Day 5. Curating & Carrying

Composer Timothy Francis and I are arranging a piano race. The idea came about on Friday during a conversation with Tim and author-artist Cecil Castellucci, about the Banff Centre’s facilities. 11 pianos on the 2nd floor premieres tomorrow!

This afternoon Tim and I took flyers to a talk by curator Marina McDougall. Her survey of recent projects “working at the intersection of art, science, nature and culture” was a useful insight into curating participatory, socially engaged works. Here are some notes I took:

• “Orphaned objects” – those that, to a museum, have ‘fallen out of” or “lost” their meaning.
• In ‘Marvelous Museum’, artist Mark Dion presented a “fictitious tableaux” [of found objects].
http://arts.berkeley.edu/reimagining-the-urban-marina-mcdougall/
• “The learner must be led always from familiar objects to the unfamiliar.”

Postcard Piece 5 is a poem that plays with two phrases from Marina McDougall’s talk, and is for Alice Wane.

What can curating concepts and practices lend to my understanding and composition of music/theatre? I have been thinking about the in-vogue term “composer-curator” (not least since I am planning next year’s Late Music Ensemble concert). Concert programming is of course a form of curating. Pieces of music can be ordered by aesthetic and thematic consistency/contrast, logistics and balance, duration and instrumentation.

As a composer, I want to curate the performance of my pieces further, by choosing an appropriate performance space for a piece, designing the space to suit the requirements and assist the affect and effect of the piece, and by considering the interaction and relationships between this performance space and an audience. Considering performance works where the locus of which is a human presence on stage (a literal stage or occupied performance space), these are elements of theatrical production which now I consider for every performance of my work.

With concert performances, often the performance space and audience-performer-composition relationship will be set for you. Can I talk of devising and designing (music-)theatre in the same way as curating? Two thoughts come to mind.

I am working on a commission for Dr K Sextet, for a Late Music York concert in March 2016. My starting point was to research the concert programme:

Frédéric Le Bel: Prologue: Le Vide
Julia Wolfe: singing in the dead of night
David Lang: These Broken Wings
–interval–
James Whittle: new work
Steve Reich: Double Sextet

After the instrumentation and duration briefs (flute clarinet piano percussion violin and cello, maximum 10 minutes), understanding the programme gave me my third compositional constraint. I don’t want to write a piece that is already going to be in the programme, neither do I want to provide a piece that unbalances the programme. For instance, with a strong theme of complex rhythmic interplay in those four pieces, I see this as a chance to write a different kind of music.

The second thought is about what dramaturgy can offer. Dr K Sextet’s programme is modelled on one by American ensemble Eighth Blackbird, who gave the premiere of Reich’s Double Sextet in 2007. In 2008, they presented that work with a second half of three new works, curated collectively as ‘singing in the dead of night’. The ensemble learnt the Wolfe, Lang, and piece by Michael Gordon, then worked with New York choreographer Susan Marshall to develop choreographed presentations of this triptych.

Of course, a single performance event can be the curation of several simultaneously performed works. This was the idea behind the piano race. In that piece, anyone can submit a score of any kind (musical, verbal, graphic…). The scores are distributed across all available pianos (therefore pianos may have more than one score).

Bentley Circle
When I announced my Postcard Pieces project, I wrote:

“My first day in the space will be spent realising what I have brought, what I carry with me. This idea of carrying is also the reason for making theatre with an orchestra: a large mass of speechless people, carrying instruments like symbols of themselves. How can these instruments express our thoughts, our memories?”

Today I ran a theatre workshop during a Bentley Circle session – an evening meeting of all music residents to collaborate/rehearse/share ideas and work. After a miming warm-up, I split the group into three and asked each one to derive movement with their musical instruments by treating them as one of the following:

• tools
• weapons
• vessels

I derived these topics from thinking about ‘carrying’. After initial brainstorming and experimenting, I gave further direction to each group individually based on their progress.

The tools group had come up with two short scenes involving raising and holding the instruments (as sponges and buckets for showering, and telescopes!). I asked them to consider the quality of their movement through thinking about weight.

The weapons team, who started engaged in a funny battle scene, I asked to focus on one small movement each, which could develop and build intensity. By spreading them out in space, they had also to focus on spatial awareness so as to build energy together without otherwise being in contact or synchronised.

I had originally given the vessels group the word ‘symbols’, which was too vague so was changed. This group included our Faculty member, pianist Jacob Greenberg (who plays with ICE). We talked about travelling and they developed a scene involving four instruments in turn moving inside the grand piano (under the lid) to mix sounds then depart.

In 70 minutes, the groups made short theatre sketches that I would love to develop elsewhere. The point of the workshop was to experiment with instructions and see what resulted. Here are some of my notes.

• Some participants responded to tasks more quickly or more literally than others.
• It may be best to begin with setting participants a musical task, so to begin with sound, then work from that to thinking about the movement that goes into making the sound.
• I can be clearer with my language, more direct with my direction, and offer even more encouragement through praise and enthusiasm.
• I was reminded that the tone of this kind of movement does not have to be of one sort. BRETHREN has been in my mind as a serious piece, but perhaps there is space for lighter tones through humour. I must remember that it will still have a surreal sense to it.

This is probably more than enough for today… if you got this far, well done!

• Banff,
• BRETHREN,
• research,
• residency