If you could only hear a piece of music one time, would knowing that fact change the way in which you listen to it?

This is a “fixed media” piece. That is to say, it only exists as a recording, and that’s how it will be presented to an audience. There is no written score for this music. Instead, each musician was recorded individually, as I guided them with verbal instructions in the recording sessions. Once all of the musicians had been recorded, that material was edited down into over 1,300 discrete elements, which were then used as source material for the finished composition. The end result is a piece which consists of 20 short movements, with a total combined run time of 20:45.

I am deeply gratified to have so many highly talented musicians collaborating with me on this project. They each bring their own unique sense of musicality and expressiveness to the work.

Musicians:

Tim Kaiser - Custom made bowed looping delay
Mira Kehoe - Voice and Whistling
Tom Kehoe - Flutes
Peter O’Gorman - Cymbals and Gongs
Pat O’Keefe - Clarinets
Mike Olson - Electric Pianos and Synthesizers
Nirmala Rajasekar - Veena and Voice
Gary Schulte - Violin
Steve Sklar - Didgeridoo
Matthew Smith - Suzuki Violin and Voice
Steve Tibbetts - Acoustic and Electric Guitars

Photo Gallery

Narrative

I’ve always been something of a contrarian, at least in as much as I tend to cast a jaundiced eye toward all things popular and trendy. I guess that’s one reason I chose to make this piece. I love the one-time-only concept and how it works against our current music consumption norms.

We live in a world where virtually all music is available anytime we like, online for free. This is something which we now take for granted, but just think about that for a minute. It’s ALL online. Everything. Any genre of music from any part of the world, ancient to contemporary. In a sense, this is truly miraculous. It’s a resource that we all take advantage of and it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. The absolute global ubiquity of music is the new normal and it’s here to stay.

There is however a significant downside to this state of affairs. I have found that having unlimited access to any and all music has changed how I feel about the music I listen to. It’s a painful admission, but I must confess that I value music less than I used to. For one, it’s free, and not having made an investment in order to hear it, does color how I value the experience of listening to it. But beyond that, it used to be that searching-out interesting music in the pre-internet world presented real challenges. Listening to the radio, reading reviews, word of mouth, random encounters with music being played somewhere. There was a scarcity that people just can’t relate to now.

This loss of scarcity has also carried with it a loss of intentional listening, or the deliberate act of focusing on the experience of listening. We’ve become a society of passive listeners. The sacred experience of connecting deeply with a piece of music through focused listening has become rare. But that is precisely what I’m trying to facilitate with this Gestural Distillations project. I am creating a focused listening experience for an audience. This will be a piece of music that will only be available to be listening to one time, on one date, in one place. It will never be available as a recording or online. The only way to hear the piece will be to attend the one time event. By doing this, it is my intention to reintroduce scarcity to the experience of listening to a piece of music.

At the live event, the audience becomes part of the piece. They will be called upon to participate fully as active listeners and remain completely silent during the performance. I am asking a lot of the audience, but it is through their active participation that I will be able to give them a unique experience. The audience members will not be allowed into the performance space in advance. They will be held in a separate area prior the start of the music, where they will be fully briefed on how their participation is integral to the piece. They will be strongly encouraged to be completely silent from the moment they enter the performance space, and remain silent until the music comes to an end and the lights come up. By calling on them to participate fully as actively focused listeners, I am creating for them an opportunity to become part of the experience. In a sense, they are being included almost like performers.

The Music

All of my projects begin with the establishment of meaningful limitations. Having strict limitations within which to work fosters creativity and provides focus. For this project I have chosen to impose three extreme limitations. The first of which is the one-time-only experience discussed above. The second is actually the first extreme limitation that I settled on, which has to do with duration. The work consists of a series of very short movements of around one minute apiece. Each movement is it’s own coherent and complete entity, capable of standing alone. That being said, the sequencing of the various movements also conveys compositional intent and they work together to articulate a greater whole. Imposing this extreme duration limitation also plays into the concept of specialness discussed above. The third limitation is something that I only settled on later, after choosing to impose the other two. And that is the idea of “one note”. Here’s what I mean by that. In the recording sessions with each individual musician, I asked them to play only one note, and make it beautiful and expressive. One breath. One draw of the bow. One articulation. One focused moment of personal human expression. Make it interesting. Make it change over time. Make it a singular entity. I described this “one note” concept to each of the musicians when I recruited them to participate in the project. Then at the recording sessions, we recorded multiple takes to get at this idea, after which we moved on to other short focused notes and gestures, some of which were not what one might consider to be conventionally “beautiful”, but my main focus was to get that first one-note expression of “beauty”, however they might define it. I felt it was important for the musicians to come to the session with this kind of focused intent. They were sometimes surprised when I pushed them beyond that initial focused limitation. The freedom and musical release that sometime followed at the end yielded some surprisingly strong musical moments, many of which were incorporated in the finished composition.

Once all of these recordings had been made, I moved on to the initial editing phase, where I went through all of the raw session recordings and harvested out any and all musical elements that I believed may be useful for the finished piece. After that, I started to construct the finished piece of music in the computer, drawing from this diverse palette of unique and carefully prepared musical elements. Time consuming but deeply gratifying. This is where the piece comes to life and crosses the boundary between thought and feeling. It is here that audio production, musical performance and the manipulation of the musical materials converge into one integrated process. A process I have been developing for many years now, and one which has yielded my strongest and most personal work.

Video

This music will never be available to be listened to ever again after the live event, however Dawn Schot is making a documentary film of the entire process. Obviously, the actual music will not be included in the video, which is another interesting limitation for the videographer. The documentarian shot some of my discussions with the various musicians, where I’m explaining the conceptual underpinnings of the work and what it is that I would be asking of them. There may be some footage from the recording sessions as well. Of course, there will also be video of the people in the lobby who are attending the live event, both before and after they have had the listening experience. Capturing their feedback and reactions will be an important part of the documentary. I find the idea of making a film that is all about a singular musical experience, and not include any of that music in the finished product is in itself rather compelling, (and amusing).