Entropy and
the New Theater
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Q: What is the theatre of entropy? A: First of all, the word theater does not imply any kind of theater that one is used to seeing. The dramatis personae are in fact the musical objects which are being acted upon by the musicians, transformed, catalyzed by them. I was very taken by Brian Ferneyhough's series of "Time and Motion Studies" which in turn were based on Antonin Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty"...the driving force behind these works lay in the exploration of the energy level of the performer when he is confronted with an over-intense amount of information, which he has to process as best he can, with severe time constraints framing him in from every angle. One senses something surreal happening with the performer's aura, but one doesn't quite know what...this is what interests me. I don't want it to be so clear what's happening, but I do want there to be some kind of discomfort in the listener, some lack of connection between what he's hearing and the performative demeanor of the player. But it shouldn't be so evident. I've long been fascinated with the idea that "energy" could be a parameter separate from pitch, rhythm, dynamics etc.. How can one really measure the amount of intensity a performer brings to the performative act, more precisely, how can one differentiate between two identical musical objects, objectively speaking, which are inflected with two different degrees of energy, or intensity of whatever you want to call it. How do you separate out this most subtle of parameters, so you can analyze it and then use it as a compositional determinant. I then found myself coincidentally learning Stockhausen's Klavierstuck VI, which inflects a very stable set of parameters with a tempo curve, fluctuating endlessly above the musical material. The most simple paradigm is that when a performer plays an accelerando, his attacks become more brittle, sharper, and quicker. His body tenses up. When he plays a decelerando, his body relaxes, his attacks become slower. This is a gross generalization but it was the starting point for many an investigation. Q: I'm reminded of Brian Ferneyhough's work Mnemosyne, and the article The Tactility of Time, in which he describes a constraining frame of temporal reference... A: Yes and in fact that article the Tactility of Time got me pretty much started on this whole idea of performative energy. What many people failed to understand about Ferneyhough's rhythmic structure, is that the parameter of relative energy is quasi-indissociable from the final aural result. So that you cannot really say that because you dont perceive a 5:7 within the first seven beats of a 8:11 precisely (the lack of any steady pulse renders this impracticable), that this notation is extravagant. The energy that results from a performer having to divide himself and force his natural gestural impulses into precise frames is what makes Ferneyhough's music exciting and what makes this type of notation extremely relevant. The other impulse was the discovery of a quote by the British painter Francis Bacon which talked about the irrationality of painting portraits in a time where representational art is unnecessary due to photography. One has to deepen the game. What he tried to do throughout his life, and this is the one obsession we encounter throughout all the David Sylvester interviews, was to make the paint come directly onto the viewers nervous system. How can one make the paint move in such a way as to make the most direct impact possible, without the intermediary of rational consciousness, the explanation, the laborious program notes which tell us how to listen or what to listen for. How does one make direct facts in music, bypassing ones intellectual side, with the eventual intention of adding to ones repertory of experiences? Q: Getting back to entropy, the Robert Smithson influence is quite important. A: Smithson had a knack for entropy. His works all demonstrate the irreversibility of certain processes, towards the ultimate state of stability. His
Partially Buried Woodshed was just that, a process-oriented work
consisting of dumping a certain amount of earth on top of a woodshed
and waiting until the roof cracks, an irreversible state. The Spiral
Jetty in Utah is now completely submerged. He had a great analogy
for entropy which was the Humpty Dumpty story, about how all the
kings horses and all the kings men not being able to reconstruct
Humpty Dumpty from the shattered mess. Q: Were you not at all concerned with quoting such historically loaded material? If I had had to think about it first, I probably would never have done it! But it occurred quite naturally during our rehearsals and I naturally appropriated it thereafter. The Mahler is particularly relevant. It is the last part, the Farewell, to basically his last completed work, and is about the final farewell, death quite literally. In fact, Mahler told Bruno Walter that the only logical response a listener could have after hearing this piece would be to commit suicide. That always stuck with me, and seemed like a useful analogy to entropy. Irreversible and final. The depressing context is more or less intentional I admit, though the Mahler is never really recognizable as it passes through a performative filter, a kind of slowed-down spasm of sorts. Q: Even though the theater is non-traditional, there are theatrical elements, for example the contorted performer in several constraining states, for lack of a better word. A: This comes back to the initial impulse of A Theater which was to explore the relationship between the performers bodily comportment and the sounds that result from his impacting the instrument when in these altered states. I am still profoundly disturbed (in the positive sense) by Cecil Taylor's attitude towards the piano. How does he manage to make the sounds he does and at that velocity? I am interested in the fault-lines between a physical stance and sound result. What does one get when one tweaks ones physical attitude so that producing clear sounds is difficult? I have to say that despite many attempts at dismissing the whole phenomenon, I was incredibly fascinated by the whole David Helfgott affair and how he performed on the night of the Academy Awards, under much duress one would imagine. What interested me was the erratic stance he took to the Flight of the Bumblebee: the fluctuating tempo, the missed half-sounds that accumulated around the right ones, not just mistakes it seemed but scars on the tissue of the chromaticism, the whole cliched crazy demeanor. Its politically incorrect to exploit someone's craziness, but I still couldnt help but think about why this pianist has received such fame...we are a society obsessed by misfits, especially those who are perceived to have transcended the barriers which society throws at us. Despite the melodramatic quality of all this, the performative stance was what interested me. It connects to the idea of performative efficiency (or lack thereof) which Ferneyhough explored in the Time and Motion Studies. We live with the antiquated notion that the performer is a totalized whole who must project confidently the music he plays in order for the message to come across. I thought it might be interesting to explore what happens when the performer is deliberately inefficient. For example, near the beginning of A Theater, one texture in the middle-register of the piano persists for far too long, monotonously, without any clear harmonic progression. The idea of playing with the listener's tolerance of such a texture was one thing, but playing directly into the boring aspect of it is quite another, when you are aware of it. As performers we try to be as vibrant to the dramatic possibilities of the work at hand...as a general rule we dont try to be boring. This was an area I wanted to explore. Q: The purely musical content is not as crucial then? A: No. It's deliberately gray. I didnt want there to be any perceived harmonic motion, any perceived rhythmic motion, or dynamic contrast. All mezzo-forte. A completely null terrain. I dont want the listener to be tuned into the timbre or the color. I want him to become rapidly saturated and turn his attention to the energy levels that are behind these textures, even though the textures themselves are unchanging. Q: Doesnt this require a visual element though? Because if the textures are not changing, how is one expected to pass to the next level as you say, without the added neurosis of the visual experience? A: When I say unchanging, I mean in matters of harmony, rhythm, dynamic and all the standard parameters. But it is changing in energy, and that can be clearly perceived without the visual impact. As I said, it's not a theater in the traditional sense anyway, so it doesnt require a visual presence, though it does enhance the experience. I'm setting up a control group so that I can play directly with the energy levels that inform the material. I don't want anything else to distract the listener. Q: Where are the musical antecedents for this idea of energy? Are there any clear ones? A: Yes, many. I gave a lecture recently and began by performing the first movement of Beethoven's op. 101, but from a very bizarre performing edition by Artur Schnabel, noted Beethoven pianist, in which all the subtle rubato inflections are notated in precise tempi! In a sense, this ultra-control is the perfect companion to Ferneyhough's Mnemosyne. If you follow these indications rigorously, you are in no less of a tight constriction than in the latter work. And there are many composers today working along similar lines: Alvin Lucier with his brain-wave experiments, music directly off the nervous system if there ever was any! John Oswald, with his micro-splices of different contexts and energy levels in a very unsettling whole...the splices originated as part of another context, and they carry their residual meanings to the new context. Also Steve Reich in his recent works, where he samples certain spoken phrases and builds musical structures around them, in the tempo of the persons speech, rather than within abstractly related tempo ratios, outside-time so to speak. There is a movement in Heinz Holliger's Skardanelli Zyklus in which each singer takes her tempo from her own pulse. Q: These are all conscious, calculated means to the end though? Yes and the point I wanted to be very clear on from the start was that there was to be no losing oneself in the heat of the moment, which in my experience often leads to prefabricated improvisational responses, an almost certain falling-back on routines. I wanted the whole project to be conscious, though extremely taxing both physically and mentally and ultimately involving and affirming, if you will. I didnt want to become crazy. I wanted to work with different areas of physical coordination which one associates with aphasia, a certain stutter, and see where they led, without becoming entranced by them. But the result on the listener is quite different, and ultimately extremely subjective and disturbing. I want to work on myself as deeply as I can, provoke certain things with new conscious means, and hopefully hold up some kind of mirror to the listener so that he or she can explore areas of themselves. Thats the ultimate goal of art I think. Marc
Couroux
Theatre
of Entropy Interface "Can you analyze the difference, in fact, between paint which conveys directly and paint which conveys through illustration? This is a very, very difficult problem to put into words. It is something to do with instinct. It's a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." -Francis Bacon
My main concern is, and has always been, the reconsideration and reevaluation of the relationship between performer and instrument; the actual moment of interfacing is unbelievably complex and multivalent. I'm interested in this within a purely musical context, but also in the larger socio-cultural picture. It is evident that the 19th century-based attitude of presenting the "perfect performer" still persists in concert halls across North-America. The ritual of interface between performer-instrument but also performer-audience has long been unrenewed, summarized as it were into a bland version of past practices. (One only has to remember that this form of interaction has only been present for roughly 150 years, since Liszt began performing other people's music as well as his own...the composer-performer-total-musician disappeared soon after.) All new techniques I've been developing in recent years relate to the notion of performer-instrument INTERFACE, rather than any kind of "extended" technique involving sounds extraneous to the keyboard. I want to effectuate a re-splitting of the physical from the sound, to provoke other links between the body and the instrument. My childhood fascination with the nature and functioning of my nervous system has now led to a direct manifestation of this in my music. It has become in effect the subject of the musical discourse. One way in which this splitting is achieved is by the unconscious spitting out of information which is then canalized, refined and directed, balanced-out, or thrown out of whack. I'm interested in unintentionality but not in the sense of the "anything goes" mentality of much aleatoric music. What is more fascinating to me is the sound quality of such unintentionalities, the half-baked, imprecise, broken attacks...the cracks. I don't construct forms through unintentionality, but I use the sounds that such involuntary physical gestures produce. This seems to me to lead directly to a new kind of "theatre" (perhaps one of cruelty, selon Artaud), one which is concerned with the interface as subject matter. The drama arises from the relationship, often conflict, between body and matter, and how body acts upon matter. What interested me about the whole David Helfgott phenomenon was his erratic stance: the fluctuating tempo, the missed half-sounds that accumulated around the right ones, not just mistakes it seemed but scars on the tissue of the chromaticism, the whole cliched crazy demeanor. Despite the melodramatic quality of all this, the performative stance was what interested me the most. We live with the antiquated notion that the performer is a totalized whole who must project confidently the music he plays in order for the message to come across. I thought it might be interesting to explore what happens when the performer is deliberately inefficient. I always wonder why I am attracted to this deviant mode of playing the piano. From the very beginning of my classical music studies, I was fascinated by the score above all else as source material which is projected onto the body. This to me is interpretation. I deliberately nurtured a lack of study of classical pianists because I always had the greater desire to reinvent the music directly from the score. This leads one into areas of interface which might have been glossed over or simply rejected in an attempt to insert oneself as surreptitiously as possible into the classical performative canon. The whole notion of what sounds good, merely a collection of culturally received attitudes, seemed to me pregnant for questioning. In my music I often effectuate SLOW TRANSITIONS OF BODILY COMPORTMENTS instead of transitions in the musical material proper. That is to say, the basic textural material does not change, but rather the filter/sieve through which the material passes, i.e. the degree of bodily receptivity/flexibility. This creates a sonic result which is ill-definable, mysterious. The listener is constantly aware of significant changes, but is unable to put the finger on exactly what those changes are. The keyboard register I employ is usually limited to the bottom half of the keyboard. There is a sameness to this register, especially towards the middle, which allows one to work on parameters other than color. The low register has fascinating perceptual qualities: it is difficult to perceive any reasonably complex chordal structure in the lower two octaves. Therefore, the possibilities for very subtle subterranean manipulation, are staggering. Conversely, it is the perfect terrain for exploring areas other than pitch, which is often over-emphasized in contemporary musics. Some notions of a Metaphorical Geology The zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is---all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the romantic ruin because the buildings dont fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scne suggests the discredited idea of time and many other out of date things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the big events of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past---just what passes for a future. Sitting on the fence In my youth as I explored "remote" regions of Montreal on bicycle I would be especially fascinated with the areas stuck in a halfway-point between complete development and total underdevelopment (Anjou, Pointe-aux-Trembles). Areas like these always seemed much more loaded than urban areas, and differentiated, and at the same time mysterious. Anjou is more stimulating than downtown Montral. Mississauga more than Toronto: suburban housing developments placed next to an open field with farm and animals, adjacent to an enormous tank and refinery. There is no attempt to reconcile any of these elements...areas in a frozen state of becoming. In music, I'm not interested in the final result but the becoming, the process. It does not resolve itself. I have been long obsessed with halfway states, especially relating to the construction of form: it could go either way, by erosion or by construction. Standing in one of these areas, one is never quite sure which process is under way...or both even. I can easily relate to Smithson's Monuments of Passaic, chiefly because he insisted that the seemingly mundane monuments of everyday life have just as much creative potentiality as works of art in a museum, if not more. In North-America, the notion of building has always been evident---building a culture as well as filling the open-spaces around us---but also the notion of deterioration, waste, entropy. My position as a musician is as privileged as anyone else's. My life has the same constraints and stresses and joys than anyone's..why should my position as an artist be any different? I am always sitting on the fence, formally speaking. The premises on which I improvise are always shaky, and always disorienting while they are in progress...I like to create situations in which I myself am unsure of where I am in the ongoing process. Not only that, but the idea of being unsure is a central aspect of my performative persona in general. One of my central questions has been: how do you change yourself and your bodily comportment in order to radically alter the form of the improvisation and the listener's perception of form (memory games) and of HIS relationship with the performer, which is no longer passive, but active, keeping abreast of sudden changes in performative ritual/dynamic. I've often likened the result of what I do to be somewhat akin to watching a series of road accidents as they happen, with that mixture of utter fear and wonderment at being transported outside of reality for a brief moment. Erosion-entropy In early short stories such as Bud Oleg Thompson (1991), I constructed a form which was deliberately entropic, irreversible. One began with a quite innocuous premise which, through small jolts, gradually edged its way to an entirely different kind of narrative, eventually winding its way to a situation which would have been unthinkable considering the limits which the opening section seemed to set. The nature of what constitutes an IDEA is also repeatedly put into question in my music. I am mainly interested in ideas that have not yet reached the stage of full-fledged idea. This is manifested a) on a pragmatic, surface level - creating half-sounds, "slurring" on the surface of the keys, never making a great effort to articulate an "idea proper", not encouraging any strong structural delimitations; and b) on an ideational level - the sounds are all well-executed, well-played, "traditionally" articulated, but the idea at the source is at an unformed, "pre-concert" stage. The question remains: what makes an idea an idea and can one tread the thin line between an idea and a non-idea?? One of the ways in which one can effectively test this notion is through the deliberate prolongation of ideas beyond their "usual" lifespan, even way beyond. (The idea that a particular idea could have a predetermined lifespan is a notion assessed and maintained through the standard Western classical canon.) This is achieved by setting a fixed, mandatory duration within which the improvisation takes place. The duration is unusually long and forces the idea to either develop or to allow its un-formedness to become the centre of the discourse, never settling into a totalizable reality. I am interested in ENDLESS DIGRESSION which does not ever intend to resolve itself into intelligibility of a teleological kind. Rather, the digression is the main topic. The idea of "process" becomes frozen, imitates itself, feeds off its own febrility, veers off constantly, but never as a prelude to hierarchisation. Also, the emphasis that is placed onto this digression in extremis leads in some cases to a deliberate CONFUSION OF INTENT, where one parameter stays fixed while the others keep slipping, eroding. One is forced to question the apparent banality of the process at hand, without ever being able to ascertain it as fact or fiction. A ritual of disintegration It has seemed to me, that the one central issue preventing a more widespread communication between a performer and a listener, has been the refusal on the performer's part to let his performative persona disintegrate on stage, fall away. Why couldn't the performer's entire nervous system be put on the line in front of everyone? Wouldn't that be a more "human" form of communication? But would that be art? Wouldn't it remove the composer from his creative monopoly (I include performer/improviser in the category of composer) and his position of authority over everyone else (including the performer)? I think we have a lot of trouble with this idea---we think of our music as radical but we fail to question the structures in which this music is presented. I think this is the one crucial leap that a performer has to make in order to step out of the 19th century. Finally, I believe it is in this manner that I can eventually arrive at reinstating a form of RITUAL within the confines of a concert hall. Until other options are realized, this remains the most potent area of investigation. It is an extremely personal ritual, though, one which feeds directly off my nervous system with the hope (expectation) of then transmitting it to the listener/viewer. The method of reintegrating ritual is essentially subversive---leading a standard concert-going audience into surreptitiously (unconsciously) reevaluating their own position in the social process of concert-going. This can be achieved by putting the listener in an awkward position, of feeling uncomfortable in sympathy with the performer's awkwardness (deliberate? that is the question!), or giving the listener the feeling of being privy to the process of working out musical material, rather than the final version. In a sense, the listener becomes an accomplice to the drafting stages of a particular work. But this ritual is never overly theatricalised. Rather, the drama takes place within the confines of the performative interface itself. My whole interest in fact revolves around the over-definition of this seemingly small but crucial element of performative mechanics and, by extension, performance practice. Marc
Couroux
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