10/11/18 “18b_RS#5 [strict]”
Final Lab Days of our project
During these days we took on an aspect of the latest score we had not delved into yet: the continuum from open to strict interpretation of modules. For this approach, we worked with the rhizomatic scores (five assemblages of several modules, drawn in non-articulated visual relation to one another).
These scores were created non-deterministically. Thus their combinatory characteristics are unplanned, and we discovered them while playing. This feeds well into their function as touch-points for improvisation. They sit at the far edge of any idea of “score”, even though they are descended from much more score-like material. Instead, they are suggested rhizomic structures, flying in parallel to the music we have worked with over a period of three years, calling up new landscapes in that language.
We tried each rhizomatic score in each of three ways: open, free, expansive; soft, elastic, flexible and; strict, stringent, binding. This continuum of approaches is, in a way, a boiled down picture of the cyclical process the scores have traveled throughout the entirety of the project, each cycle distilling a new score, with materials once more removed. With the rhizomatic scores, we played this process, nearing the material of the modules in their strictest components, playing with those components, floating away from them into new territories where they stand as a mirage.
We didn’t go in numeric order. We didn’t play in order along the spectrum points. For some scores, we reduced them first, taking only a portion of the modules in a rhizome. We did this when the number of combinations between the different modular micro-systems seemed to ask for clarity. It shows how even the simplest module – even unto the most translucent of starting points – contains all the possibilities of an entire system of its own. Were another group of artists (because these practices are certainly not limited to musicians) were to take up work with this system, the language they would develop together even out of the strictest approaches on the continuum would be different from our own. Even the tiniest seed of a notion can re-form the multi-spiraled utterances of cooperative improvisation.
Each score had a very distinct character to it, like a complex mode or a song. The indeterminacy with which they were made only enhanced this for me. Their worlds must be played into being. The modules are sigils, representing cooperative experience amongst us; this one is the Homage a´ Ligeti, cousins removed, that one is Quasi-Flamenco, which was a piece the trio played eons ago in process time. Even the most open playing contains the material; even the most stringent contains the unexpected. The continuum is, itself, a rhizome, spiraling endless fronds of new variants, vectors and plateaus.
-Katt Hernandez
