writing down music

A book has recently been published by Theresa Sauer in which she collects and presents various ways of notating music. It's part of the ongoing Notation 21 Project, a global research of innovative music notation. You can find more on http://notations21.net/notations21/

Operadagen Rotterdam afterthoughts

Yesterday we rounded up our 2 week residency in Antwerp with a late night performance at de Player in Rotterdam. A full program with 5  maybe more other shows/performances.
I was a bit out of it. Too much stuff sometimes to be the organiser/leader/player. I handed over a bit of this to Jean-Yves. He decided on the structure of the night. That felt good. And since he's a longtime companion in music I know his insticts are really good and I can always relate to them so a good co-leader or joint leader thing. Well, actually we are all joint leaders in this ensemble by moments and that's what so great about it!

One thing I've learned yesterday night:
The things I do lately are about changing the attention of the performers and the public to get to new areas of meeting. Create fresh meeting places. Not necessarily new ones but fresh ones.

This is a meticulous work that needs precision and attention. Not a thing to be squeezed into a program with other artists and with a very strong energy of the venue and it's people. Not to say that de Player isn't a great venue and the other performers were not really good or interesting or something. On the contrary actually!

But this type of work needs a clarity and precision in the proposition, the place, the scenography, how to get the public into it, how to invite them etc, that to mix this up with too much other stuff makes that really hard to do.

Our residency at Zuidpool was the thing! I hope we can do more of those!
I'm dreaming of a new work period there. Another week or 10 day period!
Like circus that hits town and let the mouth to mouth promo (does one say that in englieeeesh?) do it's natural work.
Other places with good energy that want to host us for such a trip please apply by using the official application form which you can download somewhere haha. So that a serious advisory committee can and will do it's serious job. Ok. Sorry...haha...

Right. So now the "nazorg". The taking care of the material. Archive. Write. Make a good website thingie. Talk to Elke and Geerdt. Make a movie to propose the work and get it out there.

So more news here sooner rather than later...

more on the brain and music

http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/mp3/charles_limb.mp3

on what happens in the brain when musicians are improvising,

told by a neurosurgeon specialised in ear surgery.

one of many podcasts on music & brain at the Library of Congress

http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/

A remark on the art of categorizations.

Categorizing as a strategy in the arts has always been part of artistic esthetics. The last decennium however, the translation of art in a knowledge production machine has began to occupy a disproportionate part of the discourse. This shift in vocabulary not only changed the role of the arts of today's society, it also pushed the arts (and 'artistic research' in particular) into the realm of economically viable, 'useful' and productive societal gestures. This means that the arts have little by little pushed themselves out of the focus of esthetics and into the zone of political knowledge production. The arts have come to be labelled not just as a place for (un)pleasurable contemplation, but as the perfect place to gather (critical) knowledge about its own and other societal preconceptions.

Now, if we look at the concrete results of this knowledge production processes, or take a closer look at the processes of categorizing themselves, this uncompromising view on the arts has to be understood with a little leniency. Artistic practices and their need for copying scientific strategies and vocabulary (the artistic laboratories, the information 'mappings', words like 'virus', 'contamination', 'rhizome', etc…) in one and the same gesture seem to propose an order of things, and create the acute experience of the impossibility of this categories to contain the information that they are supposed to comprise. Very often the categorizations in the arts rather reveals their own limitations: the absurd gesture of getting a grip on what is utterly quixotic and impossible to communicate in a thoroughly transparent way.

In that sense, it seems more appropriate to talk about the processing of knowledge than about the production thereof: as the surrealists showed us, art is rather a game of mislaying informations than one that makes sense of their belonging. Art does not in the first instance produce knowledge so much as an experience that we try to turn into knowledge through interpretation. What the arts keep on opening up are cracks in our systems of understanding, of placing our experiences in a pre-defined context wherein they can be understood according to the conventions of interpretation. What the arts insist upon in their recuperation of scientific systems is the absurdity of our endless attempts to create difference, to translate the mystery of things into analyzable data, to render the world-we-live-in into a comprehensible grid of information. The experience of things is not so much about 'what they mean' or 'how we can use them', but rather about 'what they do', and how they change my relations: to myself, but also to the other, and to the environment; en ecology of things that keeps on surprising me in its sheer complexity of potential associations.

what makes music expressive?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/18/science/20110419-music-expression.html?ref=science

with thanks to Guy Rombouts

A possible introduction

into the heart of lightness

Image a biologist entering a virgin rain forest where nobody has ever been. She knows something about plants and animals, from where she comes from. She knows about the behaviour of animals small and large, from the textbooks. Maybe she has instruments with her, DNA-sample kits or binoculars, electron microscopes or scanners. Maybe she just relies on her eyes and ears to explore the forest's ecology.

She bumps into a bewildering array of unknown organisms and their interactions, in which it is hard to see the forest from the trees. Where does she start? She will probably start by observing and collecting, trying to find and recognise recurring patterns in the complexity. Similarly looking plants or animals will be sorted into groups, which she calls 'families', and very close relatives within these families will be sorted into 'species'.

But every organism, so similar to the other members of its species, has its own personal characteristics. Every individual is unique. Still, each and every individual cannot survive without the entire ecosystem around it. Where does one individual end, and where does the next one begin? She realises she can start with any individual and working up towards the whole. Or vice versa.

In bacteriology, she already knows that genetic material is being swapped continuously between individuals, without them mating and procreating. The world of bacteria could be seen as one big gene-sharing pool of microscopic life. If they could sing, there hymn would be "we are the world".

And even in our own human genome, we find traces of old bacterial and viral genomes. The relationship between all living things is much greater than you would think when you look just at their outsides.

But undeterred by the immensity of her endeavour, she hacks her way into the unknown territory of the forest, gradually discovering more and more aspects of the reality she lays bare. Her knowledge grows.

And behind her back the jungle closes again. Whichever direction she looks in, so much happens behind her. Too much for one person to grasp. But she knows she is not alone. We are all together in this multiplexed world. Together we can make an effort to get our co-operating brains around it. At least, that's what humankind has been trying for the last tenthousand years. There is too much world and too little time for one person to understand. That's the power of human culture that we can build on to the work of others and hand on to the next generation. Nothing ever happens in isolation. Especially not the growth of knowledge.

In Conrad's story a human reaches into the heart of darkness in the deep primeval jungle of the Congo, or into his own mind.

I would like to turn the metaphor inside out. By exploring the unknown, by stepwise learning from mistakes and misclassifications, by trial and error, by playful experimenting and critically evaluating, we slowly progress towards the heart of lightness. The light of clarification. The hovering feeling of understanding. Our minds are catalogue-making instruments that help us to shed light on the world and on ourselves. On our thoughts and on our music.

Music and the brain

Why does music makes us shiver?

It is a wonderful thing, music. People spend more on music than on any other item (yes, even more than on sex). It fascinates and moves, it provokes emotions and makes our hairs stand on end. And it may make people run away screaming, or scare away youth from their favourite hang-out spot.

Probably the best book on the biological basis of music, making a beginning to explain these phenomena, is Daniel Levitin's This is your brain on music. Levitin was a musician , sound engineer and producer and worked for and with Stevie Wonder, Blue Oyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Santana, The Greatful Dead, Steeley Dan and many others. He also started studying cognitive sciences and in the end switched from the studio to the lab and the scanner. He now heads the department of Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at Montreal's McGill University.

Levitin shows in his experiments that music triggers the brain circuits that are involved in recognising patterns and emotions. The brain reacts especially when it detects patterns that deviate from the expected.

The corpus callosum, the bridge between left and right brain is bigger in musicians. The brain areas responsible for movement, for visual, auditory and spatial information processing are differently developed from writers or painters. It is far from clear how these differences arise, be it from genetic predispositions or from a lot of exercise.

We also know that the brain is a set of different tools, some of which can be damaged by brain disease. That explains why some people loose the ability to hear or use rhythm, while retaining pitch and melody.

Still unexplained is the evolutionary significance of music (if there is any). It could be an evolutionary accident piggybacking on the capability of language. A competing view, one that Darwin held, is that music signals some kinds of intellectual, physical or sexual fitness. The jury is still out on this.

Just as on the fact that it can move people so profoundly, while it is just a conjunction of sound waves in various frequencies hitting the ear. We only know it hits the same areas in the brain that light up while experiencing an orgasm or when eating chocolate. Serotonin and dopamine are two of the neurotransmitters involved. The former may explain why music sooths the brain and may help relieving depression.

For even more illuminating stuff on how the musical brain created human nature, read Levitin's latest The world in six songs.