1 the Art of Conduction

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

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