By
Eric McDowell
Of all the antagonists standing in the way of creative production, the
trickiest to outwit is the artist themselves. Almost nothing can spoil a
project as efficiently as the willfulness that tends to be activated by a
"great idea"-and almost nothing that leads as directly to stale,
over-determined work as an attempt to muscle a piece from inspiration to
fruition without submitting to the long, arduous, and completely unreliable
process of organic discovery.
But there's a history of brilliant alternatives to the traditional creative
process. Given the claustrophobic limitations of personal vision and
expression, it's no wonder that Cage and company turned their attention
outward, to chance operations and indeterminate compositions, concentrating
artistic energy around devising means-tracing stones, dusting off the
I Ching, or mapping imperfections on sheet music paper-while
ceding control of the ends (to a certain degree, anyhow). Outside the world
of music, the French literary collective Oulipo are known for contorting
their considerable talents around arbitrary constraints, rules, and
structural obligations like lipograms (in which certain letters are
banned), chronograms (where all letters that are also Roman numerals add up
to a specified year), and complex chess sequences (such as the Knight's
Tour).
In a sense, improvisation-especially free and collective
improvisation-approaches the problems of artistic self-limitation from a
different angle, collapsing intention, means, and end into a single
spontaneous act. As enthusiasts of improvised music, we believe in the
possibility (never the guarantee) that whatever emerges out of the coming
together of a particular group of people at a particular time and place
just might surpass the product of even the best preconceived or
pre-composed music.
But listen to (or play) enough improvised music and it becomes apparent how
often and how invasively go-to moves and trademark tricks-cultivated by
force of repetition, physical habituation, deep-rooted personal tastes, and
other invisible factors-can sometimes infiltrate allegedly organic,
in-the-moment playing. Or consider that if Cage's methods, concepts, and
aesthetic philosophies are more appreciated (or more easily appreciated)
than the results they produced, it's exactly because they're what reveals
his singular genius. And you might think that Oulipian Georges Perec's 1969
novel
La disparition-written entirely without the letter E and
relating the mysterious disappearance of a character named Anton Vowl-would
amount to nothing more than absurd and cloyingly cheeky convolution. But
the personal won't be repressed: the novel ultimately matures into a
stunning commentary on loss and death, themes intimate to the writer's
WWII-era personal experience.
Can an artist ever truly shed themselves of themselves-of habits,
assumptions, and tastes, of the weight of tradition, inherited and
assimilated-to discover something truly surprising and new? Maybe not. But
that doesn't mean that efforts to do so haven't generated some of our most
interesting art. One of the most recent installments in this genre is
Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley's series of
Syllables works.
It's worth noting that Wooley's discography suggests an amazing range of
artistic vision and capability, from abstract group pieces like the
Seven Storey Mountain
series to
foot-tapping quintet albums
, from
experiments with amplifiers
to
tuneful duos with Ken Vandermark
. There's no doubt that Wooley is one of the most inventive, versatile, and
technically masterful trumpeters-musicians-in the free jazz world. But as
much as this range speaks to his command as a player and composer, it also
speaks to an insatiable restlessness, "that most basic tenet of the
creative psyche," as he says in his own words, "the desire for
change."
With the
Syllables pieces, the desire for change and discovery
comes in the form of "a conscious act of technical abandonment-the exact
opposite of my working method-which caused a great deal of discomfort as I
tried to rid myself of my need for musical and technical control." Just as
Cage helped himself to Eastern thought and Perec borrowed from the world of
games, Wooley leans out of his comfort zone by dipping into the field of
linguistics, specifically making use of the International Phonetic Alphabet
and its demands on the tongue, teeth, and throat.
How does the method work? The liner notes-well, one of the many useful
essays that come as part of
The Complete Syllables Music
package-explain it best:
"To give an example of how the IPA was used as the basis for the works in
this set, the 'L' sound (pronounced by placing the front and rear of tongue
near the roof of the mouth with the middle dipped low, teeth 1/2" apart and
throat slightly closed) is a simple, unconscious action in the everyday
performance of speech, but when set behind the buzzing embouchure contained
in a trumpet mouthpiece and sustained by breath over a duration as long as
45 seconds, the timbral and physical considerations demand an intense
mental and physical effort on the part of the performer in order to make
sure the sound doesn't drift into a normalized or 'correct' traditional
trumpet pitch. Wooley sets the physical components of that 'L' sound in his
mouth, inhales through his nose and allows the sound, affected by the
positioning particular to the mechanics of producing that phoneme, to just be."
The focused simplicity of Wooley's method may have a hint of "Zen" about
it. And while the word never appears in the liner essays, there actually is
something Zen in Wooley's interest, in the
Syllables pieces, in
breaking out of conventional binaries of "good" vs. "bad" playing, of
performance that either qualifies as "success" or "failure." In light of
this aim, it seems silly to assign the music a rating; the abundance of
food for thought Wooley's project yields is a testament to its richness.
(Besides, how one might evaluate the success or failure of an attempt to
shake the success/failure binary is a whole other obnoxious line of
questioning.) And after all, artists
always give up control of
their art at the point when it begins to be interpreted-and evaluated-by
unpredictably subjective audiences.
Collecting the three iterations of Wooley's
Syllables project-the
out-of-print
[8] Syllables (Peira, 2012) and
[9] Syllables (Mnóad, 2013), plus the previously unreleased
For Kenneth Gaburo-gives us a better view of the project's
development over time. According to Wooley, the all-acoustic
[8] Syllables, consisting of a series of one-page scores
indicating phoneme embouchures and accompanying durations (order and pitch
are left up to the performer),
is "the most straight-forward
presentation of the
Syllables musical language." Over the piece's
49 minutes, you hear sharp attacks, long silences, and an array of
sustained timbres, some of them droning, others pinched and squealing, all
of them marked by the friction of physical effort. The audible
manifestations of that effort are key to the
Syllables
performances, as Wooley trades creative willfulness in favor of sheer
physical will. Accordingly, the music is characterized by tension and
strain, especially as the performer approaches the breaking point.
[8] Syllables ends with eight minutes of siren-style oscillation,
gaining almost unbearable volume and intensity and punctuated by Wooley's
sharp inhalations as he struggles to power the machine of circular
breathing.
While the method used to select the building-block phonemes for
[8] Syllables isn't necessarily apparent, for
[9] Syllables, Wooley makes a startling move by turning to the
phonemes that comprise the name of his hometown, Clatskanie,
Oregon-startling because of the way this choice risks driving Wooley right
back into personal experience and self-limitation. And in fact, it does, as
Wooley notes:
"Performance of [9] Syllables became linear as I made connections
with memories of my youth and general feelings of enclosure, warmth,
timber, cold. It was fascinating as a personal experiment, showing the
power of one's personal history with a word. But, as music-and certainly in
regards to the Syllables system-it was unsuccessful as it negated
my attempt to sidestep traditional musical value. I had lost sight of the
original desire to create something that obfuscated not only the technical
and aesthetic limitations inherent in the history of the trumpet, but my
own sense of what made music 'good' or 'bad.'"
To help dig himself out of this hole, Wooley dismantles his personal
associations by using the distorting effects of microphones and amplifiers,
which defamiliarize his articulations of the "Clatskanie" phonemes. To the
listening experience, this additional equipment adds contrast and
dimension, especially evident when the slowed-down amplifications create a
guttural, rumbling foundation for Wooley's higher-pitched playing. Not only
is the effect incredible to hear, but it also proves the point, embedded in
the physical demonstration of these works, that failure is a necessary part
of the generative process, since had Wooley not initially failed, he would
never have been pushed to innovate a solution. There's a reason that so
many crucial inventions and discoveries come about by accident, the
mistaken results of other intentions.
Finally, spanning two discs and over 140 minutes,
For Kenneth Gaburo occupies the full second half of the set. Here
Wooley looks to the writing of the eponymous composer to inspire his choice
of phonemes, though "the durations of the sounds themselves are purposely
stretched so as to destroy any connection to their generative words." While
the first half of the performance is a straightforward acoustic
interpretation of the score (at 70 minutes "the longest and, therefore most
exhausting, version in the
Syllables compositional language"), the
second half turns things inside out by adding a complementary electronic
score based on the
Syllables solo template. Though this expands
the piece's sonic palette (including traditional trumpet sounds),
For Kenneth Gaburo remains as challenging, unpredictable, and
rewarding as its
Syllables predecessors.
In calling this set "complete," Wooley isn't performing any marketing
tricks. It's "complete," instead, because he can no longer perform these
pieces as they are. "In 2014," he's explained, "I began to feel the
physical destruction caused by performing these pieces and, turning 40,
felt that I wouldn't be able to continue to do them in their current form
due to problems with my shoulders, throat and teeth (all four front chipped
now)." This is an artist dedicated to questioning boundaries, pushing
limits, and flirting with failure in all its forms. These things take a
toll. But the next shore is already in sight - the last essay in
The Complete Syllables Music box outlines a proposal for adapting
the system for chamber ensemble. So the question becomes: who else dares to
speak Wooley's language?
