Walking Through Songs

An Elegant Journey with Stopping Points of Interest

By David Means

In one of the first totally graphic scores [1]of the 1960s Robert Moran set forth a fundamental challenge to musicians and listeners alike: How can the complexities and interactions of a group of musicians be coordinated and inspired by a musical notation which refuses to specify traditional elements in an orthodox manner? In the collaborative composition “Walking Through Songs”, three musicians with very different backgrounds have taken Moran’s challenge even further by removing the score entirely and replacing it with a highly rigorous but freely operative performance system – one in which collaboration and improvisation form an ineluctable bond between discovered materials and invented musical forms.

This essay will explore some of the compositional voices and cultural questions implicit in the collaboration. The premier performance was given at Metropolitan State University’s Strange Attractors XI Festival of Experimental Intermedia Art on Friday, November 7^th, 2003 by Carei Thomas, voice, texts, harmonica and keyboard; David Means, electric guitar, digital wind controller, Casio CZ-101 synthesizer and MIDI performance system; and Steve Goldstein, laptop computer sampling and sequencing.[2]

Providing a constant underlying rhythmic and electronic foundation, Steve Goldstein translates his vast background in Latin, Funk, Jazz and South Indian drumming into a highly integrated and subtle system of laptop sampling and sequencing.

From his considerable experience with graphic score compositions and intermedia performance installations, David Means brings to the collaboration a ‘scoreless’ MIDI performance system in which processes, modulates and directs a digital wind controller, electric guitar and Casio CZ-101 synthesizer into a variety of textures ranging from actively melodic, to accompaniment patterns and deep-grounded drones and sonic washes.

Like a Gospel Holy Roller Party

Walking Through Songs is essentially an experiment in storytelling. It was born out of an interest in collaborating in an improvisational environment in which the reflections, memories and thoughts of Carei Thomas could be given a musical context out of which his stories and songs might emerge. Given Carei’s remarkable talents as a raconteur and improviser, the collaboration gives a spontaneous musical spirit to Thomas’ words – seeking what he calls “diverse plausible hypotheses” from a range of performative and improvisational strategies and techniques. Like a gospel Holy Roller party, these songs draw their own narrative lines of communication in non-linear, fractal-like formations of content and expression. The collaborative musical journey expands time and space to where memory and experience become signifiers in a complex semiotic mix of language, sound and performance. John Keston notes the deliberate yet Dada-like approach to the text and narration:

(Carei Thomas) was using his own words, stories, spoken phrases, and spoken letters or mathematical formulas. The spoken stories and phrases had a calm, endearing quality and seemed somewhat deliberate, but the spoken letters and mathematical formulas had an almost Dadaist approach as if he might have been reading them from a randomly generated list. He was also using the Roland digital piano to play dense clusters of notes, followed by “out” melodies, mostly using vibes and harpsichord tones. Carei played the digital piano with his knuckles, rather than fingertips. This produced a “free” sound, not at all unlike a movement in jazz called “Free Jazz”, within which the performers abandon the traditional restraints of key signatures, meter, and form. Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor were two well-known pioneers of the free jazz movement[3].

Experimental storytelling has a rich tradition in which opera is perhaps the longest running example. The works of Meredith Monk and Robert Ashley offer examples in which the voice, texts and technology itself become enmeshed in a musical genre somewhere between collaborative performance art and postmodern opera. Monk sees all of her ensemble works as opera:

I have always called my big musical-theater pieces opera…So to me, “opera” is a wonderful word because it means overall work of some kind…I always feel that what I try to do in my work is to offer to an audience new ways of seeing or hearing things that they might take for granted…I like the risk of that and it keeps me interested.[4]

Robert Ashley breaks down the dramatic and theatrical elements of his works into more discreet, collaborative elements. In his 1980s opera for television, Ashley becomes a narrator of abstract texts drawn from “…stories of the corn belt and the people who live in it (or on it)”[5] In Perfect Lives (Private Parts), Ashley develops an opera out of a cool and collected set of narratives which are doubled at times by his collaborating musicians following a linear text displayed to all via television monitors.

Deep Narratives

Walking Through Songs displays a kind of deep narrative, which might be compared to Pauline Oliveros’ notion of ‘deep listening’, a process and technique developed out of her early experiences:

When I was sixteen, I was hearing music in my head…imaginary music…Some of it was sounds (which I only realized when I got involved much later with electronic music), and…some of it was very abstract; I don’t know how anybody could talk about it…Some of it was sensation that I needed to realize as sound, but I didn’t know how to do it…I was always listening…It was like a hypnogogic state except that instead of having vivid visual images, I had vivid sound images.[6]

Both performers and audience members engage in a deep-listening exercise with Carei Thomas’ free-form narration, grounded in the spontaneity of free jazz while extending an experimental tradition.

Carei’s performance, however, was more experimental than jazz oriented. I think the unique qualities of his spoken words and phrases combined with the experimental electronic accompaniment from Goldstein and Means lead me to describe the performance as traditionally experimental…Experimental music has arguably existed since the Italian Futurists created their noise instruments in 1913… In a sense all musical styles are experimental at their birthing. So what I’m trying to get at is that there is a tradition of experimentation in music which we can see as a movement to view sounds once considered noise, or everyday, or mechanical, or incidental, or randomized, or accidental as music. However, this is just a fractional description of experimental music.[7]

Keston goes on to elaborate on the experimental aspects of Walking Through Songs, and how the performance mediates between chaos and order:

Experimental is such a broad term, and a loaded one. I have encountered many people whose impression of experimental music is cacophonous noise made by crazy people smashing glass and banging dustbin lids together, or musicians improvising chaotically without attempting to interact with their counterparts. However, experimental music can range from the soothing, ambient “soundscapes” of Brian Eno to the indeterminist and sometimes chaotic, compositions of John Cage. This experimental performance contained chaos, but it was a controlled chaos (I guess I can’t get enough of the oxymoron), at one moment restrained and in another released. There was a sense of experience, in the interaction between the musicians. It was clear that they were improvising, but they were doing so with care and consciously listening to one another.[8]

The electronic nature of the instrumentation of Walking Through Songs raises an important issue into the relationship between music, culture and technology in forging contemporary stories and musical expressions. Walter Benjamin raised early questions into the nature of technology and its impact particularly on art and its capacity to maintain an ‘aura’ of special aesthetic significance in a time of increasing technological change.[9] “…For Benjamin, the increasing mechanical reproduction of artworks signaled the end of the ‘aura’ of the artwork – that which made it original, unique, authentic.”[10]

By using technology in a real-time, live performance, Walking Through Songs employs technology to enhance the authentic experience and boost the listeners’ aesthetic awareness by constantly offering a unique set of sounds and narrated texts in spontaneous improvisation. This strategy addresses Benjamin’s concern for authenticity by engaging technology in creative capacities rather than for mere representation and duplication. Sampling as a digital sound technique, is not used to reference past musics, but rather to create original sounds and sequences that enhance the storytelling. John Keston explains the creative applications of technology in Walking Through Songs:

Today our instruments include new electronic devices like the digital wind controller of Means and the laptop of Goldstein. These instruments allow us to create sounds never heard before, either through the process of synthesizing electronic waveforms or by manipulating digitally sampled sounds. We can use these new instruments in un-new ways by restricting the pitches we use to a traditional scale and adhering to a particular meter and form, or as this trio has demonstrated, reject those concepts and focus on unexpected ways to use them and push them by inventing techniques which combine technologies and conceptual experimental theories.[11]

The element of expression is essential in conveying authenticity in musical performances and one that is often lacking in electronic or computer-assisted musical practices. Walking Through Songs seeks an enhancement of expression by creating totally new sounds, which replace the traditional instrumentation and give a more cinematic feel to the musical texture. David Means’ use of the digital wind controller is a good example:

Take Means for example. Although he was playing a digital wind controller, he did not produce sounds, which resembled any traditional wind instruments. This does not mean that there was no expression, because there was a considerable amount of it in his playing. He also didn’t play anything, which resembled a bebop riff or a blues scale. This doesn’t imply that he was playing without technique, because he clearly had a command of the instrument. By using his wind controller to play a wide range of textures from angular melodies, similar to Carei’s free playing, to drawn out, somber drones, he created a palette of audio which he carefully intertwined with the rest of the ensemble.[12]

By integrating their own musical backgrounds into a unified performance texture, the musicians of Walking Through Songs have brought a unique compositional voice to an inspired compositional process and forged an important new model for experimental musical expression.