The role of a
composer contains certain contradictions. It is a role of great freedom but, at
the same time, negotiations and coordination between desire and effect.
Creativity as such wagers on a break and novelty, but it is also part of
continuity. Composing means directing a work, its encoding, form and purpose,
and manoeuvring between the desires, expectations and abilities of the work’s
performers and listeners, between various acoustic and social spaces of
listening. In line with Adorno’s metaphor of a “message in a bottle”, it means
surrendering music to its unimaginable future.
The metaphor also
suggests that the composer’s role is independent, strongly drawing on the
notion of composers as autonomous artists, a notion characteristic of a narrow
place and window of time in history: 19th-century Western art music.
Beyond this framework, composers are more closely and differently involved in
the phenomenon of music. Before the 19th century, a finished and
written work was not the central concept of musical culture but only one of the
factors of a performance or an event. In the 19th century, the
emphasis shifted to works that were more precisely written down; instead of
using Italian adjectives for tempos, Beethoven, in particular, attempted to
introduce measurable metronome markings; performances were supervised by increasingly
more important conductors and the criterion of a good performance was its
faithfulness to the composer’s text, Werktreue.
In the 20thcentury, this demand reached its extreme and, at the same time, triggered a
series of negations that opened up the composer’s increasingly stricter control
over the material. The open form and indeterminacy allowed the interpreter not
only to make their own decisions, but also to have a deeper, more exploratory
relation with the musical work, thus bringing them closer to a composer. The
influence of sound art and the installation, performative form could change the
composer’s view of the ritual of a performance. The invention and general
spread of recording technology, phonofixation, threw musical notation into
question, even though a special cognitive dissonance prevailed among composers:
the search for new sonorities continued to take place on paper and only partly
with the use of new sound technology.
In this line of
thinking, we have to move away from the canon of Western composers since
modernisms were also realised outside it. Jazz composers did not leave behind
bodies of works that could simply be reproduced, a sealed cultural treasure, an
American version of classical music. They did not submit to musical notation;
there was no clear line between the author and the performer, rather a field of
searching between the collective and the individual opened up. That does not
mean that a jazz musician or arranger worked out the sound any less, but rather
that they shifted the emphasis from the notation to the musical personas of
their ensemble. With his assistants, Ellington composed for musicians, not
instruments. In his arrangements, he did not mark individual lines with
instruments but with the name of the musician that would perform the part. Mingus
planned his works well, he thought over the polyphony of the lines, but did not
write that down; instead, he played or sang to the musicians their line and they
had to memorise it and then perform it with the conviction that it was also
their music. From the system of composing classical music, in which he was
briefly involved, Mingus adopted the mode of an ensemble operating as a
workshop where different musicians, instrumentalists and composers can try out
their ideas with their colleagues. We also come across this idea in the case of
the AACM. Muhal Richard Abrams noted: “Basically,
musicians are performers, composers and all, at the same time. You write music
when you stand up and practice your instrument.”
At the same time,
the 20th century was also a century of great social conflicts and
political revolutions, which is why composing could hardly remain self-isolated
from society. Before the 19th century, the social role of a composer
put them in the service of the aristocracy or the church, but, with the rise of
the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, composers, more than the other
musicians, became free individuals, autonomous artists liberated from serving a
social authority. In the 20th century, this role of a free decision
making and communicating imposed on the composer the role of a social
seismograph. Attali explained composing – and, actually, music more broadly –
as a symbolic channelling of violence. The extreme, avant-garde line demanded
that every composition think about a social problem. At the same time, the mainstream
concert sector expected something similar: for a performance or release of a
work, the composer must also provide a written commentary, a manifesto, an
explanation of their “message”.
In the 21stcentury, composing can therefore hardly persist with the model of 19th-century
Western art music. It must take a position on the opening of form and material,
decide on the notation and the degree of strictness and freedom in implementing
the notation, think about the collectiveness of the phenomenon of music and
confront technology and social meanings. In one way or another. By opening,
closing, accepting, limiting.
The composers of the
three new works by Šalter Ensemble, who are also its members, bring
heterogeneous experiences to the repertoire, from classical studies, researching
through improvisation, working with electronics, the practice of sound art and
playing jazz to creating in other media. Their works reached their final,
performed form through the musicians’ cooperation – from the initial idea,
which the ensemble tested, developed, adapted and perfected in an intense
period of rehearsals, workshops of sorts.
In the compositionMy Wish Your Command, Tomaž Grom establishes a relation between a
mechanically triggered small drum and the ensemble, which, through the musical
and sound relations, quickly develops into a relation between leading and
following, between social hierarchies and forces: “The combining and
manipulating of sound elements reflects the complexity of the interactions
between an individual and society and encourages one to reflect on how
individual initiatives face outside pressures and how one can retain one’s
autonomy and integrity in this dialogue.”
At first, Elisabeth
Harnik envisioned a more precisely written work, but discarded the idea after
meeting the musicians and created the composition šum II, which is based
on the creative improvisational abilities of the ensemble’s musicians: “The ‘skeleton’ of the piece is a fixed formal sequence. The verbal
instructions for the collective shaping of the given structure allow for
extended interpretations that put ‘flesh on the bones’ of the basic idea.
Within the ‘defined freedom’, the composition experiences a multifaceted
colouring through the collective and individual contributions of the musicians. The poem Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath thereby functions as
a guide-line for the improvisational participation. A remnant
– or waste – of the initially planned piece, which provided for fixed pitch
material with indications of the noise component including fixed
instrumentation, can be heard at the end of the piece: Double stops of the
violin, sounding as if from afar, accompanied by breathing sounds of the drum.”
Jonas Kocher and
Gaudenz Badrutt wrote Interstices / Interferences with a text score that
enables the musicians to freely decide on the material, which can range from
melodic fragments to static sonorities. Their interference in the music that is
repeatedly established anew took place through their basic use of technology: “From time to time, a randomly generated light signal tells the
musicians to interrupt the music or make it disappear into silence. These
events occur at unpredictable moments, each time giving the music the chance to
start again in a different direction.”
That is how the
four composers of the three works respond to the dilemmas of composing today
and their responses have a common feature. The technology they use is brought
from their home closets or drawers and does not require the cooperation of any
large institution. The political moments of the compositions communicate with
shared life experiences, rather than with determinable theoretical connections.
Musical material is not created on a composer’s desk, but in an encounter, an
agreement and also improvisation. The creators have a bottom-up way of thinking;
they do not seek definite answers but individual solutions to composing for the
new millennium.
