15 August, 2024 | Lisa Nolte
Be it at the opening festival »Intersecting Encounters« or at individual events: Collaborative creation of music is a recurring element throughout the Month of Contemporary Music. Ian Anderson of Sonar Quartet, Christopher Dell of Trio Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard, and Elo Masing of Reanimation Orchestra talked to field notes editor Lisa Nolte about collective processes and aha moments.
Sonar Quartett started out as a string quartet for composed contemporary classical music more than 20 years ago. In recent years you have expanded your focus to include working on co-compositions as a quartet. Why did you decide to take this step, to change the focus of the quartets work?
Ian Anderson: I joined the quartet two years ago and they'd already started but it was one of the things that really attracted me to the quartet. I studied composition as well as performance and I've always been very interested in performers taking an active role in creation because I think we've lost that. It used to be a big part of classical music. For whatever reason it became very separate. I think it would be incredibly valuable if it became standard again for performers to be creators as well. It improves everything we do, even if we go back and play Beethoven. That was one of the main reasons why I was interested in it.
Was it a step-by-step process to merge the roles of composer and performer you're trained to take on or were they always one and playing with Sonar Quartett only finally allowed you to play on it?
IA: I've been composing almost all my life; I also studied it. But it wasn't after starting to play with Sonar Quartett that I improvised on stage for the first time. These aspects have always been separate in me, although I've always created music as well. I don't want to be negative towards the classical music world because it has so many amazing things. In traditional classical music training, we are taught not to let ourselves go and be free. It's not like for example for jazz musicians. Of course, it's very technical as well and it's very structured, but from the beginning they're taught to let themselves go and to bring themselves into the music, too.
This makes me think of this very bold statement DLW proclaim in their »Manifesto«. It says: »Our aim is to constructively break the autonomy of the individual author subject traditionally assumed in the music business.« What do you mean by that, Christopher?
Christopher Dell: It refers to the idea that there should be a genius who has the direct contact to reason and knowledge, who also has the power to reign over the making of a musical form, who is usually called composer. As a composer performer trio, we try to interrogate this rule. When you start to compose in a group of three people you have to reconsider the whole position of the traditional composer. This effect of group composing is really something that doesn't happen too often. The way I was educated in composing was never group composing, never. It was directed towards a totally individualistic approach, and it was clear that you had to learn to create a certain space of knowledge that will be projected onto an action that will then be multiplied and scaled. In this sense, this mechanic of power is put to question. It is important to note that we do not negate it, but we are interested in expanding the notion of composition through experimenting on the way we make music. As soon as you have multiple authorship you get a different setup of making.
How do you get out of this predetermined structure in the actual process?
CD: This is a complex question, and, in my answer, I will try to be as simple as possible. Our method connected to reading what you do, meaning that, for example, when Ian said »letting go«, that means you start to express yourself and move. When you start to move you have to be able to read how you move. Because if you don't read the music that has already decided how you move (meaning the notation), and there is no notation, then the action you take is the carrier of knowledge. There are many ways we do this in our trio. Just one example: Together we play one bar and repeat it a thousand times to make it really readable. Then we start to read what happens in that bar and then we start to modulate and iterate that bar in many ways that are very similar to compositional strategies. For example, we use a parametric design for the making of a musical space. We use the body of historically developed compositional techniques, but we expand them in the sense that we transpose them to read the action and then to continue writing this action. Afterwards we make notations of that and then we reinterpret these notations in relation to the actions that will come. In this way a huge structural field unfolds we co-create as three actors. That really multiplies the options extremely. That is why we try to keep the structure we work on as small as possible.
I imagine this sort of nucleus you start from.
CD: Absolutely, you start from a nucleus. But this nucleus comes from the method of juxtaposing and iterating the playing, the reading, and the representing.
Elo Masing: This is something that I find very interesting. Because usually in a composition we start with something that is written, even if it's a very vague concept or a very open score or a picture. We start with something that is written and then we move into the playing stage of the process. It's interesting that you start from playing and then move into writing. That's something we haven't tried with Reanimation Orchestra. It's very rare. Usually, when we talk about collective composition, we sit together, and we write something together that we then later play.
CD: We do that, too. But when you say that you work in this composer performer setting and you're blurring the situations, blurring the lines between composer and performer is what makes most of the difference. It changes the complete setting.
EM: It is diluting the notion of authorship, like you said, but maybe less drastically, less radically. We all get to be authors, but we also get to be interpreters of that shared creation because we all create the music that we play.
IA: I wonder, because you create as a group, do you always have one person leading or is it highly democratic?
EM: We mostly work with very open scores. They might either be text scores or graphic scores or some kind of time notation, where you're reading a stopwatch and you're interacting with others according to certain parameters or you have X amount of time to create a sound, then the framework is super open. In terms of interpretation, it's completely non-hierarchical. Everybody can think of the message or interpretation that they're coming to spontaneously or that they decide upon working with the score for a while. We don't sit together and say: This is the correct way of interpreting; this is what we're all going to do. There's no one person taking these decisions.
In terms of being the composer for the group we've had a couple of seasons, during which the group chose three people out of eight or out of ten and these three people got to work with the ensemble in the capacity of composer for three months. They got to develop a concept into a piece and in the end everybody, including the composer, performed the piece. In another season everybody got to be the composer of the group for one month. In these ten months the, let's call it musical director, got to bring a sketch or an idea to the rehearsal. We worked on it and at some point, we all performed it.
At first, we started to look at this blurring the notion of authorship by saying: We all come together, we're not all educated as composers. People come from different backgrounds, a lot of them are instrumentalists, experimental musicians, improvisers, they don't even have that much formal composition experience. But everybody gets to try and to bring their ideas. Because as musician everybody has ideas on how to organize sound in time. Through various seasons of trying different formats of working we eventually ended up in this situation where we decided: The interpretation of a piece is a collective act, so why don't we also make the composing of a piece a collective act.
CD: How did that work out?
EM: Surprisingly well. At first, we were thinking: How are we going to do this? To compose a piece as a whole group of eight people, maybe that's a bit too much. We divided into three smaller groups, two groups of three people and one group of two people. Then we gave ourselves a certain amount of time. I don't remember how much exactly. We did this during the Corona year, when we had the Musikfonds FEB-II Stipendium, so we had a few months to focus on that. During that time each group got to go away and find their preferred way of working. By a certain deadline everybody came back with the pieces that they had composed. I think everybody had a rather enjoyable experience with it.
We chose the groups by random. We just put names in the hat and took out the names. Noone got to appoint who gets to work together. Everybody had to be prepared to work with everybody else. We were envisaging that this could lead to conflicts. Maybe there would be two or three people in a group that totally don't get along. Maybe they would have opposing ways of approaching this process or somebody would feel excluded or not listened to enough. Everything was on the table. We could also come back in a situation where we say: This experiment failed; we couldn't make a piece. But everybody came back with really interesting, very workable pieces, which we ended up recording in the end of this process.
Did you always work together in the same group of musicians?
EM: In this project, yes. We worked together with outside musicians in the scope of other projects. We've invited guests.
Did that change the process?
EM: It definitely did. We've worked in variable formats in which bringing in a guest is already definition enough because they bring in a very distinct voice or a very distinct instrument or approach to playing. That already kind of conditions the performance and the working situation. So, we decided against using scores in addition. With guests we always work as an improvising or instant composing group. But that only works because we have worked in this improvising open score framework quite rigorously sticking to concepts and ideas and disciplining our listening and our interaction so that we can come together as a big group of people and not just create an undistinguished mass of noise. We can do this instant composing process as a big group.
CD: One aspect is that in this process the personality of each performer is very important. It's conditioning the whole setting. As soon as you shift to this co-creation process each subjectivity is really vital to the process because it will participate in the decision of everything that will happen as composition. The other aspect is that there's a certain training of doing things. If you train as a New Music ensemble to play a composition and to be able to play divergent approaches as for example New Complexity or Earle Brown or all kinds of different methodologies, you're trained on playing the written in a way that you have a huge repertoire of doing yourself and a huge repertoire of doing together. This counts the same for co-composition or co-creation. When Elo's group works together it's the same as with a New Music ensemble that plays compositions in a traditional way. It's exactly the same. As soon as you integrate another person this person must learn this way of doing.
I was just thinking about it because I know that Ensemble Modern or Klangforum Wien have a certain pool of people who substitute for others and whom they trust. They know that integrating these musicians will work out. For Ensemble Modern the International Ensemble Modern Academy is really a machine. They try to create musicians that are able to join. It is a main part of the training that they're also assistants in the practicing and rehearsing of Ensemble Modern. Everything is set out to tailor new musicians who can join Ensemble Modern. I think with the co-composition it would be the same thing: You train people who are supposed to join your ensemble in this way of doing. Because every group has a different way of doing it.
EM: I would also see it from this point of view: Every new person who joins changes the ensemble in a way.
CD: Completely, yes.
EM: It's not like we want somebody who already fits in, or we want to condition somebody fit into our way of working. Working with guest performers has been super interesting for us. Last season we did a series of concerts with vocal performers – in each one vocal performer performing with the entire Reanimation Orchestra. One of our main tasks in this project was accommodating that new voice and this new person's way of making music. I think the strength of this project comes from us as Reanimation Orchestra group having quite a long experience of working together already. We have our established ways of how we do things. We don't have to struggle with this so much anymore, so we are quite free to incorporate what the new performer brings to the table. We can also help them to bring out what's special about their musical language and support that, help them in a sense to be the soloist.
CD: But then that's a clear setting. There's really a difference between curating a contrast that you use to create a different approach or a different sound level and the regular routine. The contrasting player puts you into a stronger situation of transformation. The regular work however is rather tedious and takes a long, long time to really make it work. You work as hard as any other ensemble that must rehearse that complex music.
IA: Christopher, you're talking about these New Music ensembles that always get this New Complexity and stuff. I find that incredible. I've actually never had the patience to sit down and really learn such a complex score for solo viola. One of the reasons why I'm invested in improvising, it's maybe got to do with laziness, but I had a moment that suddenly opened my eyes to the possibilities of it. Lotte Anker the jays saxophonist was playing in Norway one time, and I went to see her. I'd never heard of her before, and it was a friend who took me along. They played all this complex music, and it was incredible, it blew my mind! Afterwards I went up to her and asked to see the music. She showed me the score and it was all black. It was basically all improvised. Of course, they had worked so intricately, and they had worked on ideas and timing and everything. But the score was just basically all blank, with text instructions. That was the first time I even realized that this was a thing.
CD: When was that?
IA: This was actually quite recently, maybe ten years ago. Before that, I'd been involved in complex contemporary music, and of course it has its own value. But what I loved about Lotte's approach is that it handed control to the performers, and it allowed the performers to bring their own personality as well. There is this idea that the composer knows every instrument perfectly. As a composer I can do research, but they know their instrument a thousand times better than I will ever know it. If I think about it that way, why would I not give them freedom to express themselves and to maximize the emotional and artistic range of their instrument. What you just said made me think of this. My journey was half through laziness but half through wonder about the possibilities of when you give people control. Lotte is very structured, she plans everything out, it's all structured but it gives people space. As a composer I, too, give more space and possibilities to the performers now than before that night.
Has working with Sonar Quartett together on your collective compositions changed the way you work on compositions by other composers that are less open with the possibilities of the performer?
IA: If you played our performance to a purist maybe they would think that we were taking too many liberties with the music. But it's always a balance. When you play any music, you also need to take into account the context. You need to respect the tradition as well as bringing your own ideas. I can only speak for myself, but it's definitely made me more imaginative in my approach to all kinds of music.
Elo, I have one last question to you, to Reanimation Orchestra: What's to be reanimated?
EM: I'm not the originator of the idea of Reanimation Orchestra and I didn't come up with the name. That was our member Ame Zek. What is to be reanimated? I think it was a response to a certain social, political, and artistic climate around 2016/2017. Resistance needed to be reanimated. With this non-hierarchical group that comes together but under the name of »Orchestra« it's in a sense an ironic use of the word because obviously orchestras are historically a very hierarchical collective. It's always working in the 19th century way of: there's God, then there's the composer, who directs to the conductor and then there's everybody else. »Reanimate« I see as a term of performative resistance to the status quo, an opening-up of essentially infinite possibilities in this group working. Nothing can ever be taken for granted because there are too many personal influences and decisions to be computed, so you can never be completely sure of the outcome. But somehow, we're all on this journey together.
CD: What I really like about this notion of reanimation is that it also questions where the »anima« comes from or how the soul is affected. Where does the action you perform come from? Where does the vector come from? This is just a question but that for me it strongly resonates with the name of our ensemble.
Ian Anderson is the viola player of Sonar Quartett. Recently the quartet has been exploring more and more how to improvise as a contemporary classical quartet and the role of experimentation in classical music. Their aim is to be a creative force as well as performing in a traditional way.
Christopher Dell is a composer, musician, and theorist in urban design. One of his main focuses is on his work with the composer performer trio Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard. Together they investigate combining the aspects of performance and composition.
Elo Masing is a composer, improvising violinist, and sound artist. She's a member of Reanimation Orchestra, which is a group of eight people with various backgrounds such as composer, performer of New Music or improviser. In working together, they try to blur the roles between different disciplines and ways of being a musician. One of their recent projects was dedicated to co-composing pieces in small groups.