than a combined ecstasy of response to a Gesamtkunstwerk (the integration of all the arts into a single medium of dramatic expression), are given space in any performance of music that allows for openness and multiplicity: “Emerging structures of listening and sense-making” on the part of a listener offer “a new sense of collectivity.” ⁹ In this way a possibility for real change is created, touching both performer and listener on a phenomenological level of previously unimagined thought via their own sensory perceptions: “A question … of being, … a clear philosophical awareness of that whole realm of unaccounted-for experiences.” ¹⁰ The listening body is allowed inwardly to resonate with sound-induced fantasies no longer anchored in the present, but extended into timelessness. Creative thought leads to reflections on memory, time, and history. To paraphrase Empedocles in Zielinski: Reason dreams, Dream thinks. ¹¹