I see. I would say that the technique tends to occur in a somewhat "anecdotal" way (and now for a bit of THIS!) in the EP/BP/PB trio recordings, which serves to make it more totemic, or more like a potato as you said earlier, than in the solo pieces, where the "inherent inflexibilities" function as a contextualising matrix, now occupying the entire aural field, within which (I would say) various poetic evolutions take place. (But you may disagree once you've given them a listen.) This kind of thing would presumably be more like a direct illustration of what he talks about in the Rotterdam text.

Looking forward to hearing them, CD... I'm afraid I have so many differences with the Evan Parker Rotterdam article that I'd better not start talking about it. I'd much rather pass straight to the music.

Well, it's 4:45am, the baby slept through the expected feeding appointment for the first (?) time... and I now find that BOTH the Braxton Parker duo AND Time will Tell are missing from my collection. This is distressing beyond belief! Never loan out discs again!

However, I do have some useful tidbits nonetheless. The St Gerold recording (ECM 1609) contains one track of all multiphonic-thingy in circular breathing. Note the strong reverb, which, if artificial, defeats the purpose of the matter entirely, as the performer isn't consciously in dialogue with the reverb. Having said that, it's not as wet as I remember it.

Seems silly to call it St Gerold Variation 10

In the second example, taken from a double-CD album called September Winds (Creative Works Records 1038/1039), once again features strong reverb, but this time it seems to be "all" space - and what a space it is is is is: "an abandoned underground drinking water cistern on the Zürichberg . . . built in 1922." [ellipsis sic] The track is titled Insects I, and features Peter A Schmid on E-flat clarinet, Evan Parker on soprano sax, and Reto Senn on taragot (Wiki sez: a Hungarian reed instrument used rarely in Hungary but prominently in Romanian folk music*). The dominant ostinato there is not the overtone thingy; in fact, it's not Evan Parker doing it...

It's an entomologist's dream, innit?

I think you'll agree that that is "better," though it's a bit like eating chocolate: No matter how cacao-phile you are, you always know when to stop. For the sake of completeness, I ought to include Insects II: EP on ts, PAS on cbcl, RS on bcl... though hardly a bass-register version of Insects I. But to stick with the topic, here is EP's ss-solo from September Winds, simply titled Sagssolo.

Superb little ditty featuring but not overwhelmed by overtone thingy

Now for something completely different, a duo with Derek Bailey on the album Arch Duo, recorded at the my alma mater's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in October 1980. Rastascan Records, BRD045. Flatulently dry. A must-have for the serious collector.

12 years before the Rotterdam essay, it must be said.

Don't ask me what Bailey is doing to encourage chuckles. I'm Chafing Dish. We welcome replies.

*looks like this (we love rosewood)

Taragot Web Page

Do get around to commenting on the article though - that's why I put it there.

Here's one snippet which might get us started.


Now, I would say that the "hierarchic relationship" and "inspired perfection" are hugely overstated, but this kind of attitude towards notated music is one which I've noticed is quite prevalent among improvising musicians of Evan's generation, as opposed to those of younger generations (the music of Lachenmann, for example, has many admirers among younger improvisers). Why should this be? I think one reason, and actually quite a good one originally, is that a musician coming of (musical) age in the early 1960s could well get the impression, with all the graphic notation and other shenanigans going on at that time, that a composer was often someone who got performers to put in the majority of the musical/creative input while taking all the credit him/herself (this came up in the Haubenstock-Ramati thread, I think). Remember Vinko Globokar's refusal to put his name to the recordings of Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen because he felt the music had been collectively made while Stockhausen insisted that it was all his own work. One can see a reaction to this kind of attitude coming through also in the writings of Eddie Prévost and Derek Bailey.

Another problem lies in the insistence on a view of a score as consisting of a greater or lesser density of "instructions" (as opposed to the word I would use which is "proposals"), implying a hierarchy which others (the composer, for example) might not feel is there.

The reason I didn't want to start is because I can't really put myself where someone who might make those observations is coming from. I missed the '60s completely of course, and musically speaking the '70s and most of the '80s as well. I admit that the bit I did feel like saying something about was the bit you quoted though...

My attitude to having encountered the level of detail Parker mentions is not at all that it narrows 'the scope of legitimate interpretation'. You can find dynamics from pppp to ffff and more in Messiaen and even Tchaikovsky for example - I think most musicians who encounter them (even those who enjoy nothing more than playing a Tchaikovskyan fffff in the orchestra!) would feel that on the contrary they help you extend your own expressive boundaries (and indeed help you become familiar with as much as possible of the territory within them). Something similar seems to me part of the reason composers such as Ferneyhough specify the level of detail they do: to point the performer towards a musical space where such a level of resolution and subtlety is thinkable. Has Parker been deeply involved with the performance of highly-detailed notated music? I suspect not and I can't rule out that fact (rather than a generation gap) as a possible explanation for why his observations are for me so wide of the mark. I actually can't see his remarks in that paragraph as referring to graphic scores at all, I'm afraid: he seems to take aim precisely at detailed traditional notation. Going out on a limb I'd suggest that at most his remarks suggest to me a reaction to second-hand moans about Ferneyhough, heard from players who didn't get the point, refracted through observations of the graphic-score situation you suggest. (There are some early programme notes for Time and Motion I at the Sacher-Stiftung in Basel in which Ferneyhough expressly states that part of his intention in providing so much detail is to attempt to rebut the notion that only in aleatoric or improvised music is a co-creative role for the performer possible.)

Certainly I suspect quite a few people see the composer-performer relationship as 'hierarchical' (I don't). I wonder if some of that lies behind a tendency in the improvisation world to employ terms such as 'spontaneous composition', which I personally don't find a helpful coinage. I'm sure the intention at its best is to break down that hierarchy and to assert the creativity involved with improvisation. My own impression though is that it accepts the valorisation of 'composition' in the act of appropriating the name, rather than genuinely asserting the creativity which may be involved in performance whether of notated work or not - and for that matter the kind of creativity which certainly I (and, I know, many other performers) seek not only to bring to a performance situation but to contribute to the composition of new work.

No, indeed he hasn't been so involved. But very few performers of his generation have, of course.

But that's a side issue I think. EP has obviously relented in his attitudes towards some composers who use complex notation!

Another side issue is the fact (as I see it) that the note was written mainly to justify receiving (presumably) a composer-sized commission for an improvisation project, which, I can say from experience, doesn't happen very often.

The most important idea in it for me is "improvisation as a method of composition", that is (moving into my own preferred terminology!) as a method of structuring ideas/objects in musical time and space, which is what makes it a different thing from interpretative performance.

Of course there's a distinction... just that we are gradually populating the no-man's-land in between so as to reach an understanding of the music creation world where there is (potentially) no distinction. Concepts that blur the line are still few and far between, though, and need constantly to be reinvented.