Klarinet Archive - Posting 000340.txt from 2005/06

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Bouncing Brian Ferneyhough
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:31:40 -0400

Tony Pay wrote:

> Another issue is that pulse needs to be capable of being continually
> updated by musical events. It's no use continuing with your pulse if
> the pianist has made a small ritardando before continuing with the
> next bar. In fact, that's one of the main reasons why physical
> movement is rather a bad pulse keeper, because you have to interrupt
> something that has its own inertia to make the update.

This makes me think of some rather interesting things I learned about
jazz performance some way back. A lot of modern jazz is rhythmically
very "free"---particularly the styles that descend from Charlie Parker,
John Coltrane et al. But while it is free rhythmically there is in fact
a very strong and rigid pulse underlying the music. The strong pulse
really dates back to *very* early jazz---trad jazz bands will sometimes
start up a piece with a rhythmic flourish to "stamp in the beat" (with
the stamping often being literal;-). What Parker, Coltrane and others
did was to take this strong, rigid pulse and play *around* it, just as
harmonically they would play around, rather than in, the chords of the
piece. So, relative to the pulse, the rhythm is very free, but the
collective music as a whole is bound together by this common thread.
The skill of jazz musicians has now developed to the point where
*everyone* in the band can be "playing around" the harmony, the pulse,
and so on, with complex underlying beats (5/8, 7/8, ...) going at very
fast tempos; and the band still stays together.

... but of course the penalty of that, it seems to me, is that if
everyone is playing around the pulse, the pulse has to remain rigid for
everyone to stay together. By contrast one can listen to musicians like
Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans or Charles Mingus, who tend to play "on the
pulse" a lot of the time, but who because of this can develop great
expressive potential by varying the pulse---listen, for example, to the
wonderful album Bill Evans recorded with the singer Tony Bennett.

It would be interesting to try to bridge that gap, and I would imagine
the best way would be to introduce a conductor who would be there not to
"direct the music" in the conventional sense but who would rather be
another improviser in the group: a silent one, improvising with the
pulse (partly in reaction to the players) and thus enabling new freedoms
and interactions for the musicians.

(At least it would provide an antidote to the sort of thing one hears
often which is a slow intro with a very "liberal" pulse which suddenly
breaks, without warning, into an up-tempo improvisation with the
metronome going "tick-tick-tick" in the background; which usually leaves
me feeling, "Well, what was the point of that slow expressive intro if
the rest of the piece has nothing to do with it?")

Maybe someone has already done this---I'm out of touch on these things
at the moment---but to be honest my impression is that while there is a
lot of very good jazz being played these days, there's not a lot of
*advancement* of the music happening. (I feel kind of the same about
modern classical music.) I'd like to be proven wrong.

> By the way, we're speaking as though it's simply a question of a
> 'steady' pulse. But in more complex music, eg Stravinsky and well
> beyond that, you need to have much more sophisticated frameworks at
> your disposal, and be able to play across even those. (Think what you
> have to do to play Ferneyhough, for example. Though of course, he's
> TRYING to screw you. "This piece is an attempt to make palpable the
> positive structure of doubt." [BF, 'Transit'.])

Very true. I remember György Ligeti discussing African music and the
notion of the "super-fast pulse" that serves as the underlying framework
for the very complex rhythms in different African musics. You get the
same thing in the last movement of Bartok's "Contrasts" and of course in
Stravinsky, although with less rhythmic complexity than in the African
works. But it seems to me that in a sense that's an "analytical" point
of view of the music rather than a performer's view.

For example, in the case of the last movement of the Stravinsky Three
Pieces, there's a continuous regular pulse at the semiquaver level. But
I find that when I try to play that work (which I don't do very well
right now, but that's a function of not putting enough time and effort
into really getting it right:-) I don't "feel" the pulse on that level.
I feel the pulse in terms of the larger units---quavers and dotted
quavers, affected to some degree by the placement of accents---and the
speed of the semiquavers works kind of like a "bridge" between these
things. My fingers do the semiquavers and I can just follow and "pick
up" the transitions from that.

... of course, that might be a function of previous slow practise where,
because of the speed, I *have* to feel the semiquaver pulse; and my
fingers learn that, so the rest of my mind can forget about it and go on
to higher things, as it were.

I would imagine a similar thing applies to Ferneyhough, only with much
more complicated "bridges". The technique suggested by a book I have on
modern rhythmic technique is to find the common unit between the
different note values and to "feel" the pulse of that common unit. For
example if you're playing in 4/4, first four crotchets and then
quintuplet crotchets, you "think" quintuplet semiquavers on the last
crotchet and then just shift the note length from 5 to 4 units for the
next 5 notes.

On the other hand the Aka Pygmies learn their rhythmically hugely
complicated songs by ear, from childhood, without any of this theory, so
it strikes me it's far from the only way of approaching these things. I
somehow doubt that they would even understand what is meant by
"super-fast underlying pulse", but they sing absolutely marvellously.

... but that still doesn't seem good enough for Ferneyhough. :-)

I would guess you were the clarinet soloist in the original performances
of Transit, so I'd be very interested to hear how you and the others in
the London Sinfonietta dealt with that material, and your experience of
rehearsing with Ferneyhough who, I seem to recall, conducted the
premiere. I met him briefly at a performance of---nice
coincidence---Transit about 8 years ago in London and exchanged a few
emails with him after that. He was charming and very generous with his
time and ideas and I found his thoughts very provocative but he was
(deliberately, I think) not very forthcoming with direct technical
comments either about his own compositions or other music.

Interestingly there's one piece of his for flute and tape (which
contains 3 or 4 overdubbed flute parts prerecorded by the performer)
which needs a click-track for performance. He comments in one of the
interviews in his Collected Writings that several performers came to him
after a certain amount of experience with the work to say that they
thought they could now dispense with the click-track, but he didn't want
them to do it, because he had conceived the performance of the work as
being a deliberate counterpoint between the tape, click-track and live
performer. It was *intentional* that the player's performance, which
involved as usual a great deal of complex rhythmic material, should have
to have to react to and interact with this steady pulse.

Anyway, having fallen victim to a couple of my own scores/sketches
you'll know that this idea of "screwing the performer" or, as I'd prefer
to put it, generating interesting technical problems for the performer
which result in interesting musical and dramatic effect, is something
I'm rather fascinated with. :-)

-- Joe

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