Episode 57: Timbre and Transcendence: Improvisation in Music

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1 Published on Up Close ( Episode 57: Timbre and Transcendence: Improvisation in Music Timbre and Transcendence: Improvisation in Music VOICEOVER Welcome To Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities, and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimeld.edu.au. That?s upclose.u-n-i-m-e-lb.edu.au. That?s the sound of Robert Vincs, on the saxello. Hello and welcome to listeners of Up Close, from the University of Melbourne, Australia. This is Jacky Angus. My guest today is saxophonist, Dr Robert Vincs. Dr Vincs is based at the Victorian College of the Arts, which is part of the University of Melbourne Australia. And where, in addition to the saxophone, he teaches improvisation and music technology. Dr Vincs is known for his pioneering work in computer music in the?80s, where he programmed a computer to improvise jazz, like a human. Dr Vincs has appeared at numerous jazz festivals in Australia and elsewhere, including Seoul, San Francisco and Amsterdam. His instrumental diversity are featured in the exotic sounds of his CD, Devic Kingdom, where he plays tenor sax, the saxello and the Korean bone flute, with equal ease. Welcome to Up Close, Dr Vincs. Thanks, Jacky. Well Robert, I?d like to start by asking you about computer intelligence and jazz and how this complements human creativity. They?re not the same. You know, what is the intrinsic creative intelligence of a human isn?t a set of rules. I used to think so. I used to think that you could define creativity as a set of rules that you could program into a machine. And what I?ve come to discover is there?s an interactivity or play. And that?s the thing which fascinates me now. But at the time, the way I was taught American style jazz is

2 there?s a rule based function. And that?s the point of view I tried to proceed with. But it?s really that notion of play and surprise, which is elusive for me in that technology. We tend to think of musical genres very distinct from each other, as very separated, particularly by historical sort of stages. But from what you?d saying, you?d want them to sort of flow into each other more, whether it?s jazz, whether it?s other types of music. Am I right? Absolutely. One of the great things about coming from the tradition I come from is that I can go anywhere in the world and play with like-minded musicians. You know, playing with Korean musicians or whatever. We share a language. But when you?re limited to a score, it makes it much more difficult. Your flow is dependent upon the piece of paper in front of you. Whereas to me, music is just a really sort of a passport to playing with other people. So it?s very much performance oriented, isn?t it? And that means, of course, that every performance is completely different. Every performance is different, depending on the audience, the acoustic, the site specific nature of what you?re actually playing. I guess nowadays we can capture that, can?t we, by recordings? Whereas once upon a time? I was thinking of Chinese music for example. There?s no record of it, because they don?t have the same notation as we do. That?s right. Chinese music, Indian music. Strong aural traditions that have allowed the music to continuously evolve for thousands of years. Once it?s written on paper, that sense of evolution is really limited. One of the things I know that you?re interested in is the effect of music on people and what it does to you, the capacity that it has to enlarge in your world and transcend other things. Obviously that can?t be done to the same extent in a notational music. Is that right or?? No, I think it can be. But I think audiences have forgotten how to listen. And we?ve been led to believe that music is an essentially structural event. And we?re listening for structures, rather than just the pure sound. We?re trying to break things up and not hear the music as a whole. One of the interesting things for me is try some chanting before you listen to a great work like Beethoven Nine or something simple

3 like that. And it can lead you to a very different experience of the music than if you try and hear structural relationships the way that we might have been taught, you know, in primary school. I think the essential experience of music, at least as far as I understand it, is to be really present in the moment and to just drop any expectation that the music will be this, that or the other. It?s to really just be there. And that?s hard for people to get to these days. It?s a sound world. The world is sound. And things organise themselves spontaneously into music, if you just allow yourself to hear it that way. Now when you organise your own sounds? I know you do a lot of technology and studio recording yourself, as an engineer, as well as a composer and musician. When you organise other people?s music, how do you do that? What does that involve? Well, sometimes it involves just a respect for the particular tradition that the music?s coming from. Other times, it can allow you to just have more free expression and really spatialise the music, for instance, or really experiment with the sonority of the music. So what does spatialise the music mean? For me, spatialisation is this quality of immersion, that you?re able to just release into the sound. We?re used to hearing sounds coming from a point source, usually in front of us. But a lot of entertainment media now is going towards this sort of surround sound thing. Has been for a while. That?s a different experience, isn?t it? Oh, it?s a different experience. Because you?re kind of in the music. In the music. So now we?re talking really about the sophistication of technology these days, that makes the whole business of music and sound very, very different from the idea of something very controlled, out there as a sort of fixed performance. What does this mean for our capacity to transcend, I guess, ourselves and the world that we?re in.

4 Yeah. I think that a lot of entertainment media allow you to transcend in ways that the concert hall experience can?t. Because the concert hall experience, you?re still aware of yourself sitting in the seat, watching a performance. Whereas the immersive technology allows you to experience yourself as being in the performance with whoever is performing. And that immediately allows you to relieve that sense of self. Now I know that you?re very interested in dance and music for dance and the whole nature, the whole relationship between sound and the body. Can you explain a bit more about that and where your research is leading? Sure. Well I?m married to a dancer. So that?s? That?s a start. That?s a start. But what I find fascinating is that you see your music expressed through the body. You can see a visual representation or a kinesthetic representation of what you?re playing. The sonority is there. Well I?m very influenced by Deleuze, the French philosopher and Guattari. There?s a particular idea that?s called the body without organs. And I know a lot of people are groaning because they?re sick of that idea. What does it mean? Well for me, it means the body without organs is a construct, a theoretical space of intensities. So to experience music as an intensity, rather than a structural assemblage. So the music I?m improvising or composing is just about intensity, rather than about structure and form and the more traditional elements of music. Yes. So the body without organs is also described as a sort of a desiring machine and desiring being lack. As we lack, we desire. The desire motivates itself through this body without organs, which is just an intensity. So it?s intensity that isn?t embodied.

5 Exactly. It?s sort of spiritual. It can be spiritual. I even? But corporeal at the same time. Corporeal. I?ve seen John Woo, with his scenes where you get two people facing off with guns. And there?s that moment of stand-off. And the intensity passes between that moment, without there being any sort of sense of form about that. There?s just an intensity of the moment that just comes out of the situation of two people holding guns with one another. Okay. And what?s the connection with music. The connection is that, similarly, you can play in such a way that you create this sense of intensity that arises just out of intensity itself and not out of a formal structure. Not thinking about sonata form or A-A-B-A or any of the traditional 32 bar forms or even the more traditional Vedic forms or anything like that. There is no form. There?s just a moment of intensity that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Because you?re a sax player, aren?t you? So obviously you really believe that there is a moment in which jazz kind of takes you into a completely different dimension and you lose your sense of self and presume your sense of body. Oh, absolutely. And I?d say that works as well for Indian music and many of the other improvised forms throughout the Middle East. I just come out from an American model of jazz. But that?s a point of connection I have with, you know, many improvisers around the world. One of the instruments you play is the saxello. It?s got Middle Eastern qualities, the sound that you make on it. Can you tell us a bit about the saxello? The saxello?s roughly modelled off an American jazz player by the name of Roland Kirk. He was playing one in the?60s. A rather remarkable player, a jazz player.

6 It?s like a sax, though, is it? It?s like? Yes. It?s really just a bent soprano saxophone. Right. And what I like about it is it doesn?t sound like a soprano saxophone. It sounds a little more like a Middle Eastern shawm. A shawm, yeah. Which, to me, has much more intensity about it. Yes. It?s always very melancholic, I always think. It?s got that sort of? Oh, melancholic, absolutely. That grieving quality, like a lot of Middle Eastern music. Yeah. And do you like it for that reason? Or do you like it because it complements your tenor sax? I like it because it just doesn?t sound like jazz. It just sounds intense. Whereas for me, the tenor saxophone is harder to transcend because it has more jazz history with it.

7 That?s right. It?s got an agenda. That?s the way I understand it. You seem to be moving away, not only from? obviously from classic music and from a lot of the sort of mainstream, even beyond jazz now. You?re moving right into sort of an? even experimental music, aren?t you, in terms of sound, pure sound? It?s pure sound, pure intention. Trying to find freedom. Trying to find transcendence. Trying to find those other experiences that music can give you. You?re listening to Up Close with Jacky Angus. And I?m talking to Dr Robert Vincs, of the Victorian College of the Arts, which is part of the University of Melbourne, Australia. I know, Rob, that you?ve done an academic thesis on the area of transcendence. But as a private practitioner, as a musician, you really are interested in transcendence as an experience and as a way to move beyond the empirical self. How does that fit in with your own playing as such? I mean, it?s an experience presumably you have yourself of transcendence. It?s the fun bit. Music for me exists at multiple levels. There?s just the professional gig through various levels of experimentation and whatever and then there?s the transcendent experience, that sense of out-of-bodiedness. That?s the part that I enjoy and that?s something I work with my students on. We do a lot of work in meditation and trying to play for a meditative state. And usually find that students will plan a way that is much more satisfying for them and just the listener. I think they get to a space where they can actually move someone. To me, that?s the other essential element, is that you play in such a way that you move a person, that you change their experience of their ordinary life. That perhaps they think something or feel something that they wouldn?t have. And playing from that meditative space gets you there a lot quicker. A lot of musicians do this unconsciously. But more and more, I think we?ve got to teach people to just allow themselves to release in this space and forget those more traditional notions of like a moral perfectionism, where people assume that meaning comes from the perfection of iterating someone else?s score, which is a very traditional model. So our students look at very intimate sort of communication. I?ll ask them to play as a gift from one person to another, engaging eye contact, sitting six feet away. It?s a very challenging thing. It?s very personal too, isn?t it? Absolutely.

8 Robert, can you tell me about one of your CDs, I know, is called Verdic Kingdom. And it draws on the whole tradition of Verdas and spiritual presences and so on. Well yeah. The album?s called Devic Kingdom. I?ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of indigenous artists. And I?ve been privileged to occupy some sacred spaces and interact in a playful sense with the natural elements that exist in that place. This particular album was more of a solo effort, going to those spaces and recording in them and then coming back and reprocessing, with some interactive electronics. Sometimes have the interactive electronics on location. And really just trying to experience what is there in the bush and having a sense of dialogue. It sounds a bit crazy. But this idea of playfulness with natural elements, natural sounds. What sorts of sounds did you use? What are the instruments that you played with? Well, there?s the saxello, the tenor saxophone. There?s a guy called Garry Greenwood, who?s departed, who built a leather instrument we call a bowhorn. So I use one of his horns, which is a very wild sort of sound. Then there?s a Korean bone flute. Yeah. All of those instruments. Really trying to find that space. Well, we look forward to hearing some of your music now. MUSIC Thanks very much, Rob. That seems to be more about timbre than about notes and harmonies. It?s just about sound, isn?t it? Absolutely. But it?s not easy music to listen to, because a lot of people expect the concept of note. The note has a particular start and a particular end and it doesn?t change. We learnt from Bach and Mozart that there is this concept of note. Whereas my feeling is to try and change what happens within the concept of note and look at timbre rather than note and shifting timbre. When a note articulates or a timbre articulates, it may articulate cleanly or not at all, which to me is much more like the way we speak. We sometimes start. We sometimes stop. We sometimes cough and false start. And really trying to take away that idea of a moral perfectionism in the music, this Apollonian sense that music is a perfect world order. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn?t. Sometimes it just mirrors who we are as just beings, imperfect beings. In terms of mirroring who we are, I?m just wondering whether there are certain

9 cultures, certain societies, certain ways of life that respond better to this music and others that would find it just an assault. Well yes. It?s the music in the West. It?s become a celebration of the human ego. Whereas other cultures seem to be able to just transcend that egoness, either as a religious experience or as an experience of body, through things like dance and just celebrating. Does that mean that your type of music that you?re talking about, it?s really about meditation and you can do it with people or you can do it alone or you can do it just walking around in a natural landscape? Well absolutely. I think Buddhists called that samadhi, that idea of transcendence in the every moment. In terms of the playing I do, if people have that experience, well that?s terrific. Unfortunately, it?s not a big seller. It?s not a commodity thing. It?s not easy to sell the idea of just being who you are and transcending in the moment, no matter what you?re doing. Thank goodness. Well? yeah. Well all the best to you, Dr Robert Vincent. Thank you for joining us on Up Close. Thanks, Jacky. MUSIC You?ve been listening to Up Close, from the University of Melbourne Australia. Relevant links, a full transcript and more information on this episode can be found on our website, at upclose.unimelb.edu.au. You may leave a comment on any episode of Up Close by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page. Melbourne University Up Close is brought to you by the marketing and communications division, in association with Asia Institute, at the University of Melbourne Australia. Up Close is created and produced by Eric van Bemmel and Kelvin Param. Our audio engineer is Craig McArthur and our theme music was performed by Sergio Ercole. I?m Jacky Angus. Until next time, thank you for joining us on Up Close. Good bye. VOICEOVER

10 You?ve been listening to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au, that?s upclose.u-n-i-m-e-l-b.edu.au. Copyright 2009 University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne, All Rights Reserved. Source URL:

Richard Hoadley Thanks Kevin. Now, I'd like each of you to use your keyboards to try and reconstruct some of the complexities of those sounds.

Richard Hoadley Thanks Kevin. Now, I'd like each of you to use your keyboards to try and reconstruct some of the complexities of those sounds. The sound of silence Recreating sounds Alan's told me that instruments sound different, because of the mixture of harmonics that go with the fundamental. I've got a recording of his saxophone here, a sound