Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Interview by Alan Bamford

Photograph by Konrad Winkler

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Re-sound, a Melbourne-based contemporary music ensemble, formed seven years ago at Monash University’s School of Music. Guided by artistic director, composer Thomas Reiner, re-sound are bound by neither traditional ‘academy’ values nor transitory fashions of contemporary music composition and performance.

Alan Bamford spoke to Thomas Reiner and re-sound flautist Melanie Chilianis about the trip.
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What’s re-sound been up to lately?

Melanie: We’ve been workshopping a lot of new music, and started to incorporate technology a lot more. We’re working closely with computer music composers and have done some pieces with computer graphics and with dancers. We seem to be exploring many more facets of contemporary music as they exist today.

Does re-sound have a ‘core’ membership?

Thomas: It’s not like a professional contemporary art music group that gets funding over several years and has a set membership, amplifying the group here and there with a trumpet or trombone for a particular piece. With re-sound it’s always been a collective based on whether people fit with the group dynamic at a given time. It’s a very fluid group, always has been. What sort of challenges does that present when choosing pieces to work with?

Melanie: Well, we’ve had to search far and wide for repertoire and some pieces have been written specifically for certain members. We’ve also been limited by our instrumentation: we currently don’t have a piano, so that eliminates a lot of 20th-century repertoire. We get around it a bit by commissioning pieces for the current instrumentation and with people’s capabilities in mind. Personally, I find the modernist stuff we’ve been doing for a long time to be the most rewarding as it’s more of a challenge to perform and learn. It keeps me sharp. A few of us have been doing that type of work for the last five years and we want to keep it going.

Thomas: We’ve always been flexible and willing to negotiate repertoire, no matter how weird the instrumentation; at one stage we had two pianos and three flutes so we were forced to look for more interesting or obscure repertoire, or have it generated for us. If we had a standard contemporary music ensemble playing the standard pieces it would probably be a trap – we could be doing all the so-called “masterpieces” of the 20th century and just be a standard contemporary chamber group.

I’m interested in the stylistic gap between your two CDs. On the first I detected some processing, particularly ‘Grace Notes’, Thomas’s piece for solo clarinet. Then there’s a tremendous amount of processing on the second CD…

Thomas: That’s the interesting thing about that clarinet piece: you seem to be able to hear all these different sounds – sustained tones – within a single tone.

Is that just room reverb?

Thomas: It’s all room. We have a wonderfully lively auditorium – our performance space – where most of the first CD was recorded. With that clarinet piece we had two sets of microphones, one close and another set recording the ambience. The two sets were mixed, but there were no added effects, even very little equalising – no aesthetic processing. It’s the nature of the piece: if you have an instrument playing stuff that’s removed from the conventions of melody and harmony and lets the listener hone in on the sound itself, with the sustained sound one suddenly realises there’s a whole universe of microtones happening within that. I guess the link between this kind of thinking and the electronic music is obvious in that a lot of the discoveries that are being made about sound colour and timbre in the present day by electronic music artists are really contained – in a more concealed way – in a lot of acoustic music written from the 1950s through to the 1970s.

Much of that can’t be notated – it can’t be documented and ‘proven’, and instead happens in performance, like the harmonics generated in the music of Lamonte Young and Arnold Dreyblatt, for example. But working with computers, for example, you can look at the file and see the data.

Thomas: Yes that’s right – it’s a big advantage in that way. But I guess there is always that issue of the purpose of a musical score. It can be the John Cage approach, giving a set of instructions for the performer without even attempting to represent the sound, and the musician follows as they deem appropriate – that’s one extreme. The other is where a composer wants to be as close as possible with their musical score in their graphic analogy to the sound, with everything constructed, formalised and worked out to the last detail, and the smallest subsection of a beat fully notated. Both aesthetics are legitimate.

Each approach has had its famous moments in the 20th century, but do you think they are now not competing as much?

Thomas: Yes. This sort of opposition, which existed in the 70s and the 80s, is no longer as urgent or apparent because I think composers now understand that they can draw on the benefits of both. And, as you mentioned, they have the studio in addition to that. That association of one technique with an ideology is really a modernist – or an early postmodernist – argument at best.

How did you get from the first CD to the second?

Thomas: Actually, IN C was one of the very first works we looked at back in 1996. We thought it was interesting because it doesn’t specify the instruments – it doesn’t matter who plays what and that gave us a fair bit of flexibility in terms of improvisation. Then I guess we left it aside for a while, and shortly after the release of the first CD began looking into expanding our repertoire; Steve Adam worked with re-sound on a number of occasions and helped us to get a taste for electronic music. Then I started to do a couple of pieces for re-sound, which incorporated both electronic and acoustic elements. Around that time we had the idea of recording IN C, with its repetitiveness and minimal approach, applying things to it that we had learned in our encounter with electronic music – including beat and pulse-driven electronics. The result was an electroacoustic, dancey (or at least rhythmic) version of IN C.

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Steve Adam has been involved with re-sound for some time and in important ways that have affected their development. After re-sound performed a number of Adam’s electronic works at their concerts, re-sound and Adam received a grant from the Australia Council to undertake a major collaborative project, resulting in HybriD, a piece for amplified ensemble and computer. Re-sound performed HybriD three times in 2002, premiering the work at the Australian Computer Music Conference. The underlying idea derived from a particular interface between the computer and the ensemble, in which the computer would process input from the acoustic instruments to generate hybrid sounds with characteristics of both acoustic and electronic sound. The work was developed during a series of workshops, allowing Adam to adjust and refine his music technology applications and giving the musicians enough time to become familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the computer-performer interface.
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I was flabbergasted to learn that IN C wasn’t done in one take, but is in fact edited from separate takes; all the musicians aren’t on each one. So I was wondering, if the CD comes across as a seamless flow, how did you arrive at that conceptually?

Thomas: Although nearly all the instruments were recorded individually in the studio, with the editing we never took something that was played in, say, the first five minutes and chucked it in somewhere else because it sounded good; we never compromised the timeline of the overall piece. Editing only occurred vertically – if the 10 or 11 original recorded tracks were superimposed as one block of sound there would be moments of muddiness and rhythmic confusion, perhaps, and it was there that we might edit to resolve those problems. We didn’t actually move anything forwards or backwards. And in that sense I think we do a lot of justice to the piece, in that it starts somewhere and unfolds over an hour or so and ends somewhere else.

On the other hand a purist may argue that the whole point of IN C is the interaction of the musicians in relation to each other in real time. That didn’t occur with our interpretation and that’s the biggest difference to conventional approaches to IN C. The sequence was laid down and provided a temporal grid for each musician, who were then able to improvise in relation to the sequence. The individual musician still has complete freedom in terms of dynamics, timbre, octave placement, and where to stop a motif and begin the next – as long as the overall sequence is kept in the proper order. You could argue that this is against Terry Riley’s basic idea.

Yes, I’d argue that – the piece was written around about the time Riley was working closely with jazz musicians, when he was influenced by his enthusiasm for the role of improvisation in jazz. So what were you trying to achieve in almost trashing that aspect of the piece’s performance?

Thomas: For me, it was the combination of the spontaneity that was still there in the studio and something that was constructed, in the sense that you look at 10 tracks and you mix them, thinking this is something that’s happening between instruments without the players having intended it that way – because they weren’t there together when the material was recorded. You get this element of chance that allows for certain combinations to occur that not even an improvising musician could do in that way, because the improvisation still has a set of base responses that determine what happens. But by having a set of blind recordings all combined, you get the most amazing things occurring that sound perfectly planned but in fact are not.

So you’re introducing a whole series of possibilities that technology offers that real-time, one-off playing might mitigate against?

Thomas: Yes, and it’s just one of several things that distinguishes this interpretation from others. We are still waiting to hear from Terry Riley whether he is happy with what we have done; he may well send us an email saying, “Look, this is not what I had in mind with this piece”. But over the years, sufficient justice has been done to IN C in its original version that, on the basis of that experience, to take it into a studio and try another version of it is not to feel terribly guilty about it.

Thomas: photograph by Lindsey Reiner

What was your setup at the IN C launch at Revolver?

Thomas: The instruments were amplified on stage and played with a pre-recorded sequence, so you get the two things together, as well as real-time modification of the acoustic instruments. At the IN C launch, we had Steve Adam at the mixer modifying the acoustic sound in real time. My role was to maintain an overall balance in the performance between the sequence and the stage sound: while Steve was looking after the individual instruments, I was overlooking the final output.

So you must have rehearsed the piece quite a few times.

Melanie: Yeah – oh yes! We started rehearsing six weeks before the performance, but the last time before that had been in the studio to the pre-recorded sequence. There had been a long gap before that…

How has it evolved?

Melanie: I wasn’t present the first time it was played, so my encounter with IN C was with the electronics. I played my part, improvising as I saw fit, to suit the pre-recorded sequence. Then it was really refreshing to rehearse with a bunch of musicians again and it became a much more organic thing for me, rather than just my personal response to the sequence material. Over the six weeks we developed a real group mind towards the piece. It was still evolving right up until the night of the launch and I thought that gig was one of the best times, when it was really sitting just right.

You seem to have an enthusiasm for pieces like IN C ,developed in a workshop setting with space for group interpretation.

Melanie: Yes. And we’ve definitely had long relationships with other pieces as well, where the outcome is more arbitrary in a performance sense…

Thomas: We did a whole Cage concert, and Mel was working with one Cage piece, “Waterwalk”, that incorporated musical and theatrical aspects of performance, so it’s arbitrary in the sense that it is not fixed in notation. You have to work towards an outcome and you don’t know what that will be, but if you have an aesthetic as a performer or composer, of course you will do certain things and not other things. A composer like Cage counts on that, on the perfomer’s input, liberalising it in that the performer has to take some responsibility in translating these instructions into a result. That is definitely a process, to come back to your question – an example of a piece of music that requires a workshopping process.

If no rules are set down for what you’re supposed to achieve, then you can’t determine the success of your efforts by checking against the score and listening to a tape. Sometimes private languages develop among musicians who improvise. Does that process occur in re-sound?

Melanie: We haven’t done a lot of group-based improvisation or free improvisation – not enough for that internal language to happen. It has usually been mediated by a score or graphic of some sort, and also because the personnel has changed quite a lot. But when we’ve had the same people working over time on a piece, like IN C , it does happen. And I’d like that to continue.

Thomas: It’s weird – sometimes you know that things are falling into place without communicating verbally. You get an enthusiasm for a certain part of a rehearsal and at the end you know that something has worked out really well; I don’t think that can always be communicated in the first place. Having shared a certain aesthetic over a number of years makes you realise things collectively.

My favourite composer is Steve Reich, and the odd thing for me is comparing the early pieces of his and of Terry Riley – the listening experience is very similar, although I know there are great differences of perspective and philosophy, of compositional rigor, between the two. But one thing they seem to have in common is that their pieces are workshopped considerably with ensembles. I understand you’ve also played some Steve Reich pieces…

Thomas: We did Reich’s “Piano Phase” and “Clapping Music”, and thought about doing one of the counterpoint pieces, the one for clarinet; we also talked about doing “Violin Phase”. I think the main comparison, if you look at the way they approach minimalism, is that with Riley you move different materials in relation to each other, often in an improvisatory way and by increments – you may have 4 beats with one and 3 beats with another instrument and they will over lap in a certain way while still following the same pulse. In a work like “Piano Phase” the shift of two instruments in relation to each other can be in terms of a continuous phasing: one instrument changes tempo gradually in relation to another instrument, and this may continue until they are locked in to the next pulse or beat – and then they will go out of phase again.

Melanie: photograph by Michael Shaw

Is that very difficult?

Melanie: It’s really difficult!

Thomas: It is extremely difficult, yes. It’s something you can’t expect of any traditionally trained musician.

There’s some unlearning to do?

Melanie: I suppose you have to unlearn the tendency to be on the beat and “in time”.

The position of the downbeat changes within the piece. Is that what’s so difficult to work with in an ensemble?

Thomas: Even worse than that, with Riley’s work, the downbeat’s position may change – or be different for different instruments – while still following an overall tempo. With Reich, people actually change tempo against someone else holding the tempo – and what you learn in classical training is to be in time with other people.

I wanted to ask you about the meaning of something on your web site, where you talk about the notion of “vital experience gained through engagement with the sonic world of our time”. That’s a pretty oceanic statement! I guess what I want to know is, how does it feel to do what you do?

Thomas: Well, again, Cage’s philosophy of music is important to us in that he didn’t want to distinguish between thinking about music and everyday life anyway. With that quotation from our (now very out of date) web site, when we talk about experiencing the sounds of today, that’s something that resonates very strongly with Cage: we live in an age where we can’t always predict the sounds that will be relevant, and we have to be careful not to be too precious about music or art, precisely because there is a lot to be said about just living, experiencing music in the moment and I think this is where that statement comes from. The sounds of today can be anything around us, to which we can respond without having any preconceived ideas about it.

It seems to me you touch base with a whole bunch of ways of operating: you’re working with process in terms of the technologies you use and the workshopping method, but you’re also intensely concerned with the experience of doing that for the people in the ensemble…and you aim to produce things of beauty, a thoroughly modernist concern. Are you aware of the whole bunch contradictions there?

Thomas: Yes. I remember criticisms even within the group of a lack of direction, and I always thought that if we did determine a very stringent direction there would be a strong danger of the whole thing becoming very stale or redundant. This is where I’ve felt I’d rather deal with uncertainty, confusion or criticism of not knowing where to go next than being too deterministic and saying this is what we are going to do. Having said that, though, one important thing for me is to allow us to work together on the documentation and on sound recording because one way of enjoying music is on CD at home – and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that. So we’re not subscribing to this “process over product” ideology, either, whereas a lot of people would say that process is the only thing and product is nothing.

It’s especially the case in the academic world, where you’re almost required to justify yourself on that level before you play a note.

Thomas: We leave our options open, but that’s not necessarily a licence for not striving for quality in whatever we do – and the measure of that depends very much on the project.

Any final words?

Thomas: There’s one last thing I would like to respond to, and that’s an issue you raised before we began the interview: politics. By using certain musical approaches and aligning them with a particular political outlook, one can be politically correct, I guess. The example I’d like to refer to is a particular experimental music scene in Melbourne, where people are concerned with process and look at the product as something to do with materialistic, capitalist consumer society. There’s a unification of an artistic, aesthetic and political outlook, and I do strongly sympathise with that – I think it’s great to be able to say that certain forms of art or expression lend themselves to certain alternative political views. But I also know that music can be easily appropriated, and has been in the past: Beethoven, for example, was played by the Communist party as much as he was by the Nazis. If there is a link between politics and music, it is not a one-to-one analogy and is not as simple as finding one style – like minimal music – and saying that it represents democracy because everyone can play what they want.

And all the parts are the same volume…

Thomas: Exactly! I think that we are not striving for this one-to-one analogy and that music will always be something that is much harder to confine to political or ideological views, although that’s something people have always tried to do. So when we don’t push any particular view, this isn’t avoiding politics but more perhaps recognising that music shouldn’t be reduced to a vehicle for political or ideological messages.

..:: LINKS
Re-sound
Move Records