subtext to a performance

When we listen to live music we encounter a mediated version of the performer’s listening. As they navigate various sonic structures we as audience-listeners begin to understand the particular sensibilities of the performer as evidenced through their engagement with each sound: how does the performer hear loudness, quietness, intensity, sparseness, silence, the architecture of the room, and the social conditions of the performance context, etc. The performer offers a response to these questions through the production of sound. Listening and performance almost make a loop – in each sound we hear the performer hearing themselves – but in performance there is a tiny gap or delay between the perceptive-cognitive act of listening and the production of a sound. This gap is typically small in instrumental performance, but it becomes significant in other contexts.   

In the performance of electronic music this gap between listening and the production of sound can be extended, shortened, or removed entirely. We can imagine: a software that produces sound at each click of the performer’s mouse; a software that produces sound several minutes after a performer’s intervention; a software that begins producing sound before a performer can intervene in its structure; as well as many other modifications of this gap. In the case of fixed-media electronic music, in which no sound is produced live but instead a prefabricated sound work is diffused in the performance space, the gap is entirely removed. In this context, what is the performer to do but listen? This is an opportunity.

 In my recent solo performances I have attempted to explore this gap by performing my listening instead of generating sound in real-time. I perform alongside a piece of fixed-media music allowing me to write for its duration. In my writing I to attend to the way sounds make contact with the unique social configuration of the performance context, the specific architecture of the room, the character of the sound system, and my particular feeling in the moment of performance. Collected below are transcripts of the texts produced during several recent live performances.  

Shift: FourOneOne – NYC, May 3rd  

The piece has started. In this moment, I’m sitting with my nerves. In the silence. The silences intensify my awareness of myself. I’m wondering how people will hear the piece – whether they’ll be able to attend to the connection between speech and sound. Mostly I’m writing to work through my nerves as best I can – to find a balance or grounding in my listening which is so firmly centered on the reactions, the reception of the audience at this moment. Try not to have expectations for how others listen. I’m facing the side of the stage so that my left ear is pointing toward the speakers. Interestingly I’m hearing the left speaker with greater intensity – this makes me wonder if something is awry in the sound – could a cable be broken? Is the piece not sounding as it should? I still have so much of the rigidity of the classical musician in me – part of me desires silence – respect and attention for the work (which means for me). In the making of a piece, in my conscious thinking and creating, I would never expect these feelings, or at least not acknowledge them. The performance context has a way of bringing them out. I have to make a work that frees me from this rigidity, to reorient or rearrange this feeling in my listening. I was taking a moment away from writing as I was enjoying so much sitting here and listening. Billy’s drums are set up in the corner of the stage – I hear them resonating slightly with the speech associated sounds as well as with Joseph’s voice. The sympathetic resonance of the drums creates a quiet, hazy texture not dissimilar to the sound of the reverb applied to the speech associated sounds – it’s as if the reverb’s tail is taken up by the drums just as it dies out in the speakers. I hear a new resonance being activated by the synthetic sounds – I think they might be resonating Billy’s gong. It’s causing the illusion of harmony: there is a sense of harmonic motion as one sound resonates the gong and another the drums and cymbals. Isn’t it interesting how speech is so often transposed, changing forms – it moves from sense and content to pure sound, then to a resonance or articulation of the room, which causes a resonance in an instrument or object in the space. We so often think of the subject as located in their speech, in what they say. But the sound waves propagated by the act of speaking diffuse the self, spread it thinly across a room, an environment. What would it mean for the self to be located instead in the tail of a sound, in the resonance the voice creates in space – a movement from text to context. I thought I would spend more time focusing on the linguistic association of the sounds, but I’m having trouble hearing this aspect! It’s as if I’m listening from further away than I normally would – from above the piece. This position makes it harder to track the material. My perception is pulled in two directions – at once attempting to hear my thoughts and write them, and also to focus on and hear the piece. Part of me thought that this writing was an attempt to document my listening as a correlate to the listening of the audience, but I can never be in the position of the audience – I’m situated somewhere different, somewhere between the piece and them. What I’m listening to is in fact my reaction to their listening – I’m hearing an emotional response in myself elicited by their reception, or my interpretation of their reception. What was I looking for from them in the first place? I love hearing the high frequencies on these speakers. I love hearing this music loud – all the details start to sound, all the richness of the material. I am trying to track the semantic content more clearly in my listening – when listening at home I found that I heard the music in layers – the layer of speech and then the layer of sound. The speech associated sound would exist in the foreground and then somewhere underneath it I would hear all the other sounds. Now I’m hearing them as if in unison – somehow glued together? Focus on the internal sensation: the energy of recognizing your own processing, the vibrancy of your own perception. The piece’s structure is so thin by the end. The audience must know implicitly that the performance will soon be over? I love how the noise at the end sounds – so rich. More to say. How do I put down my pen?

KM28 – Berlin, June 7th

I am thinking about what Rahul said: that in performance, your listening becomes a means of attending to the audience, of translating their tone, their energy. It is harder to do this in silence – as a performer not producing sound. How do we channel or mold silence to accommodate the energy of an audience? The performer becomes an antenna, a conduit for the audience’s reception – is it akin to transference? I primarily feel an intensity and focus from this audience in their listening. We don’t necessarily think of transference as occurring in masses, but a musical performance in fact constitutes a kind of group transference. How am I to conceive of this transference as it makes contact with my own listening? Music creates the conditions for a loss of self – to give ourselves up to the otherness of the material, and perhaps the otherness of the listener?

 [To think about: are there words for this process of giving up that do not frame the act as a sacrificial gesture? Something like homeopathy – the fortification of the self through the other?].

The alphabet is not unlike a leitmotif, is it? There’s a conversation happening outside the venue: it is unintelligible from inside but the voices have an exciting way of merging with the speech sounds in the music. In performance I hear everything that I would change about this work: every performance seems to suggest the next piece. Continuity – the need to keep composing. New questions, more to say.

Les Ateliers Claus – Brussels, June 8th

The sound of the voice reverberates through the space and off the concrete walls. I can almost feel it bouncing – the reverberance applied to the synthetic sounds becomes doubly reverberant through its diffusion. How strange! What if the alphabetic sounds associated with speech weren’t synthetic sounds but were instead pitched ones? Tonal content? As music approaches language, becomes closer to it, the gap between the two becomes more pronounced. Tonality has its own linguistic structure that might bring out something new in its alphabetic association with speech. I am enjoying sitting in the strangeness of this piece. We are sitting in a circle – maybe it’s corny, but there is something generative about our being in this configuration. Something like Moten’s pleasure of being together - or at least gesturing at that? Someone giggles when the full sentence is realized – I feel glad! Often I find myself laughing when musical structure becomes tangible.

Evelyn’s Garten – Cologne; June 9th

­­­­­­­Performing the piece outdoors. The silences function more explicitly as openings into the environment: this is the case in all spaces, but the activity of the outdoors makes this all the more tangible. The material is also transformed by its presentation outdoors: it becomes an addition to the environment, complementing its sounds. I take note of the sun slowly setting: as it sets the environmental sounds begin changing. There is a marked increase in the intensity of the sounds before giving way to the night. The birds especially are getting louder. This movement from sun-space to moon-space affects the piece as well: the silences open onto a changed environment; the sounds are changed as they make contact with a new environmental context. Bugs, sparse rustling, night noise. In the outdoors sounds get diffused in extremely complex ways – I am hearing sounds coming from behind the speakers in fact. Rooms do this as well, but we are trained to un-hear these aspects, to abstract them away. This piece should be played loudly such that each sound has an impact, but this is antithetical to what is suggested by performing outdoors. I’ve lowered the volume in the hopes that the sounds do not drown out the environment but perform in counterpoint with it. For future consideration: I should not be attempting to dominate any space in my performances but instead should work with its unique qualities to adjust and reorient the performance to the characters in the context.

Qubit – NYC; June 29th

I wonder if I have changed in the process of performing this piece, in the realization of this written-listening practice? At first, performing in this way consumed me, filled me with dread – now I feel at ease sitting here listening. I’m writing much less. What does this mean? Is this evidence of a transformation? Maybe more listening means less writing…

Cutelab – NYC; November 7th

Your anxiety regarding the audience is the anxiety of the other. I’ve started to perform the piece while the audience is still getting drinks, adjusting themselves, continuing conversation, unaware that the performance has begun. This is the right way to start – imbricating the performance with the sociality of the concert rather than setting them in distinction. The energy of this moment – this pleasure.