My electric harp set up on Ampkit using my ipad, which was tried & tested during Colab, will now feature in all my live performances.

CoLaboratively Speaking: Perception of art within the Arts.

NB: The following was written for a conservatoire project; however as I think it makes an important point, I have reworked it to post here. It contains less debate &/or humour than previous articles which you can read by clicking here, here & here. I currently have access to limited footage/audio from the performances. However, you can expect to see follow up posts containing these in the upcoming weeks.

All art yearns to be shared. As a creative artist, I give freely to the world everyday, whether it be with the markings on my face, clothes on my back or the music I play. All of the arts are highly responsive crafts; composed, indulged and created as a response to what we sense or feel. Instant reaction, appreciation & feedback from others therefore are the ultimate gratification and stimulus a creative artist can receive. At a conservatoire, practicing alone for hours on end it is easy for musicians to forget this. Music even at its most chaotic, by very definition, is structured. It is a process of organized sound even in improvisation heavy jazz music, relevance always existing in the applications of harmony, form, phrasing or style. These things, not without valid reason, take primary focus in the study & practice of music. The reward therefore often comes from self-indulgence or self-improvement rather than through connections.

In recent weeks I have come to learn that dance possesses an incredibly different approach. The practice & execution of dance is fundamentally receptive to people & the world around them. It is based on spatial & bodily awareness including the transfer and placement of weight. While a music student’s schedule is dominated with individual practice time, a dance student’s day is preoccupied with group classes. The sharing of their art is constant & embedded into their doctrine. For dancers, connections, not just within their bodies but between people as well, are fundamental to how they work & rehearse. It is unsurprising then, that the basis for the project ‘We’ came from a dancer.

‘We - Original compositions from both music and dance experimenting with the soundscapes and textures of electronic music and the connections between people.’

The quote above is the sum of the details I had before entering this project. The then foreign aspect of working with dancers & understanding their perceptions of music was not what initially excited me about the project. My current infatuation with various forms of electronic & intelligent dance music instead got me enthused. My interpretation of ‘connections’ was that of improvising & jamming with the other musicians within a highly interactive genre of music. This included evoking heavy world music influences. The musicians, including myself on electric harp, Paul Ooi as composer/producer & Jennah Smart on flute, began rehearsals a week prior to the dancers arrival. With these rehearsals it was evident that my preconceptions were not wrong; Jennah & I spent time playing and manipulating the main theme over Paul’s electronic backing, which did indeed contain many world elements such as a tambura section. Through our discussions further world music elements were included into the composition such as African drumming patterns, samba beats and eastern scales. These sessions however were primarily to gain a firm grasp on the material & each other’s playing styles before full rehearsals. It was quickly apparent that there was little we could develop until the dancers’ introduction when we could observe how our product served. Before the project had officially started, by creating music for a purpose outside of our usual classes we were already being forced to consider connections & responses then act accordingly.

Paul would trigger effects & loops he had created within a project on Ableton Live.

Upon first meeting the dancers it was very clear that despite being music & dance being so tightly intertwined, they exist in very different worlds. Soon it became evident that my role in the project was not as clear as previously envisioned. My comprehension of how dancers worked with music existed largely from films I had watched focusing on either ballet or hip-hop in which dancers predominantly used set choreography or a definite story. Being a harpist further enshrined this, an important part of our repertoire being the great classical ballets of Tchaikovsky. Naturally, I was extremely thrown by the hours spent on ice breaking games and peculiar workshop exercises. This way of working was so different to how musicians interact; at times it became difficult & frustrating because from our perspective there was an apparent lack of progress. Even when preparing heavily improvised pieces, the architecture & practice of that music is no different from the strict repetitive nature of learning any other piece. I assumed contemporary dance would behave in much the same way. I now discern how these workshops, and the musicians participation in them, were essential to our operating & connecting as a group and ergo the success of our project. At the time however, it seemed too much emphasis was placed of lying on the floor ‘feeling’ as opposed actualizing the material.

Many of the dancers’ workshops centered around carrying each others’ weight.

The open environment allowed for a very free flowing exchange of ideas and soon led to enquiries from the dancers as to how musicians evoke music. The emphasis musicians place on phrasing & structure made me conceive our role as the narrators. The dancers were playing out & reacting to the scene we described with our music and in turn our scene evolved as moving objects were placed in it. The coherence & unity of these scenes grew as the week progressed largely due to lengthy discussions of the image Paul, Jennah & I felt the music depicted. Even with our very different methods of advancing our art, a consistent interpretation of the material across the musicians & dancers ensured our functioning as a tight unit. Throughout the duration of both project & performance nothing felt forced or stagnated due to lack of enthusiasm, participation or interest. This what I believe to be the driving force that generated the overwhelmingly positive response to our performances. The commentary said much of how bonded we were as a group as well as our engagement with the audience. Everyone was in sync, everyone connected. Our ultimate outcome & initial objectives were one of the same.

However, what I ended up loving about the project was so much more than what I initially expected to enjoy. Though the act of playing an instrument is physical, musicians lack a tangible product. The dancers being there not only gave us something physical to respond to but also supplied us with a visible result of our music. It allowed us to see instantaneous feedback & indulgence of our work. The immediate gratification as we were playing was exhilarating, especially as it is something we seldom experience in the classical world. Emotions at the end of the project were running high with renewed realization of how strong my desire is to share my art, display what music can offer, and reverberate it off it and other creatives. Despite the vast & varying approaches among the different disciplines, this is the basis from whence every artistic medium evolved. We all strive for the same fulfillment; we strive to share.

x Maya

I would love to know if my usual readers would be interested in more of these posts, discussing my work as a musician? The ranting & raving articles will remain of course but if people find interest in these then I will post more.

This image was taken during the rehearsals of dance music project I was taking part in at conservatoire.

‘We - Original compositions from both music and dance experimenting with the soundscapes and textures of electronic music and the connections between people.’

Newspapers lined the walls, conveying connections around the world through events & the media. Dancers would read out random headlines or excerpts from articles on top of the cacophony of recorded voices used in parts of the music. They would also approach & start speaking to audience members, sometimes quoting these headlines.

The Freak Factor

Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga & John Cage.

What are the first things that come to mind when you hear those names? Most likely a contorted face screaming ‘You a stupid hoe’, a pop artist scantily clad in meat & an entire orchestra performing 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence. With all of these individuals, we get left with the sensation of doing things just because rather than for any musical purpose. There is a joke, the truth of which I’m not certain, that a janitor/stage hand had cleaned out the piano of all the junk lying on the strings before a performance of Cage’s prepared piano sonatas; Cage sat down to perform & upon hearing the first chord, screamed & ran off stage. The audience all clapped because they believed that to be performance. I could imagine a similar situation occurring at a Nicki Minaj show. *The motive behind much of Cage’s works, like with the actions of Minaj & Gaga, seem to be largely a brash grab for attention or being different purely for the sake of it. ‘It’ in many instances, being notoriety & money.

As an example take Lady Gaga. She exists as a business entity, not an artistic one. Some may find it curious to state so due to the nature of her dress; however, it only takes a quick google search to find videos/interviews which clarify that Gaga’s image was manufactured to sell records rather than a development of personal style. Furthermore, is it really that different a business model to what Madonna was doing 20 years ago? Do something outrageous & people will pay attention, whether it warrants it or not. The evidence of this was splashed everywhere last year, which was John Cage’s centenary; even after his death people are still paying to sit through silence.

However, this need to alarm & annoy has now become tediously overdone. It is merely a competition on who can out-freak the other in order to grab more tabloid space. This not only belittles & cheapens the art form but distracts from the content itself. This could be viewed as a good thing, as certainly in the case of pop artists, the content is often unchanging & unremarkable. The freak factor therefore is needed to differentiate between near identical music & stand out in an ever saturated market. However, this not only reflects negatively upon the music business but contaminates the art forms it exploits for these purposes. High fashion, already little understood as an art form (as I have written about previously), is being pawned off as a way for would be A-listers to compete for column inches rather than for the incredibly evocative medium that it is. What is more baffling however, is that classical music feels the need to make a spectacle of itself in much the same way.

I was involved, not out of to desire, in one of the many centenary celebrations of John Cage last year. The works performed that day were not exclusive to those composed by John Cage but were all contemporary classical. What I found remarkable about them, is that many required visuals/explanation to even realise that this was the musical performance. Others were completely discordant, many with little direction (or none in the case of 4’33) given by the score. With the latter, I find it difficult to accept that the composer should be given credit in the performance at all.

For all the superiority complexes the classical music world have over the pop industry, we have fallen into the same pitfalls of utter ridiculousness. The ‘Classical’ Freak Factor may not be as overtly money grubbing but the attention seeking gimmicks are still there, aiming to shock or distance music from its very definition till the term music does not seem acceptable anymore.

In a time when classical music is endangered among the younger generation, clinging to these ways further alienates an already distant audience. It is possible to captivate, test and innovate in music far beyond dresses made of meat, frying mushrooms on stage, smashing up instruments & even atonality. Musicians should have faith that their own personal style can grow into something new rather than resorting to the tried & tested ways of challenging consumers. The freakathon between the likes of Minaj, Gaga & Ke$ha are no more outrageous than the snobbery that still exists around new compositions which sound ‘too pretty’.

The time has come for us to realise ‘The Freak Factor’ has been exhausted. This racket is old & tiresome and we all look like idiots.

It’s time for change.

Maya x

*I know I’ll get some backlash from this so I thought I’d explain: I do appreciate that Cage’s contributions to music have been important. However, I do think his work is overrated & his style needs to stop being viewed as ‘current’, which is the main point of this post. On a separate note, some of his works are infuriating & with analysis it becomes evident that he did do things just to be difficult ie. shortening rests in micropatterns so they won’t add up to 32 beats. Furthermore, if you do the maths most of the micropattern analysis that is applied to his work is just wrong. Overall, I think much (NOT ALL) of his work needs to be thought of as performance art, not music.

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Hey! May I ask where you got this t-shirt from?