Materiality and what it means to be led by it as a force that attracts both other materialities and sensibility is a source of consternation for me. I am never sure whether what is suggested by these seemingly found movements of thought to be valid or useful, and must subject them and their outcomes their possibilities to various tests: tests of re-examination from different vantages and tests of manipulation. Working with electroacoustics presents the ultimate challenge of materiality and working process. There is almost nothing other than materials themselves at hand, and the techniques used to conduct these tests to fine the material by the heat of the intellect or moment and select on fiat are either seemingly inseparable from the materials themselves or themselves a material that can be in turn subject to the above.
When Jane Aubourg and I first began discussing a new work for string instrument and electroacoustic tape after she came across my earlier piece sun study ii which I had written for the sympathetic and extraordinary Lily Tait I felt conflicted: I was excited to create a new piece and to work with a musician at the distant edge of peripheral connexion, a musician I had seen perform in new music events of the highest calibre, and I immediately felt a gnawing reservation, a tugging concern. First, I had nothing a void with which to start the piece. A flatness from which I had to perform this conjuring trick that no posturing about structure or exploratory concerns, though these are perhaps in themselves important postulations to make, could save me from: I had to create materiality a near tactile world from which I could begin to hammer out the piece. Secondly, I was being chewed by the close pool of the past. I could not write the same piece twice. Jane had asked I write for violin and tape-track and though the circumstances had changed as is obvious in all details since working with Lily in an abandoned hotel with strict time constraints, I felt as ever obligated to extend working patterns and systems into some degree of unknown territory.
There is a fundamental break between composers of two basic sorts: those who write ‘classical’ music and those who are ‘avant-garde’. There is nothing stylistic or territorial about this rupture. The former write music that they hear: they have a melody or sound and they practice alterations of all kinds to this and are in essence ‘on the page’ composers as what they do cannot escape the stave or bar-line. The latter do not know the end result. Nothing is for them fixed or stable, there is the unknown into which the piece draws or is drawn, whether by experiment or blind staggering.
Pulling together sources that ultimately have no ‘ground up’ relationship (ie: they are not ‘field recordings’ to be presented as pregnant with meaning as a result of their scenarios of recording) to what I was working on made working on this piece an unusually difficult task. I have used up considerable amounts of data on my computer and sketched large volumes of shaky pages in poor drawing hand to press or push different materialities. A lot did not make the cut and a lot of worked sections whole blocks of electroacoustic material which I spent hours manipulating with software fell to the side. Even hours into this process I was still unsure of what I was assembling but by then I had given myself to these feelings of uncertainty to blind groping forward, and began to feel the piece emerge. I am driven by the unknown in music, the lack of intelligible data and the tidal pull of forces I cannot comprehend at the moment of listening. I know it is an impossible wish to write a piece that is both me and not me, one I imbue with my interiority but one that remains unknowable and shrouded from me, but I cannot help but dream and hope that osmotic filterings of this dream occur through the membrane of my practice and allow a smaller scale or scatterings to exist in the piece.
Pushing and extending what lies behind the work together with its materiality and the processing thereof into the in-between of composer-performer relations exposes the pathways taken to date to new lights and angles, new rigours of fining, new ways of breaking what was previously delicate or weakly put together. The hazard of the unknown, even if taking place in the static- and glitch-pocked landscape of a web-video call, becomes celebrated and joyous in this relationship: mistakes uncover new territory, places where mismatches of intent buckling into new folds become whole landscapes.
I finished the tape track when auspiciously the programme I used to create it crashed and all my files but the exported high-definition provisional track were lost. This endpoint meant I could start working on the score and rightly pushed me off the edge.
[Aside: I sense I have compartmentalised different pieces into different methods of working: this piece as well as the earlier sun study ii saw the tape-track made first, then the score/instructions prepared. Other works, works that feel to me more set more privately rigorous/top-down, have been prepared in score first. Rarely is the process score and tape – watch this space?]
The tape finished presented one level of materiality in both its felt sections and its entirety, materiality that could be explored both in itself and in what it suggested. The nature or development or structure of the tape-track I had made suggested to me at least two novel ways of creating and ordering the score. First, the piece could progress from the most distant point of observing itself through a mid-point of being ‘inside’ or at the (same) level of the tape itself to a point so close up that it would be both like being nose-to-canvas with a Rothko or Napangati, or existent at a pre-cellular near molecular level. At each of these zoomings-in or degrees of distance or closeness there is an unspooling of the concerns shared with the tape and of new degrees of chaotic materiality. For example, at the furthest-point the piece itself is condensed into bare outlines; at the mid-point the tape and violin share the same dialectic and the nature of materiality is essential sublimated into action; and at the closest point all is reduced to noise as if at that point we as humans cannot sense what is taking place as detail devolves into a morass of sound.
The morass of sound in which detail is entirely immersed, all edges or contours that are recognisable and graspable are situated and dispersed, is furthest point of music with electronics or electroacoustic and the feedback into acoustic and notated music. Xenakis or Radigue guide like beacons here. Composers that work(ed) in this realm jump out as having a liquifying sensibility – all their micro-concerns, ideas-behind-pieces, sound-concepts, etc, dissolve into this morass that is identifiably their piece and identifiably once piece, with moment to moment difference, but with the whole as the listening experience differed.
david william murray - composer 