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.

my starting doc

body and soul

a random variation on ecology and eric's cosmology
Bifo Berardi (The Soul at Work):
the soul is the 'clinamen' of the body. it is how it falls, and what makes it fall with other bodies. the soul is gravity. this tendency for certain bodies to fall in with others is what constitutes a world. the materialist tradition represented by epicurus and lucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain down through the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, until a sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve - clinamen - leans bodies towards one another, so they come together in a lasting way. the soul does not lie beneath the skin. it is the angle of this swerve and what then holds bodies together. it spaces bodies, rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency, the affinity they have for one another. it is what they share in common: neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain way of vibrating, a resonance. frequency, tuning or tone.

beyond the catalogue

A biologist among the musicians,

a first draft reflection

collecting is understanding

finding is keeping

We can't help it. We observe things, experience them and immediately start putting them in categories. The reds and the blues. The soft and the hard. The quadrupeds and the birds. The trains and the bicycles. We have to organise our world of experiences in order to survive. And we are very good at it because we have a language as a useful tool to label things. If we wouldn't do so, we would be lost in a world of seemingly infinite variety.

By labelling we force ourselves to think why we put something in a certain category. Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? (Culinary speaking, we rank it among the vegetables, botanically speaking it is a fruit.) Beer and wine are both alcoholic beverages, but the former is made from seeds, the latter from fruits. (That's why saké is fundamentally a kind of beer.) And they both belong to the fermented drinkables. There is only one human race Homo sapiens, therefore racism is biologically impossible. Racism is just the wrong word for the discrimination of ethnicities. So you see, categories and labels interfere with all things human, on an everyday basis.

And that we don't need our eyes for this encyclopaedic work is beautifully demonstrated by Geerat Vermeij a Dutch limnologist who is blind from his third. When he says "seeing" he means "feeling". And he feels sea snails and determines species by the form of their shells. He is one of the leading specialists in his field. Give him a snail from wherever in the world, and he'll tell you which one it is.

He charted the evolution of all these species. One of his fascinating conclusions is that ecosystems are more productive, create more diversity and numbers of species if it is under pressure. By feeling the form of the shells in his fingers, he deduces the grant logic of nature.

It shows how collecting things and putting them in categories is impossible without deeply and pragmatically reflecting on the criteria to be used while doing so. And by thinking about criteria, we have to think about the reasons behind them. That's why cataloguing things leads automatically to investigating these things. Only understanding differences and similarities, relationships and connections can form a workable basis for any systematic inventory of things.

Look up at the starry night sky. All those suns burning away millions of years away. They have been grouped in constellations since time memorial. These have been used as signs of the zodiac, supposedly determining the lives of earthlings. In reality, the stars of Libra or Pisces have no real configuration whatsoever. There is no Big Dipper in the sky, except when you look up to it from our very peculiar spot in the universe. A random distribution of stars at very different distances make up an image in our minds and eyes.

But is as inevitable as it is useful. Cataloguing things - be it objects, sounds, processes, colours or sounds - stimulates us to reflect on the essence of what they do to us, what they mean, how we use them. Any collection says as much about the collected items as about the collector.

Look at your bookshelve(s). How are the books ordered? By colour? Alphabetically? By author or by title? By size? Thematically, or by country? Is the fiction separated from the non-fiction? Did the poetry get a different shelve?

The diversity is bewildering and complex. And no system is good enough to arrange everything in a 100% satisfying manner. Always there is some particular example that evades categories. Even the most simple categories become fuzzy and fraying at the edges.

It may seem easy to discern the living from the non-living, a tree from a stone, for example. But even the definition of 'life' runs biologists and philosophers into problems. It is not clear on which side of the border between animate and inanimate a virus sits.

But having to decide, begs us the question. It not only forces us to define our criteria, it forces us also to look more clearly. What is the matter? Which differences and which similarities are meaningful? And that is where science comes in. Science as the never ending endeavour to gain trustworthy knowledge. It is a never ending activity, as each new answer leads to another question. The circle of knowledge may grow bigger, but at the same time its circumference, where known and unknown touch, grows longer too.

The horizon beckons and recedes. By looking beyond the objects themselves, you bump into the relationships between them. How they interact. How they fit together in networks.

The science that studies these systematic interactions in living systems is known as ecology. It is the scientific discipline that studies systems and complexity on four different, but interrelated levels.

Look at a forest. There's the individuals. The behaviour of a squirrel or a beetle, the growth and fall of trees. But individual organisms never come alone. There is a population of squirrels and beetles, there is the forest that you can see from the trees. As a group they have characteristics that differ from those of the individual. Males and females, migrants and residents. Next to study is how all these living things interact. With each other, and with their geochemical surroundings, with the soil en the air, with thunderstorms and forest fires, with seasons and climate. They are all bound up in one complex whole by the continuous stream of energy and information linking them up in a multilayered network. Finally these three components are surrounded by a bigger whole (there is always something bigger). Any forest fits within a wider landscape, any group finds a place in a society, any piece of knowledge or ritual is part of a culture.

With this crash course in ecology in mind, now look at a band playing music. The same ecological framework can throw some light on the structure and the functioning of people playing music together.

There's the individual band members, with their bodies and minds, their own idiosyncratic histories, backgrounds, hang-ups and fascinations. There's the interaction between them as members of a group, any group of animals follows some unwritten rules. People cannot escape the psychosociological ties that bind them. By playing together they exchange information and energy. That's what binds them together, it's what makes the band into a whole, the reason why they play together. And of course they play somewhere, in a studio, on a stage, on a rooftop, just on their own, within a framework of music production and consumption, embedded in a society with values and options on what music is or can be, that go far beyond the top-20.

One aspect of systems in this ecological approach should be stressed. These systems are dynamic. They are always in flux. Change is forever. Any forest is different the day after. Nature stays never the same. The old Greeks already realised that you can never step into the same river twice. The curious thing is that we still recognise the forest a day later. Just like we recognise a musical theme even when played slower of in a different mode. Like we recognise a Chinese opera and a Lady Gaga song both as music. There is also some resilience in the disturbance, robustness in the shifting systems.

This ecology thing may seem a long way from a Songbook. But if you think of a songbook not as a static book but as a living process, build from words and letters, movements and gestures, sound and visions, then it might start approaching the multilayered complexity of the real world of musicianship.

scale free network graph

ilan's grottos for the french art anthology Frederic Magazine