Rank Ensemble will perform David Toop’s ‘composition for improvisers’, “FLAT TIME/sounding”, the afternoon of Saturday December 3rd, 15:00 at Taidehalli, Nervanderinkatu 3, Helsinki.
‘FLAT TIME/sounding’ is David Toop’s answer to the challenge of ‘composing for improvisers’. Toop bases the work on John Latham’s concept of ‘Flat Time’: an elaboration on various forms of art, sound, and those immaterial and mysteriously insubstantial events that exist as anomalies within our predominantly space-based, object-based, materialistic epistemology. Using this as a starting point, Toop develops a unique ‘score’, which combines a multi-faceted approach to time with a range of performance directions which are more stimulus than instruction, widely open to a range of performance interpretation, from direct enactment, to metaphor, inspiration, and beyond.
We’re certainly looking forward to the concert. Hope to see you there!
…And, for anyone interested, here is more detailed information from the composer about FLAT TIME/sounding:
Flat Time was a concept developed by John Latham over many decades. He saw it as an answer to the problems and anomalies that arise as a result of a predominately space-based, object-based materialistic epistemology. The way we talk, write and think about reality traps us within an unworkable system that no amount of tinkering can solve. The common sense view of reality – largely a world of dimensional and stable solids in space, verifiable by observational methods such as seeing and touching and existing in various states of duration within the forward march of time – is unable to fully account for all those immaterial and mysteriously insubstantial events that make life so complicated: emotions, psychology, religious experience, various forms of art, sound and so on One of the means JL developed for illustrating this by means of an artwork was the Time-Based Roller and the T-diagram, an attempt to “relate three conceived components of temporality within the single framework.” He described the three components in various ways – for example, specious present, past time and omni-present; in his Flat Time Hypothesis of 2000, he wrote about the dimensionality of art, particularly music, which manifests three time-based components:
1. count time
2. time-based ordering
3. an omnipresent score
The Time-Based Roller presented passing time as a vertical band in which history, memory and future are behind the roller itself. Running horizontally across this vertical band to make the T is the Time Base Spectrum. The spectrum is a 36 band grid representing time bases from the least possible event to the unimaginable extendedness of the universe and all universes, micro to macro.
For the purposes of improvisation, count time can be considered as an admixture of clock time and a subjective perception of the passing now. As for the omnipresent score, this translates for improvisers as ‘a way of working’, which may differ from person to person and group to group but still exists as an omnipresent, tacit methodology that informs and guides each performance.
The assigned performance time of 2 hours is indicated as a vertical band. This will be marked (and heard sparsely as pre-recorded sounds) by percussive markers that will function much as percussion instruments such as bells, drums and woodblocks delineate the significant phases of a ritual (alluding to the atemporality of myth, the extra-human temporality of liturgy and their relationship to circadian, seasonal and cosmological cycles). Each marker is an audible sounding of the peak instant of a boundary condition or changing state, an opportunity for decomposition through which endings and beginnings, convergence, silence, propulsion, reaction, self-cancellation or some other form of consciously signalled reflexivity might be signalled. The piece will begin and end with 6 minute periods within which performers do nothing except be aurally attentive and at one or two points within the vertical line there will be an indication to all – 4 insistent tones of different frequency voiced between 2 points, for example, or 4 musicians performing but not making sound – though their observance is dependent on intuition and attention rather than exactitude and obedience.
The horizontal band is extended into imagery with 60+Aphorisms+Analects. These correspond very loosely to a wide variety of auditory time-bases (pre and post-human, involuntary, mythical, extra-musical, etc.) including what might be happening in the performance context, such as an audience member banging the door as he leaves or rain falling on the roof. Unlike a normal notated score they are not instructions to be followed; they might be described as indications of a conscious and imaginative non-hierarchical spectrum from which improvising musicians operate, including specifically referenced notions of micro-gesture and digital music performance, historical material and technologies, transformations of sonic phenomena, changes of state between material and process in performance, and discontinuities of human and extra-human sounding in auditory communications.
The eventstructure of improvised music begins with ‘nothing’ yet can expand outwards to unpredictable and highly elaborated forms, corresponding to a diagrammatic representation of the Time Base Spectrum itself, which begins with the smallest possible event but opens out into the whole cosmic event. Like divinatory findings, the 60+Aphorisms+Analects can be taken as possible referents for a given situation, even commands to be enacted (‘Silently reading an open Bible, a saint, in the company of a lion’ is easy enough except for the lion), but this is a matter of choice. The exploratory field is as follows: improvisation takes place without a written score, count time or the conscious playing out of ideas, yet all of those conceptions exists in improvised performance as non-dimensional, assimilated boundary conditions.
JL’s breakthrough discovery of the spray paint mark in 1954, the ‘quantum of mark’ or least event which is instantaneous in its making but exists over the duration of art and extends outwards in its influence over potentially very long durations relates closely to the moment form of improvisation, a collective work beginning in what has been described as ‘an unmarked space’, in which the making is the work: each moment simultaneously contains the potentiality of an entire piece (all of the events that led up to that moment and how they might develop from that moment). The totality of that moment is an instant hit for the listeners and performers alike, nobody knowing how it might turn out, but all aware if not fully conscious that the dynamic potentiality of each moment determines both vertical and horizontal structure of the whole.
Flat Time (as embodied in FLAT TIME/sounding) has a historical continuity with two specific events: an earlier composition of mine from 1975 – “The Divination of the Bowhead Whale” (released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in that year), in which five musicians improvised a piece structured according to the striking and long sustaining fade of a percussion instrument, and John Latham’s performance enactment of the time-base spectrum – Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair – in 1978. This piece was originally known as The Chair’s Story, named after my song of that title. One of two other pieces I recorded for the Obscure album, this track was used by JL as a representation of the ‘listening’ bandwidth in his performance.
An additional component: JL wrote about what he called the Karamazov triad, the informational bases represented by Mitya, Ivan and Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Mitya operates in fits of anger and enthusiasm, unable to appreciate a situation logically; Ivan is able to process information and act dispassionately; Alyosha is spiritual and intuitive, able to understand a situation without knowing all the facts. This is the taxonomy that has been chosen by Antony Hudek and Anathasios Velios to order the John Latham archive online (and edited recordings of FLAT TIME/sounding are imagined as integral within the online archive). Beyond the practicalities there is relevance for an improviser. The three strategies are contingent elements within improvisations – individuals and groups may experience these characteristics at different times within a performance, so they function as motivational and structural nodes, exoscopic knowledge oscillating at a complex, fluid and extremely rapid wavelength.
