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Take
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Take
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Take
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Take
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Take
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Take
6
THREE
Kris Tiner: Trumpet
Douglas Kearney: Vocals
Paul Kikuchi: Percussion
Adorno writes: “Music aspires to be a language without intention.”
To exaggerate this notion, Tiner and Kearney sought to create a project
that would disrupt intentionality.
The idea: incorporate composed, improvised and found “texts”
into a single three-minute piece using 20-second intervals as the overriding
compositional basis. Mathematically speaking, each of the three artists
provided three samples of each of the three texts. Our only conductor
was the second hand of a large clock.
As we did not set an order or compose any sound together prior to recording,
we had to communicate through our existing material (or, to extend the
metaphor further, vocabularies); content-based communication was limited
to brief intervals of improvisation.
Another effect of the random blends of texts is that individual musicality
was affected, even when the written/existing content was unchanged.
If one listens to all six-takes, material performed in, say, Take 2
and Take 3, have striking distinctions in musicality based on the new
sonic “context.”
Kris Tiner: This project was for me a more formulaic extension
of several years of work I have been doing dealing with the exploration
of improvisational music and spoken word. What is interesting to me
are the subtle changes that occur in the sympathetic relationships between
improvisers when the spoken element is present. The words can become
a sort of access point to hearing the music, creating a portal of literal
meaning that causes musical sounds to register in quite specific ways,
usually either occurring with the words (as an accompaniment) which
creates in itself a type of drama, or in contrast to the words, playing
against the original meaning or intention, or even the personality of
the text, which often times can be quite an hilarious, ironic, or astounding
shift of perception.
THREE, as it is structured, challenges the performers to make essentially
nine decisions over the duration of the three minute piece, based on
the sonic material they choose to bring to the session. Each performer
comes prepared with three original prewritten (composed), three found,
and three improvisational sound objects (each with a duration of one
to 20 seconds) to be put into the mix in any particular order, but only
one for each 20-second time unit, and all nine must be used. For these
sessions I brought in composed fragments of some earlier pieces of mine,
several short melodic, “found” fragments of Lee Morgan trumpet
solos, trumpet etudes, and compositions by Vinny Golia, Miles Davis,
Charlie Haden, etc. Paul, our percussionist, brought in several short
rhythmic fragments he had composed prior to the session, as well as
rhythmic transcriptions of birdsong from the Carpathian Basin of Slovakia
for his found component.
The placement of these objects is subject to the moment, such that all
three performers might be playing quite different things at the same
time. And once a written element is chosen, it becomes part of the texture,
and will affect the trajectory of the performance. The trick is in the
choosing, when to implement a written object and when to opt for one
of the three improvisational “wild cards,” which results in
an ever-shifting ensemble focus, but one that remains focused if the
performers are successful in directing their improvisation together
and remain aware of how all three parts are developing.
In this particular ensemble of one voice and two instrumentalists (trumpet
and percussion were chosen to isolate melodic and rhythmic aspects in
order to achieve a greater clarity), the single speaker quite naturally
stands out as the focal point, although at several points a suprising
kind of cohesion is achieved when the spoken element becomes more instrument-like,
or musical, and all three parts take on an equal presence in the sound
texture. When this occurs it seems that the direct meaning of the words
becomes less important than or even subject to its musical meaning and
the timbral/tonal qualities of the voice as they relate to those of
the instruments.
Douglas Kearney: Over the past few years, I’ve been working
with the idea of composing collaborative poetry; yet I was confined
to a metrically-based model: “Gimme 20 feet of trochee with an
assonant ‘oo’” type of stuff. See, I want to compose
an “improvisational” group poetic that won’t compromise
the written aspect of the work, but maintains the contrast of voices
and the unique synchronicities of the jam (a working metaphor for how
“Kind of Blue” was created).
Over this semester, the idea of metaphor as a bridge between métier
has knocked the walls off the meter approach, and I have attempted to
apply a purely sonic/musical metaphor to poetic tropes like chiasmus,
oxymoron, anaphora, parallelism, synechdoche and paranomasia. Some of
the composed elements of the THREE sessions are direct results of this
experimentation.
Further, in some of the found material, I cheated a bit, forcing unrelated
language into conversations, arguments and monologues—thus integrating
several found texts into a single 20-second segment. This both subverted
intentionality and demonstrated the ambiguity/flexibility of language,
the latter of which is a constant obsession within my work.
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