Interview with tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE — Part 1

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE shouting "alanyl" while skydiving as part of his "Titin (The Chemistry Between Us - Love Letter for E)" project - July 18, 2013. Photo: Cush

In addition to participating in Crucible Sound #4, releasing the "MM 26" compilation, and providing a list of his favorite recordings, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE also recently sat down for an interview. We talked at length about graphic scores, structured vs. free improvisation, the longest word in the English language, invented instruments, and so much more that I had to break it into two parts. Here's part one. 

I know you're a big fan of John Cage's work, and he was famously against the idea of improvisation because it's so much about the decisions of the performer and their taste, but at the same time he created many graphic scores which have space built into them for the performers to make decisions. I'm interested in what you make of this.

There it becomes an issue of the language. If a person is reacting to a graphic score that's not through-notated, the performance is often referred to as a "realization" in avant garde classical circles. The implication is still that the score is a directing factor, regardless of whether it seems to be completely non-specific in conventional terms (I think Cage even has a piece called "Improvisation" if I remember correctly¹. I think I may even have a recording of it).

I always make the distinction between free improvisation and structured improvisation, which is a completely straightforward distinction in my opinion. In free improvisation, people are supposed to be coming up with something completely new that's structured/based on/informed by, as little as possible, their previous playing habits and so forth. As I've often said (maybe too often), that's turned into a style that doesn't live up to those expectations anymore. It's generally a style that's based around the micro, the sort of fast, often virtuosic, miniature interaction, without any willingness to go into concepts of larger form, except for forms like what Jack Wright was a big proponent of—and Jack Wright is certainly a great improviser—which are forms of "duet now, trio here, different duets" and so forth and so on, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but I think that there are a zillion other forms that one can use that are just as interesting, if not more so, for making things lively that don't inhibit the gist of what I, at least, want to get out of improvisation, which is: the ability to be spontaneous and fresh. For me personally, I actually like structured improvisation a lot better. I think it's more likely to stimulate me into doing things I wouldn't do otherwise.

But back to the whole thing about John Cage, there are so many different ways that people use the term "improvisation," like some people who are less familiar with its most common usage amongst improvisers might say something like "well what key are we going to play in?" And then a more seasoned improviser might say, "well we aren't using keys, we're just playing" but there's all of this baggage that's related to improvisation that's connected to jazz for example where people consider jazz to be an improvisatory musical form, but then other people might say "but there's a theme, which is the head, and then there's a series of hierarchical solos based around that theme, and then there's the return to the theme, the recapitulation, the tail. That's really not that improvisatory. It's often very based around licks that the players have played over and over. I love Eric Dolphy, for example. He's an incredible musician. But I've heard multiple performances of the same pieces where the solos are almost identical. They're great solos, but they're still almost identical. So is that improvisation?

I think Cage's disdain for improvisation is a disdain for taste in the sense that he was always oriented around trying to get people to bypass their biases in favor of experiencing something that's determined by something that he built into the score using so-called chance methods and so forth. His disdain for the term "improvisation" was probably a disdain for the sense of improvisation as a person exploring their tastes in a particular situation. That's what he was trying to get them to not do. But then there are other people who would use the term "improvisation" and say that, for example, a graphic score or one that's based on the imperfections in paper et cetera is just a structured improvisation and it's still an improvisation. I don't really care in a sense that much about the terminology. I actually like the term "realization" a lot, but I would call many of Cage's pieces structured improvisations, independent of whether he likes that term or not.

I wanted to ask you about HiTEC because you said something about getting people to do things they wouldn't normally do. It seems like that was one of the aims of that long-running project.

Prior to HiTEC, in the 90s, in Baltimore and then in Berlin, I had a project called The Official Project, which was co-founded with instrument inventor Neil Feather, who has always been one of my favorite collaborators. And The Official Project used what was called CAMUs — Cue-Activated Modular Units — which were systems of playing that could be activated by using specific cues by any of the players under a detailed set of guidelines. Most of those, if not all of those, were specifying particular physical actions, rhythmic things, ways of interrelating, and so forth. That was great, and I really enjoyed that project a lot. At its peak, there were 17 people in that group. So when I founded HiTEC, I didn't want to just repeat that process. I wanted to see whether I could go to a new level of conceptualization and not specify physical actions at all.

HiTEC stood for: Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative, and the idea really was to try to have a group of people mentally conducting thought experiments which would manifest itself in sound or motion without there having to be specific things that the person had to do, other than concentrate on the thought experiment. Now it wasn't 100% like that, but there were things like Avicenna's Floating Systems Manager, which is the one where the performer, the HiTEC Systems Manager as I preferred to call them, had to imagine themselves as being a soul without a body and then act accordingly. Or there was the Brain in the Vat, which was the one where — and these are both sort of classic thought experiments — where you imagine that you are a brain in a vat that's being electrically stimulated to think that you're having these physical experiences, that you have this history, and so forth and so on, which may not be true, and then to again act accordingly. I thought those were really interesting. I thought they were huge challenges for people to try to realize. Think about the Avicenna's Floating Systems Manager thing. If you're thinking that you have no body in that instance, that you're just a soul, then how are you going to be creating something with sound, which is a physical phenomenon? It's immediately created a conundrum, which for the most part probably resulted in silly things happening or whatever, but still they were silly things that were being squeezed out of this conceptual dilemma.

I forget how many people "passed through" HiTEC in a sense. I think it might have been over 40, but the most people that were ever in a performance was 21 people. And I think that probably at least half of the people just thought "oh well I can just do whatever I want to" which is definitely not the idea that I had in mind. That's actually not my primary interest. I really wanted people to be challenged and try to take it seriously, which Cage wanted too. He wanted people to take him seriously. I've heard stories through Ben Opie of let's say a tuba player in an orchestra just playing some cartoon theme song as part of a Cage piece in a way that was meant to be deliberately disrespectful, as an insult to say "this is just buffoonish bullshit" or whatever. I can't say that HiTEC was 100% successful because some of the people never got the idea that it wasn't just free improv for the sake of making weird noises, as some of the people have actually said.

But for me personally, it was a great experience, and I do think a lot of the recordings are very interesting to listen to. I remember Roger Dannenberg, who's a great trumpet player and very intelligent guy, and who's played as part of the Crucible Sound series, saying he was listening to one of the HiTEC CDs in his car, and he was just saying something like "you can't really tell which piece it is that you're listening to because there's no specific melody." And I thought that's true in that sense, but actually if you listen to them in the same way that you try to perform them, you can actually figure out which piece it is that you're listening to. For some it's much easier than others. That's an interesting aspect of it for me. If I'm listening to a HiTEC recording, I try to think "Is this 'Brain in the Vat?'" I can usually, not so much now but more when I was immersed in the thing, I pretty much knew which piece was which every time I listened to them. I could always figure it out. So there were things that one could hear that weren't as easily pin-pointable as a rhythm or a melody. And I am very preoccupied with this whole thing of getting people to do things that they wouldn't normally do, especially myself. And I don't mean things like getting people to chop someone's head off or whatever. Something that expands their brain outside of their most banal habits.

So for example, I've been making all these keyboard scores which are mapped in a 1-to-1 relationship with a keyboard, which you put over the keyboard and then you refer to it as a chart. In the case of this one, this is the score for "Titin," where I took the full name of Titin — it's 189, 824 letters long, which is 5 letters longer than what it says on the internet, but I have corrected it. I found 5 typos in the word and I corrected it. I'm very proud of that! — and because I've analyzed the word to an extreme. There are 23 repeating chemical components in the name. I took those 23 components, I counted how many times each of them occurred within Titin total, and I used that as a partial structuring for this score. A part of the way the score is set up is to get the player at the keyboard to play in the lower register, in the upper register, and almost not at all in the middle register. It's also designed so that there are no repeating scales from octave to octave. The structure as it goes through the octaves is a larger arch, and there is a structure as far as spaces between pitches goes etc. When one is playing it, if you're using an electronic keyboard to trigger samples, it doesn't even matter whether they are pitches or not. What matters are just the keydown commands. So the process of playing that has been very interesting to me.

"Titin," score for 61 key keyboard

I know next to nothing about chemistry or how chemical names are structured. The full name of Titin begins:

"Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonylleucylglycylaspartylprolylglycylisoleucylglutamylglutaminylserylleucyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucylisoleucylglutamylalanylglycylalanylaspartylalanylleucylglutamylleucylglycylisoleucylprolylphenylalanylserylaspartyl"

which can be broken into:

methionyl
threonyl
threonyl
glutaminyl
arginyl
tyrosyl
glutamyl
seryl
leucyl
phenyl
alanyl
alanyl
glutaminyl
leucyl
lysyl
glutamyl
arginyl
lysyl
glutamyl
glycyl
alanyl
phenyl
alanyl
valyl
prolyl
phenyl
alanyl
valyl
threonyl
leucyl
glycyl
aspartyl
prolyl
glycyl
isoleucyl
glutamyl
glutaminyl
seryl
leucyl
lysyl
isoleucyl
aspartyl
threonyl
leucyl
isoleucyl
glutamyl
alanyl
glycyl
alanyl
aspartyl
alanyl
leucyl
glutamyl
leucyl
glycyl
isoleucyl
prolyl
phenyl
alanyl
seryl
aspartyl

which I interpret as being a list of the components of Titin in a meaningful sequence. SO, that stimulates me to imagine various things:

What if other things were to have 'names' that consisted of list descriptions? For example: steps-door-doorknob-floor-lightswitch-picture-lightswitch-steps-airconditioner-bed-computer-internet-email as the word meaning WhoUnit?SubRoutine or some such. Of course, that's a short example. I'd like to write an entire descriptive book as one word following the cue of chemical names.

The score for the sound version of "Titin" has the component names assigned to specific keys, by which I don't mean scales and I do mean the physical objects one presses on to play the instrument, and minimal rules for frequency of playing those keys, based on the frequency that those components appear in the actual protein. What I imagine (and I admit that this is somewhat fanciful given my lack of chemical knowledge) is that every time the piece is played, it's 'writing' the name of a chemical compound—probably one that doesn't already exist.

EG: in the version "for 88 key piano" a player begins with:
C#6, A#0, A#0, G6, C7, G7, C8, C4, A#4, A#4, C4, A#0, A#0, A0, B0, C1, F#5..
That translates into:
methionyl-alanyl-alanyl-phenyl-prolyl-seryl-thereonyl-varyl-isoleucyl-leucyl-leucyl-isoleucyl-alanyl-alanyl-acetyl-arginyl-asparaginyl-lysyl
...which may be the beginning of an actual or an imaginary chemical name. This fascinates me as a mad scientist approach to creation.

(To be continued in Part 2)

^{1. Cage has multiple pieces with the term "improvisation" in the title: "Child of Tree (Improvisation I)" for amplified plant materials (1975), "Inlets (Improvisation II)" for conch shells, water, & tape (1977), "Improvisation No. 3" for 4 tape players (1980), "Improvisation No. 4" for variable speed tape players (1983), "Improvisation" for ensemble (1984), and "Three Composed Improvisations" for drums or bass guitar (1987), according to Josh Ronsen's now-defunct "John Cage List of Works" website.}

---

For more information:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/
http://www.youtube.com/user/onesownthoughts