Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol. 12, No. 1

Book Review

The Art of Conduction: A Conduction Workbook By Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris Edited by Daniela Veronesi Karma, 2017. ISBN-10: 1942607423 ISBN-13: 978-1942697427 224 pages

Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting By Gustav Rasmussen & Ketil Duckert Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, 2016. ISBN-10: 1181349307 128 pages

Reviewed by Anders Eskildsen

There is something deeply intuitive and yet intriguingly unpredictable about being led on a collectively improvised journey, guided by the symbolic gestures of an attentive conductor. How is this possible? When we travel to a foreign country and have no language in common with the people we encounter, when words cannot convey the delicate intensity of something we wish to say, or when our capacities for vocalization or audition fail us entirely, we turn to a more fundamental level of human communication: gesture. In the performative arts, gesture plays an important role wherever the physical activities of musicking, dancing, or acting take place, even if the gestural remains an imagined or unmarked aspect of the activity in question. Furthermore, as a specialized means of musical organization and communication in ensemble contexts, centuries-old techniques of conducting rely heavily upon our ability to perform and understand gestural communication. But when improvisation resurfaced as an important modus operandi in Western music and art in the second half of the twentieth century, the gestural attained an entirely new role; several experimenting artists began to connect an explicitly symbolic layer of open-ended musical instruction to systems of gestures performed by a conductor, resulting in the development of a set of practices sometimes referred to as “conducted improvisation” (Marino and Santarcangelo). Conducted improvisation could be defined as a practice in which an ensemble interprets and responds to a conductor’s gestures, and the conductor listens to the ensemble and responds with further gestures, which in a dialogical fashion generates improvised performances.

Two of these artists, Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris and Walter Thompson, have been particularly dedicated to the development of coherent and refined practices of conducted improvisation, and each has developed their own extensive practice and system of gestures,1 referred to as Conduction and Soundpainting, respectively, over the course of several decades. Due to Morris and Thompson’s continued efforts in teaching and disseminating these practices, Conduction and Soundpainting are arguably the most elaborate, refined, and widely practiced systems for conducted improvisation developed to date. Adding to the availability and accessibility of practical knowledge about Conduction and Soundpainting, The Art of Conduction: A Conduction Workbook and Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting constitute significant contributions to this work. Resulting from collaboration between established practitioners in the Conduction and Soundpainting communities, the publication of these books indicates that these practices of conducted improvisation are proliferating well beyond the work of their original creators. While united by these practical ambitions and an inspiring sense of enthusiasm, the books differ slightly in their purpose and aim. Published posthumously and based on Morris’s notes and drafts, The Art of Conduction is the first publication to present Conduction for a broader audience. Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting, on the other hand, is not the first book about Soundpainting,2 and as such reflects a practice and perspective which is somewhat distinct from Thompson’s original conception.

Presenting itself as a documentation of Morris’s legacy and contribution to music, The Art of Conduction is marked by the dual purpose of documenting Morris’s practice of Conduction in a way that does justice to his original intentions and of presenting Conduction to future practitioners in an accessible way. While the book’s insightful and celebratory foreword by Howard Mandel and other short contributions by J.A. Deane, Allan Graubard, and editor Daniela Veronesi constitute helpful introductions to the historical development and practical use of Conduction, The Art of Conduction’s main strength lies in the sections originally drafted by Morris and edited/completed by Veronesi, Deane, and Graubard. The well-crafted sections “The Art of Conduction” and “Introduction to the Conduction Lexicon” provide a particularly original and interesting window into Morris’s own conceptualization of Conduction. Reflecting upon his initial motivations for developing Conduction, Morris describes his process as being driven by an impulse to explore intermediate spaces. Morris, a musician with a strong background in jazz, understood “music for orchestra” and “jazz” as distinct traditions and saw the former as relying upon musical notation and coordinated precision to achieve its unique musical qualities and the latter as relying upon the so called “extra dimension” present in jazz and related genres.3 Morris thus explored the

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intermediate space between “jazz,” associated with rhythmicity, interaction, and spontaneity on the one hand, and “music for orchestra” on the other. As anyone who has aspired to achieve a level of musical organization similar to that of great orchestras with a large group of improvising musicians will know by experience, a need for organizational tools and frameworks arises in such situations. Morris’s early ventures into conducted improvisation was a search for “common ground between orchestral notation and improvised music” (34), which entailed returning to elements of “a common language” shared by all musicians. The search resulted in a practice which, according to Morris’s own concept of Conduction, explores “the area where the interpretation of the symbolism that generates notation meets the spontaneity of improvisation” (38). Given that this intermediate space is explored in a feedback loop between the conductor’s symbolic gestures and the ensemble’s responses, which generate new gestures for interpretation, Conduction effectively explores another intermediate space at the same time, i.e. the space of possibilities for musical agency which lies between individual expression and social interaction:

To find common ground between orchestral notation and improvised music, I believe one must return to musical fundamentals and identify those elements that allow all traditions to coexist. That is, to provide an opportunity for improvisers to improvise and for interpreters to interpret the same material. This, to me, is what Conduction makes possible. [. . .] What has emerged from my investigations is a procedure that not only addresses composition from a notational or improvisational point of view, but also one that is intimately connected to how each musician interprets the signs and gestures through which I conduct. It is only the instrumentalist who can bring “meaning” to those signs and gestures, as it is only through the dialogue within the ensemble that we can contribute to their possible evolution. (Morris 34–35)

As outlined here, Conduction may be based on the conductor’s compositional choices and use of directives but largely derives its creative potential from interpretive moments when musicians respond to the conductor’s directives. It is thus no wonder that the use and understanding of the directives takes up a great deal of space in the book: The section titled “The Conduction Lexicon” (48-157) includes instructions for the order in which gestures may be combined and contains a sizeable list of all the Conduction gestures, where detailed instructions are provided for the physical executions of the gestures, how the gestures are used by the conductor, and how they should be understood and interpreted by participating musicians. This section and a similar section in Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting (57-159) constitute detailed works of reference, and as such, these parts of the books require significant amounts of work from the reader in order to make sense of the systems of gestures as coherent wholes; as the authors of both books point out, conductors/soundpainters, musicians, and ensembles need to practice Conduction and Soundpainting, respectively. The Art of Conduction does group the directives into meaningful and functional categories such as “Articulation,” “Dynamics,” “Repeats,” and so on,4 which is helpful as one makes sense of how the different gestures relate to each other, and the short section on “How to use the Conduction Lexicon” by Veronesi and Deane contains a few helpful hints aimed towards music teachers who wish to use Conduction in their teaching. But ultimately, The Art of Conduction refrains from providing elaborate instructions or suggestions for how one can practice and develop one’s use of Conduction. Many of the directives are open-ended with regard to the content of what is to be played, requiring significant imagination from the participating musicians, and similarly, The Art of Conduction largely leaves approaches to the integration of the directives into a coherent practice as a task for the reader. This may be an editorial decision to keep the reader’s imagination open and encourage experimentation, but for a book that aims to be a practically useful introduction, some readers may hope for further considerations in this regard.

Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting likewise introduces the fundamental concept of Soundpainting (including central “ground rules” and the Soundpainting “syntax” which governs the order in which Soundpainting gestures are combined to form meaningful instructions) and provides a sizeable and well- illustrated list of select gestures from the Soundpainting language, accompanied by video demonstrations of gestures for which the e-book-format is well-suited. But for Duckert and Rasmussen, Soundpainting remains a means to an end; the core sections of Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting, which set it apart from The Art of Conduction and Thompson’s workbooks, describe how Soundpainting can be used for the purpose of improving skills in ensemble playing. This particular choice is unsurprising, given how the authors specialize in “rhythmic ensemble playing”—a common discipline in the Danish music education system where the long-time collaboration between Duckert and Rasmussen originates, and where the authors remain active as freelance Soundpainting teachers. The authors describe initially experiencing a Soundpainting workshop with Thompson as “an approach to music which automatically focused on the collective awareness, musical receptiveness and interaction in an ensemble” (15). Their book extends this observation by providing numerous exercises, small games, and pedagogical use-cases which highlight the affordances of Soundpainting in training ensemble playing skills. Exercises are organized around key components of ensemble playing, which according to the authors include the ability to “blend” sonically with others, developing awareness of group “dynamics,” musical details such as “phrasing,” “intonation,” and “timbre,” as well as the “sense of [musical] time” of the ensemble (17). The exercises are generally designed to allow students to develop a higher awareness of the reasons for and the ways in which musicians in an ensemble listen and adapt to one another, and improvisation is treated as a special topic within this broader practice of ensemble playing. Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting does not convey the intention behind Thompson’s original development of the Soundpainting

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language as thoroughly as The Art of Conduction does with regard to Morris’s perspective on Conduction. But on the other hand, Duckert and Rasmussen take their instruction a step further by providing practical suggestions on how to implement and combine the gestures into longer, meaningful sections based on the focal point mentioned above. These pedagogical considerations and suggestions constitute the main contribution of Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting.

The most striking observation to be made when looking across the two different systems described in these books is that despite some differences, Conduction and Soundpainting are remarkably similar in terms of the functions of gestures and the general thoughts behind the systems (considering also the ideas expressed in Thompson’s workbooks). First, the particular similarities include what is referred to in Soundpainting as the “syntax” and in Conduction as “basic parameters”—rules and distinctions which govern the order in which gestures are combined to form meaningful instructions: Soundpainting features a four-fold syntax (Duckert and Rasmussen 58) which entails that gestures are generally performed in the order of who-what-how-when, whereas Conduction features a functionally equivalent three step sequence (Morris 52) where directives are given in who-what-when order (for instance, soundpainters may sign Whole Group-Long Tone-Volume Fader- Play, instructing the whole ensemble to perform a sustained note at a specified volume level beginning exactly when the Play-gesture is executed, and similar instructions can be given in Conduction). These combinatorial rules and the implicit differentiation among types of gestures yield many possible combinations of gestures, which thus constitutes a generative driving force in both systems. Second, adding to this semantic richness is the general division of labor central to both Conduction and Soundpainting; as Morris makes clear, “[t]he conductor is responsible for structure and form, and the instrumentalists for content” (Morris 42). According to this logic, the conductor provides direction and makes editorial decisions, whereas the musicians contribute to the performance by coming up with improvised actions within the boundaries set by the gestural instructions. The delicately designed openness of the gestures which designate different kinds of content requires active interpretation from the participating musicians:

The Conduction Lexicon is descriptive rather than prescriptive; its function is not to set limits, but to test boundaries. Directives are indeed interrogative in nature, in that they ask the instrumentalist: “What does this sound like in this situation, at this time?” And, “What is the content you choose to place in this context?” (Morris 42)

While this premise of conducted improvisation partly removes the individual freedom characteristic of freer forms of improvised music, the promise of these systems of conducted improvisation is the possibility that, as Deane suggests, “[a]n energetic feedback loop develops between the symbolic (conductor) and the sonic (ensemble), and through this energetic exchange, a musical form emerges on its own” (29). Whether or not the musical forms generated by such feedback loops are interesting, productive, groundbreaking, transformative, or imbued with some other quality, the consensus among the authors appears to be that the answers to such questions lie in the evolution of the practical engagement of individuals and ensembles.

Upon reading these books, the differences between Conduction and Soundpainting appear less remarkable than the similarities, but a few aspects do deserve mention: First, whereas music is the main art form for which Conduction was designed, and Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting deals with the use of Soundpainting in music, Soundpainting has evolved into a multi-disciplinary sign language intended to include a broader sphere of participants from dance, performance art, poetry, visual art, and other backgrounds (Thompson, Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3). Second, whereas The Art of Conduction includes all sixty-three directives5 in the Conduction lexicon and Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting covers a similarly sized selection of Soundpainting gestures, the total Soundpainting language, developed by a community of Soundpainters, is composed of more than 1,500 gestures (Duckert and Rasmussen 11), of which only a minority have been documented in published instruction materials. While the development of Soundpainting has been characterized by expansion, Morris appears to have focused more on refining a condensed set of directives. Third, and lastly, while there is no single directive in Conduction which is entirely similar to the “Improvise” gesture in Soundpainting, the closest functional equivalent in Conduction is the “Pedestrian” directive. Many gestures in both systems implicitly require the participants to improvise, but “Improvise” and “Pedestrian” are probably those which do so most obviously. Whereas “Improvise” simply instructs the addressee(s) to “[p]lay/improvise a solo” (Duckert and Rasmussen 103), the primary task of the “Pedestrian” is “to contribute to the overall integrity of the construction in progress and to find or create situations for elaboration and development” (Morris 59). “Pedestrian” thus emphasizes the social task of contributing to the collective sound instead of the individuality implied by the notion of the soloist. It should be noted that while a similar instruction to “Pedestrian” does actually exist in Soundpainting (referred to as “Relate to”), along with the opposite option to ignore one’s surroundings during the improvised solo (referred to as “Improvise-With- Blinders”), these different emphases, when it comes to the most direct instructions to improvise, hint at some of the subtle differences that a thorough, comparative study of Conduction, Soundpainting, and perhaps other systems would uncover in greater detail. For the purposes of this review, it is interesting to note that Duckert and Rasmussen emphasize the socio-musical affordances of Soundpainting in a way that is quite comparable to what Morris does with regard to Conduction, but with a more purposive twist.

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Written by and for practitioners, The Art of Conduction and Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting should be read and appreciated as practical introductions to these elusively simple yet potentially very complex approaches to musical improvisation. The books provide well-crafted introductions to the sometimes slightly esoteric terminology of Conduction and Soundpainting and will provide a good starting point for interested practitioners and students of conducted improvisation. Readers interested in a more academic approach to the topic may find the well-explained yet lengthy instructions on how to execute and understand the gestures in Conduction and Soundpainting somewhat unfulfilling, compared to a more analytically distant discussion or critique of the systems in question.6 The authors insist, for instance, that Conduction and Soundpainting can bring into dialogue and accommodate musicians and ensembles coming from extremely diverse backgrounds and skill levels, but both systems are built on particular musical idioms, products of particular times and places. As these systems are implemented in musical education systems around the world, it would be relevant to consider whether all microsocial interactions enacted in practices of conducted improvisation result in constructive social and individual development, or if other complexities are at work. These questions are beyond the scope of the books being considered here, but future research into the effects, uses, and (micro)politics of conducted improvisation is certainly imaginable. The tendency in The Art of Conduction and Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting of leaning toward a collectivist ethics implied by an emphasis on listening and adapting to others is and has been a topic of broad concern for scholars, historians, and practitioners of improvisation. Practices of conducted improvisation offer interesting approaches and experiments in this regard, and these books show that while there is a world of complexity to explore in these practices, complete mastery is not required in order to begin to appreciate the musical processes and reflections on improvisation that Conduction and Soundpainting can facilitate.

Notes

1 In Conduction and Soundpainting, individual gestures are referred to using a number of terms: “directives,” “signs,” “gestures,” “signals,” etc.

2 A series of workbooks written and published by Walter Thompson (Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 1; Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 2; Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3) introduce the Soundpainting sign language and concept in a way that is comparable to Morris’s writings in The Art of Conduction.

3 The “extra dimension” to which Morris refers is the rhythmical phenomenon of “swing” (Schuller 8), which also for Morris entails “spontaneity,” “ignition,” and “interaction” (34).

4 The Conduction gestures are classified in The Art of Conduction according to the following categories (which were revised by Deane and Veronesi): “Directive Activation,” “Directive Endings,” “Dynamics,” “Articulation,” “Repeats,” “Time-Tempo-Pulse/Rhythm,” “Tempo Modifications,” “Tonality/Pitch,” “Evolutionary Transformations,” “Event,” ”Effects/Instrument-Specific Directives,” and “Score-Related Directives.”

5 The exact number of directives may vary depending on how one counts certain directives which are grouped into one category, such as “Repeat” and “Developments” (Morris 50). The number of gestures mentioned here counts those directives which are functionally distinct as separate gestures.

6 For academic literature on conducted improvisation, see (Duby; Minors, “Soundpainting: The Use of Space in Creating Music-Dance Pieces”; Minors, “Reassessing the Thinking Body in Soundpainting”; Faria; and Marino and Santarcangelo).

Works Cited

Duby, Marc. Soundpainting as a System for the Collaborative Creation of Music in Performance. PhD dissertation, University of Pretoria, 2006.

Duckert, Ketil, and Gustav Rasmussen. Ensemble Playing and Improvisation with Soundpainting. Edited by Jakob Faurholt, Translated by Simon Palmer, Edition Wilhelm Hansen, 2016.

Faria, Bruno. Exercising Musicianship Anew through Soundpainting: Speaking Music through Sound Gestures. PhD dissertation, Lund University, 2016.

Marino, Gabriele, and Vincenzo Santarcangelo. “The Enaction of Conduction Conducted Improvisation as Situated Cognition.” Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus13), edited by D. Glowinski et al., Casa Paganini-InfoMus Research Centre, DIBRIS-University of Genoa, Italy, 2013, pp. 1–6.

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Minors, Helen Julia. “Reassessing the Thinking Body in Soundpainting.” How Performance Thinks, Kingston University and Performance and Philosophy Working Group, 2012, pp. 142–48.

---. “Soundpainting: The Use of Space in Creating Music-Dance Pieces.” Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body, edited by Marilyn Wyers and Osvaldo Glieca, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 27–34.

Morris, Lawrence D.“Butch.” The Art of Conduction: A Conduction Workbook. Edited by Daniela Veronesi, Karma, 2017.

Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford UP, 1968.

Thompson, Walter. Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 1. Walter Thompson, 2006.

---. Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 2. Walter Thompson, 2010.

---. Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3. Walter Thompson, 2014.

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