Tim Humphries

This article arises from a remark made by a dancing co-performer that the process of choice between instruments was a particularly appealing aspect of the performances of musicians that he had observed! The phenomenon of the appealing choice perhaps appeals mostly to dancers observing the movements made by a musician. However, it may also be an important component of the live performance of any musician. The article investigates the idea that appealing choices are markers of the experience of improvised performance.

Recently I began to collaborate with a group of five performers, each specialised in particular ways of expression, to investigate differences and commonalities between those particular ways, or ‘modes’. In these sessions, I perform as a specialist in realising musical expressions that result from the improvised choice made from complex arrays of musical options. These choices may be accessed via an equally complex array of ‘meaningful’ impulses. Musical options range from the more familiar ‘note choices’ to the selection of iconic sound instruments. In the context of a collaborative improvisation such ‘music’ icons may not even make a sound. The remark from the dancing collaborator mentioned above reflected his interest in the display made by musicians moving between musical choices. From his perspective, the rhythm and depth of engagement in this liminal or transitional space within the musical/moving collaborative landscape is as fascinating as the preceding and following musical inventions. The fascinating rhythms (apologies to Henry Mancini) of choice provide a dynamic chronology of the transition in the music.

We know live musical performance to be an experience of exercising multiple choices, not only in the case of improvising but for any musicians who interpret the music they play in the moment. We relish performance in the moment as unpredictable while encapsulated within a more predictable zone of stylistic or ‘contextual’ comfort. In the language of performative choice, invention may come from surprising re-workings from a restricted range of options. When musicians make choices, they shift focus between different expressive means. These expressive means may be called ‘modalities of performance’. For observers and listeners, the shifts of focus are markers of the musician’s experience of performance. We observe, hear and appreciate modal shifts, where modes are any selection from the complex array available to us.

Musicians utilise different ‘modalities of performance’ than contact improvisers. Musicians improvising to an audience at a ‘serious jazz club’ utilise a different set of choices than those musicians improvising in collaboration with dancers and movers, although the experience of improvisation across different sensory landscapes has been described by Barry Hill as complementary and similar (Hill, 2001). This similarity could be described as a cultural synaesthesia, part of the reason why we like to watch musicians, and why musicians like to make music to move by. Additionally, choices and their associated focus shifts may also be made between varieties of ‘performative’ options that may be ‘internally’ or ‘externally’ directed, depending on the manner of interaction with the performance milieu of the individual performer.

Improvising contact with animate and inanimate objects
Contact improvisers ply their trade in the realm of relationship with other moving bodies. Musicians, in contrast, ply theirs in the realm of the virtual contact within sonic interplay. The physical contact of musicians, discounting the haptic experience of sound waves as they envelop and vibrate the body, is made with a variety of physical sound instruments, which act as artefacts that inform their activity. It is also fascinating to combine musical contact improvisation, which may not be confined to various forms of ‘body percussion’. Other options might include vocal contact (termed ‘close-neck singing’, or simply ‘necking’). It is difficult to imagine certain vocal musicians coping with this. Instruments played by more than one musician are another option. Movers also have the sensation of the sound, if present. Musicians have the vicarious, perhaps kinaesthetic sensation of what the movers are doing. Although their sensation and the movements that they associate with their own concurrent playing, if present, may be contrary, analogic, dialogic or absolutely unrelated. There is a contact with an ethereal and fleeting musical field that is sustained through its coherence.

Within the quaint sub-culture of jazz improvisation, musicians speak of ‘note choice’ to extemporise particular tonal, modal (in the sense of pitch) or intervallic formations. Depending on the choice of the aesthetic realm, note choice is in turn constrained within prescribed styles and genres. ‘Note choice’ may also be irrelevant within collaborative improvising milieux, for example, the banal repetitions of limited sets of pitches that may be re-contextualised in gestural and iconographic compositions. The long tradition of these types of compositions, for example works of Mauricio Kagel, reveals that many musicians and composers have been aware of an expanded visual and embodied meaning of the musical craft for some time.

The conscious experience of performance
What is our awareness of our performance and what does the audience think we’re thinking about? Can they suppose that they might be correct? Are musicians ‘conscious of their actions’? These are daunting questions that recall philosophical debates concerning, for example, subject and object and the possibility of ‘inter-subjectivity’. The ‘consciousness as action’ thesis developed by S. L, Hurley holds that actions are manifestations of consciousness (Hurley 1998). The movements of musicians, according to Hurley’s theory, are indicators of their conscious experience. Actions (including observable movements) may be observed as discrete activities. They become identifiable as previous actions dissolve or cease and new actions arise. The observable actions are dependant on the paradigms of observation, which in this article is the mutual experience of improvisation for dancers, musicians and observing and listening audiences. In contrast, watching sports physiologists may observe with keen intent the muscle flex of the performer, preferably with some measuring device gathering quantitative data. Shifts of focus between discrete actions are noted in studies of human activity as visual markers of experience (For example, Bødker, 1996).

Musical performance also may be studied as a visual activity that carries markers of the wider milieu of the musician, which may include cultural, social, and physical factors. The qualities of visual information, including the appearance and movements of the individual performers, are indicators of the multiple factors that contribute to the experience of performance. Tracing the conscious experiences of performers through their appearance in performance is a test of the hypothesis that consciousness is a phenomenon based in action. It also offers a scaffolding principle for mapping the complex array of options and impulses available to, and accessed by, improvising performers.

Focus shifts within an instrumental tradition
My research into the experience of trumpet performance (Humphrey 2002) examined the shifts in the conscious foci of individual performers. These shifts reflected a dynamic interplay of internal and external factors in their performance. The interplay showed a moving focus in the consciousness of each trumpeter rather than a change from ‘unconscious’ to ‘conscious’ activity. All the trumpeters displayed an internal focus at different points of time in their performances that the audience observed and appreciated as normative to a musical performance. The degree of awareness of each musician to different qualities of movements and actions that he or she undertook in the course of performance was reflected in the degree of internal focus that they displayed.

The observed shifts between internal and external foci indicate that a dynamic process of shifts in consciousness is occurring during the trumpet-playing activity. The association of the focus shifts with degrees of technical difficulty in the music and the ‘performative’ demands of playing before different audiences supports the thesis of a mediating activity dynamically moving between a concentration on an internal world of technique and musical construction to a concentration on the external world of surrounding environment, whether specifically musical and/or cultural. The focus shifts reflect the Vygotskian idea of ‘unconscious operations’ becoming ‘conscious actions’. However, particular operations are susceptible to ‘elevation’ to the realm of ‘conscious actions’ and are never far from consciousness.

The interplay between internal and external factors perhaps reflects a vigorous and expansive ‘consciousness in action’, rather than a layer of conscious activity being undertaken over a layer of ‘unconscious’ technical movements. My study showed that the development of trumpet technique was in part a development of an acute and dynamic consciousness of the capabilities and potentials on the part of each trumpeter’s body. An audience observes and appreciates as artistic performance, and also contributes to, the dynamic interplay between body and environment in the virtuoso musician.

Movements make music meaningful
My research into the experience of trumpet performance also showed that different modes and qualities of movement are vital ingredients in the live performances of trumpet players. At certain times some of the trumpeters ‘danced’ in a performative mode, and at other times the only discernible movements were those associated with the rigours of musical production. Brass, and particularly trumpet performance, exhibits a sparse gestural repertory relative to other instrumental performance traditions, where it may be clearly observed whether or not the movements are extraneous to purely instrumental technique. The range of such extraneous movements is limited by the technical demands. To be a trumpeter is to restrict, or form the array of choices in a particular way. Sometimes these may be musical choices made for a lifetime. Even within the realm of purely musical performance, musicians exercise a complex variety of choices that are not restricted to customary ‘musical’ options, such as note choice. Within a collaborative realm, involving, for example, other musicians and dancers, the options become qualitatively transformed and note choice rapidly becomes a minor set of options in the landscape of choices. The focus shifts now occur across a differently defined landscape. As we map each performance through observable experience, surprising correspondences indicate an emerging aesthetic commonality. A new ‘zone of proximal comfort’ is created with each performance which defines the boundary of the collaboration and allows for the fascinating rhythms of choice to emerge. The surprises are appealing as they reveal the conscious experience of each performer.

References
Bødker, Susanne. ‘Applying Activity Theory to Video Analysis: How to Make Sense of Video Data in
Human-Computer Interaction’. In Bonnie Nardi, ed. Context and Consciousness. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996. Pp. 145-174.
Hill, Barry, ‘finding contact (musings on my limits … musing on … the music)’ Proximity 4,4: Pp. 4-7, 2001.
Humphrey, Tim, ‘The Experience of Trumpet Performance: Etic and Emic observations in Five Case
Studies of Professional Musicians’, PhD Thesis, Monash University, 2002.
Hurley, Susan L., ‘Consciousness in Action’, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998.