Solo Performance

(photo credit: Bianca Griffin)

Over the years, I’ve developed a series of electro-acoustic pieces for ‘augmented solo’ performance. These can stand alone, or be presented as part of a recital including other contemporary literature for oboe and English horn. (View a sample list of available repertoire.)

Three in particular arose together as attempts to re-integrate my practices of composing, improvising, and performing contemporary ‘concert music’ on the oboe, which I felt had been developing along separate paths for too long. I owe thanks to Tom Djll, whose invitation to contribute to a ‘solo + extensions’ night at Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, in 2015 provided a key catalyst.

They all trouble themselves, in some way, with a fundamental crisis: how to transform a hermetic creative practice into an outward-facing product with sufficient payoff for anybody else – a thing in the world that can justify not only its own existence, but mine as an artist. Like all of life, a balancing act: between the megalomania of presuming anyone else should care about a public display of introspection, and the humility required in striving to ensure anyone could. Make it a solo composition – worse yet, exclusively for me to perform myself – and the screws tighten a couple more turns.

A Spurious Autobiography for John Barth (2015) is a framework for confronting head-on the tautological pitfalls of solo improvisation – the sneaking suspicion that, in the wake of ‘developing a voice,’ one’s just doing the same damn things over and over again in subtly different contexts. I fed, in two separate passes, the entirety of my first solo album, entymology (2000), through the circuitry of the classic modular analog EMU synthesizer housed at UC Santa Cruz. I then placed the chopped-up results into a structure that digitally flings taunting distortions of overly familiar materials at me in unpredictable orders and combinations. The effect is one of strapping myself into a personal-hell monkey-mind batting cage for your voyeuristic amusement.

In A Fuzzy Monolith for James Turrell (2015), I was interested in dragging myself away from over-reliance on texture, timbre, and extremities of extended technique, and towards a careful attention to pitch, interval, and motive. But that’s my problem. What I hope to convey to the listener is some semblance of the surprisingly moving impact that can arise from work that aims directly for a hijacking of the perceptual system. I love how Turrell’s sculptures are somehow simultaneously so monumental and so tender. They require time and presence – you don’t look at them, you have to inhabit them – but with patience you rather suddenly realize that the very way you’re physically experiencing light has changed. Figure and ground flip; proximity and distance get mushy; you see yourself seeing.

An Extruded Introversion for Blixa Bargeld (2016) is the most recent and likely last stop along this line of inquiry. The dedication is maybe a notch more oblique than those of the other two pieces. Discovering Einstürzende Neubauten as a 14-year old marked a sort of aesthetic Year Zero for me. I could gush about all that the band meant to me at the time; what seems relevant here, though, begins with their self-immolating front man as model of “the performative body,” his physicality an undeniably central component of his music. Another dimension involves the role I projected onto them as I myself began to navigate overlapping worlds of classical music, contemporary art, and rock & roll’s more bastard offspring. I concluded years ago that they were the perfect heirs to German Romanticism – a logical, if grotesque, conclusion that linked them from the far side of the breaking point directly back to Weber’s Der Freischütz. I began this piece with the explicit intent of maintaining more ego-less poise and equanimity than I’ve yet achieved elsewhere – trying to contend in my own way with the gauntlet gently proffered by the Wandelweiser collective, another form of Germanic extremism entirely – in order to make something that’s unapologetically…well, beautiful. In the end, I can’t deny the ghosts I see poking through the rent fabric all the same: of the histrionic, and of The Sublime’s taunting brass ring.