Books

Music and Literature Issue One / Fall 2012

Stories and conversations and manuscripts and the programs of musical evenings: I seem in throughout the residency to have followed in the footsteps of "Pärt, Selby, Marcom", the first issue of the Music and Literature magazine. There is a certain fastidiousness I can completely relate to in terms of the collecting of any little trace of an event, a thought, a draft. I mostly read the sections of the book relating to Pärt, and most of it is really the work of a historian, retracing every slight tendency and documenting a break or a choice with the utmost precision for fear we might forget. It places a great deal of importance on the processes of creation, which is, in the end, what the work around and from Musique ludique has been about.


Book suggestions
Bailey, Derek, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, 1980
Ross, Alex, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, 2007
Zimmermann, Walter, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians, 1976

DEUX COUPS IV: FINALE

F So she did... It's funny, I thought for a second, I was wondering whether you hadn't seen that in '67, if there wasn't a pavilion at the expo where Inuit throat singers would have been invited

R On film, certainly, but not the singers themselves

F Had you heard any throat singing before, or was that like, whoah?

R Well, you'd always hear a little bit of it each time they'd show a documentary on the Inuit, we weren't, it wasn't new it was just that, when I saw them perform on stage, then I understood the, the technique of what it was they were doing, and it, it really interested me as a tool because it's, it's a musical game, it's not a score, and the first one who laughs loses, eh, you get it, you have to make the other laugh

F The first one who laughs, it's like barbichette (*a game for two in which each grabs the other by the chins; they sings the riddle, "je te tiens, tu me tiens, par la barbichette, le premier qui rira aura une tapette" and then stare at each other until one or the other cracks up and thus is promptly slapped)

R Exactly, it's a musical barbichette

F Musical

R And that's, that's it, that's what interested me so much

F And that's your binary mode

R That's my number 2

F Number 2

R Yeah, it's action-reaction

F And you called it DEUX COUPS.

R DEUX COUPS but it meant that each of the two musicians could only play two notes before the other could reply, so all you can exploit is, "Do I make him wait or do I give it to him rightaway?" You understand, it's, and then you create a tension, you create a rhythm, for instance you go, "Pom pom?" and he replies, "Pom pom."

"Pom pom?

Pom pom.

Pom pom?

Pom pom.

Pom pom?

Pom pom.

Pom!"

F HA

R And then normally he'll, either he's stuck, either you've tricked him and he plays, or he's seen you coming and he doesn't, but for the public all you do is you watch and your can easily tell that they're waiting for each other or cheating each other, at one point with Jean Derome we were doing like, fake echoes,  so I'd go, "Pom pom, pom pom, pom pom, pom pom, pom pom..." and then he'd go "Yeah, but where does this all end?" HUHU so there's all this strategy and this way of

F HHHHHHH

R ... of playing with the other musician and with the material

F Did that amuse people?

R Of course! 'Cause, we'd explain the rules to the public, so the public doesn't expect a nice melody, it doesn't expect a, a thing, it watches as a game unfolds between two musicians and there he'll find something, the most surprising that will, you know, there's a sort of participation from the public when you know the rules...

Watercolours and Bound Drafts

DEUX COUPS III

F But in '71, what did you know of Inuit singing?

R Well, I knew the... I had heard Inuit singing, I even attended a few performances, because at the time the Société de musique contemporaine, the SMCQ, was organizing what it called Musialogues with Maryvonne Kendergi and they invited Inuit throat singers and they performed

F Maryvonne who?

R Kendergi, K-E-N-D-E-R-G-I, she's a musicologist and was teaching at the University of Montreal at the time, she would organize these, these conferences that she called the Musialogues, and for those Musialogues she invited Xénakis, Stockhausen,

F HHHHHHH

R Messiaen, um,

F HELLO

R They all came, they came and talked to us, Takemitsu,

F Who's that? Is he Japanese?

R Yes he is, I had sent you a, a

F YES! Yeah, yeah, right, I remember

R So all these, these composers from the 70's came and talker about their work and at the same time she invited um, a Spanish band, ZAJ, like um Z-A-J and they would, um, perform with all sorts of gestures and moves according to musical scores, it was, it was, there was no sound, and it was just this activity that was organized by the

F That's like Mme Cholette's scales! (*Mme Cholette was my music prof at the little school -- she would make us sing scales stressing each note with our hands, higher and higher like they were climbing a staircase)

R Mme Cholette, yeah, but ZAJ would put on a hat, take it off, sit down, stand up

F Very Fluxus that

R Very Fluxus, that's it, but that was in the 60's, you know, I'm talking about '71, '72, we were pretty close to Fluxus then

RULES

DEUX COUPS II

F When I start putting a tune together, I always try to go where I wouldn’t, I mean that you have, you have all the major harmonic progressions stuck in your head and when you have a note, there’s another that follows and it’s very natural, it’s what you hear everywhere, and

R Hm

F When I start, I have – I have a musical phrase, and then.. That phrase, it would go somewhere naturally in pop music or in… and then I’m like, “Where can I go from there...”

R It’s an effort to avoid what…

F “…that wouldn’t be that?”, because it bothers me, that music bothers me, it’s beautiful and it makes you cry but it’s not interesting

R It’s a very common road to, um… take, so um if you want to branch off you have to um…

F If you want other colors… I think that the…

R I like it, I like the common flow of music, but my game is more about creating breaches, meaning to interrupt the flow, and to find out what will happen in the breach, in the pause, that’s where, that’s where it all becomes interesting…

F Yeah

R So there’s always something that, that is quite organic, that belongs to your own clichés, to what you’ve always heard which is the common language when you start improvising, and all of a sudden, you just stop! And from there, you do the first thing that jumps into your mind, which is

F Pbläh!

R And then you respond to something else

F Huhu! Yeah, it feels good to put in a cliché or two sometimes. Or even

R Well…

F The suggestion of a cliché, half a cliché or…

R That’s it. Because that’s what it is, you want, it’s like poetry, it’s, you can always write Letterist poetry, but there’s just nobody who’s into that! It’s better to write poems that are…

F What are Letterist poems?

R It’s um… with invented words, like Claude Gauvreau’s

F Oh yeah, Ursonate is so cool!

R Yeah, yeah, but I mean if you make, but the second page from Ursonate, the third page from Ursonate, the second page from Ursonate is, well…

F Rrrrrakete rinzkirakete rinzki rakete kinzki rakete rinzki!!!!

R Hahahaha

F What was DEUX COUPS, was it played with dice?

R No. Before the dice game came along, I put together simple concepts for, for games. Meaning that I got into something that is not all that common in occidental music, but that exists in aboriginal music, this idea of musical games.

F Wait a second…

R For instance, DEUX COUPS is very much inspired by Inuit singing

F Aaaaaaaaah…

R It’s also inspired by ping-pong. How do you introduce a, if you don’t have harmonies or melodies of things like that how will you create a wait, a suspense, a tension, an interest for um, for um music well I thought about sports, and DEUX COUPS is a sport

F Wow, I just read... You know, in my, my 499 class, it's on, on contingency, so dice games, and... and I read a paper on improvisation (*it's Edgar Landgraf's "Improvisation: Form and Event. A Spencer-Brownian Calculation" in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, 2009, esp. p. 191), the second reading we... um, read which likened improvisation to sport. Which drew a really really neat and precise parallel between improvisation and sports it,s really um, you have a frame, and then you allow things to develop...

R Well, hockey is, improv and hockey are pretty similar I find, except that hockey players have to score goals, in improv, there's no real goal to score, there's just a structure, but it's because it creates a minimum of tension and interest if you are aware of the rules, anyway it's the same thing for hockey, if you don't know the rules, you look at it and wha, they're nuts...

F Same thing for improv, if you don't get it, you're...

R If you don't know what they're doing, you, you, because the result, the result comes second in the end, it's really the, it's really how musicians situate themselves, what rapport they establish, how they use the material, what strategies they employ to get ahead, or accompany, etc... so there's an entire, an entire play there that is really fun to unravel...

At the FARR, with a Canon

 Wrote my first few art history papers with those... At 5 or 6 my mom would sit me up on her knee and we'd leaf through Manet et son temps. I was always very taken with "Le toréro mort"...

 ...in full color...

 Amira's pick, I suspect...

...and my fave. They're all on my phototumblr, too, kid.