Part 2
There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?
Distractions are literally everywhere…
A little more than a month ago, I was feeling really stuck creatively. I couldn’t get myself to feel excited about playing, or making anything. I happened across The Isolation Journals one day, a quarantine project by writer and journalist Suleika Jaouad that offered journal prompts for 100 days from different artists, writers, and community leaders. The prompt on this day (Day 89) happened to be from an old dear friend, the amazing musician Michelle Ross. You can read the full prompt here, but the essential question asks you to observe your own imagination as if it is a foreign land and translate what you see onto your page.
This question was the first thing I’d come across in a while that really sparked something enough to open things back up for me. I sat down immediately and wrote about this for probably an hour without stopping. Through this exercise, I became aware (and was surprised to discover) that I could indeed visualize my imagination as a distinct place, an environment inside me that looks like a landscape but functions like a laboratory. It is a place that is part of my brain but is not me: it’s a place where my brain can make anything appear and anything work, if I can dream it up.
Thinking about this notion of imagination as separate, as not me but as an actual location I can access any time, free from the emotional needs of the rest of my brain, heart, and soul, has been a distinct change for me. I know that when the pressure is on, it’s always more difficult to access the flow state of creativity that your question alludes to. But getting to know the landscape of my imagination feels like a great way for me to try and learn to make that state accessible anytime.
How do you make use of technology? In terms of the feedback mechanism between technology and creativity, what do humans excel at, what do machines excel at?
Machines excel at organization and synthesis of information. Humans excel at abstract thinking and forming abstruse connections. Machines and humans both excel at finding patterns: it’s the way we connect the dots that is different. The moment we can teach a computer how to sleep and really dream abstractly, like actually go through a REM cycle, we’re all toast.
My first love will always be acoustic music because of the accidents that can happen in practice and live performance; the way performers have to respond in the moment to these accidents are the things that make it sparkle for me. I love truly musical uses of technology (like watching amazing electronic improvisors) that do use this kind of “happy accident” mentality their practice, and how they use the tech. This way of thinking makes technology an organic outgrowth of what is possible acoustically.
I use technology a lot, from reading music to recording music, to manipulating music. It is not a first or second language for me. I feel lucky to have so many colleagues who have a deep love of technology and are willing to help and encourage me, and sometimes shove me lovingly in that direction.
Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives through playing together or just talking about ideas?
Collaboration is everything. It’s the quickest way to learn and to get to the heart of an idea. Working with Spektral for six years has really taught me that and I’m fully indoctrinated in this idea now. We bounce ideas off each other constantly, but we regularly work with other artists so that we are always learning, always drawing on new perspectives, and challenging our notions.
Collaboration is not a substitute for doing your own work, it’s the natural extension, to see how your work coexists and contends with the work of others as in a dialogue, to learn more about a kind of practice, and to inspire and be inspired. I also have some projects outside of Spektral that draw on different disciplines: I’m working now on a project that involves a composer, a visual artist, a poet, an animator, and a set designer. What our work says to each other, and the words we use to say it, has been very revealing.
Each collaboration takes it’s own form because of the people involved. Building in a long period of getting to know each other is important, because the collaborative process tends to develop exponentially as it goes through the process of accumulating a shared vocabulary. Discussing priorities is important. Knowing what each other loves is important: sharing inspirations and love for other art, eating meals together, etc. Spektral has started a whole series of digital events based around this idea of getting to know what our collaborators love: in our “Floating Lounge” series we ask a guest to share a playlist that we listen to live, in front of an audience. It’s been huge fun and a great way to get to know new music.
How is preparing music, playing it live and recording it for an album connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?
A live concert performance is a fluid organism. An album is a snapshot of a moment in time. The difference in construct/product makes it essential to consider what risks are worth it when recording. For instance, it bothers me when a Classical album sounds overly produced or like the artist is playing it too safe. But if you go too far the other way, you may end up with a bunch of takes that are just not usable at all because they’re not technically consistent enough.
You have to determine those moments of risks that you just can’t live without, and practice them in different conditions so that you’ll be able to execute them on the day of the session. When you’re on the group’s clock and it’s not a solo record, it’s even more important to be able to consistently get your ideas across in the music so you’re not dragging the session down. For this album, it was a priority to us that the music feel as live and spontaneously inspired as possible. We recorded in longer chunks than we usually do: sometimes playing whole movements over and over, to replicate that experience of live performance just for our own continued inspiration.
Composition and improvisation….both still have a framework, a structure. The difference is sort of related to that risk factor idea. In an improvised piece you are responding freely to a devised set of parameters or are defining those parameters in real time. It can feel super risky! In a composed piece, where many more parameters are defined, the question as an interpreter becomes: “How much can you color outside the lines before your musical gesture begins to not resemble the composition anymore?” The process of answering this question is a way to consider your artistic voice and priorities.
How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' and 'performance' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre?
Sound is essential. If your structural interpretation is there and you have a lot of performance panache, but your sound is not complex and varied, it’s weak. It’s like having only the smallest box of crayons instead of the big box. The “performance” aspects, as you say, have to connect to the sound. There is a way to do that where every movement, every physical gesture you make organically contributes to producing the sound you hear in your imagination.
I start with practicing for sound every time I take out my violin. How do you make a sound on an open string? How do you get the instrument to ring the most? Ring the least? From there, you can work on timbre. How does it work when you mute the sound, search for a specific color, or play in different places on the instrument? Can you make all of these timbres at different volume levels too? I try to practice this at the same time I practice technical challenges and I like to create sound color exercises for myself while I practice scales and exercises, so that tone is never divorced from fluidity.
Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?
Can you listen without your ears? Seriously, try it!
Whatever’s going on around you, can you take a break and listen? And then can you try to listen from the nape of your neck?
From the center of your chest? From the soles of your feet?
Run your tongue along your teeth inside your mouth. Can you listen with every place your tongue touches your teeth?
I don’t understand the full complexity of what’s physically happening when we do this, but I do know that it is activating. It makes those nerves in those places feel more alive. Imagine if we had a thousand tiny ears on the tips of our fingertips. What if we could ask our fingertips to listen while we played? What if we imagined that we could? If we imagine it and it does something, does it matter whether the sensation is anatomically explainable or merely perceptible, if it works and is useful?
Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?
I believe art, politics, and societal trends are very intertwined. Whether a piece of art is overtly political or not, an artist cannot help but be a product of their time in some way. As an artist who plays a lot of historical work, I think about this last point quite a bit. “What does it mean to perform work that is so completely removed from the context of its creation?” is a question I ask myself all the time. Spektral responds to this question in different ways for different situations, but we’re always thinking about how to set the stage for a given work and what kind of information or experience might help an audience member get deeper into the music – like the tarot cards for our new album, Experiments in Living!
As a performer of music that is (for the most part) written and composed by other people, curation is fully embedded into my artistic practice and curation is inherently political. What a performer chooses to play, who they play it for, and how they market themselves does have extra-musical meaning whether or not these components are thoughtfully considered as part of the curation process. As artists we have enormous capacity to engage with different audiences: we must accept the responsibility of knowing that every performance has the possibility to create or reject community and communities, and in so doing, seek to perform and produce in ways that are the most accessible, the most knowledgeable and respectful of the traditions of others, and free of societal hierarchies and barriers to entry.
It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music and performance still intact. Do you have a vision of music and performance, an idea of what they could be beyond their current form?
I’m going to assume that this question refers to the concept of an artist/performer who puts art out into the world that is consumed by an audience. This kind of formalised concert experience - where music is divorced from ritual, practical purpose, and dynamic community presence - is only one aspect of our world’s music history. I think that across the 20th Century and into now, performance in this sort of stylized way has begun to unravel in a way that’s really exciting. I imagine it will continue to do so as we wrestle with the spectres of colonialism and hierarchy in musical practice, especially in Western Classical spaces. We need to consider our own gut level response to the question “what constitutes a performance” and acknowledge that this response exposes specific learned cultural values. I think that part of this acknowledgement needs to be a thorough investigation of the notion of art as a conversation between viewer/artist, between listener/performer rather than the notion of art as an abstract, unidirectional information delivery system.
