Re: [microsound] How essential is your music?

[Stephen Hastings-King <roachboy@xxxxxxxxx>]

seems to me that the question of whether an audience "understands" your
music is a function of the kind of music you're doing--or the intent behind
it, the extent to which the music is programmatic, the extent to which it is
representational of that intent.

for me, performance is the center of what i do.
i like being able to play spaces that have decent pianos.
i have lost fights with recalcitrant old guy instruments.
pianists always have that extra element of not knowing exactly what the
Situation of a performance will end up being.

with clairaudient, since the outputs are shaped by processed shortwave radio
as much as by the piano, there is little point in moving beyond constraints
and/or graphic elements to structure pieces.  so there are rules or
procedures and there is basically collective improvisation at the center.

performances make me nervous, so i try to go blank beforehand.
going blank helps the process of approaching the zero.
if performance is a way to approach the zero, it kinda follows that the
question of intent and of the representational characteristics of the sound
produced through it, is not the same as it would be for a composer, say.
generally, the less i know about the performance after it is over, the
better it can be.
i remember lots of details, but i generally do not know what actually
happened.
i listen to recordings later, which is like studying maps. the map is not
the territory.
and i come up with ideas about what must have been happening.  but they're
not binding on anyone else.

generally, i am focused on organizing the sound in the way i think about
organization.  generally, the sense of things is detached and focused on
manipulating structures that generally i can see in a way but not always.
and because my experience of the performance as performance is mediated by
recordings, i focus on this register of the game.  but folk tell me that
they find performances to be a very physical thing, about materials and
their manipulation---and they are, but not so much for me.

i like the fact that the performers and audience are simultaneously in the
position of making meaning from partially determined phenomena in the
time-space of a performance.  i think of it as an exercise in autonomy.  i
prefer it to doing through composed pieces where i have a map and the
audience follows.  this does not translate into any particular attitude
toward composition as such----one of these days, i'd like to start stealing
more from anthony braxton's idea of system in which the distinction
composition/improvisation is made problematic to the advantage of both.

so i am glad that audiences turn up.  and often i am surprised.
i am pleased to see them still in the house after a performance.  depending
on what we are doing, there can be an attrition rate.
i am pleased that they listen and that they generate their own meanings by
way of their own experiences of the performance.

i find these meanings to be variably interesting, but that for my own
reasons which have to do with specific ideas i may have about the
piece--which are ususally transposed through the constraints that shape it.
i don't really want to audience to experience the constraints as such, but i
listen for indications that they were operative for them in other ways.
mostly i like to find out if people reached a level of listening where
listening and hallucinating are the same, and if they do reach that place,
something about the colors.

that's how i think about this in general.


stephen