[This is the draft text of a paper I am set to present at the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, on Wednesday, September 16.]
The collective trajectory of this year’s colloquium links practicing various forms of improvisation to nurturing various forms of intersubjective well-being. By attending—carefully, critically and briefly—to solo and to collaborative electro-acoustic performances by the British saxophonist Evan Parker, I want to gesture at the nascent work of remediation that Lisbeth Lipari has recently called “an ethics of attunement,” a close listening that cultivates compassionate alterity within an attentive body: an akroasis—an audition, an audience—that provides a resonant and differential basis for the possibility of what Jean-Luc Nancy has provocatively named an “inoperative community,” a version for me of what Alphonso Lingis calls The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, of our conflicted and diverse human species. Nancy’s philosophical interrogation of listening to music (as “the art of the hope for resonance”) offers contingent conceptual support with which it’s possible to assess the sensibly vibrant sounding of interstices, both between and within each human frame, that constitutes Evan Parker’s improvising.
The collective trajectory of this year’s colloquium links practicing various forms of improvisation to nurturing various forms of intersubjective well-being. By attending—carefully, critically and briefly—to solo and to collaborative electro-acoustic performances by the British saxophonist Evan Parker, I want to gesture at the nascent work of remediation that Lisbeth Lipari has recently called “an ethics of attunement,” a close listening that cultivates compassionate alterity within an attentive body: an akroasis—an audition, an audience—that provides a resonant and differential basis for the possibility of what Jean-Luc Nancy has provocatively named an “inoperative community,” a version for me of what Alphonso Lingis calls The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, of our conflicted and diverse human species. Nancy’s philosophical interrogation of listening to music (as “the art of the hope for resonance”) offers contingent conceptual support with which it’s possible to assess the sensibly vibrant sounding of interstices, both between and within each human frame, that constitutes Evan Parker’s improvising.
Claims about well-being and health tend
to presuppose an uninterrogated sense of what constitutes a proper,
well-ordered body. Rather than extend a critique of what Michel Foucault might
have called the “care of self” and its biopolitics, I am going to premise my remarks
on improvisation and well-being by assuming that corporeality may also be understood
as porous and conflicted instead of individuated, discrete or holistic, and
that this porosity is a founding condition both of co-creativity and of lived
community. Reworking a Deleuzean pluralism, Annemarie Mol writes of a medical
practice that addresses and heals the “body multiple,” which she presents as an
“intricately coordinated crowd” that “hangs together” through “various forms of
coordination” (55). Following on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, David Abram describes “the boundaries of a living body” as “open
and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of
metamorphosis and exchange” (42). I’m interested in pursuing with some rigour
those “forms of coordination”—or the textures of that porosity—at the level of
acoustic experience, as a humane and ethically preferable set of cultural
interactions.
Lisbeth Lipari proposes
“interlistening” as a term for “the multiple dimensions of embodied
consciousness that vibrate in the dance of conversation between [among?] people
talking” (161). Her aim is to delineate discursive practices that listen
otherwise, that attend to the presence of others, even as they enable speech.
“Listening otherwise,” she writes,
challenges
the ego and the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise
from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our
capacity for compassion. . . . [L]istening
otherwise . . . suspends the willfulness of self- and foreknowledge in
order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other” (Lipari 185,
186).
Heavily influenced by
Emmanuel Levinas, Lipari also models her auditory ethics on the music theory of
Hans Kayser, whose concept of akroasis
(the Ancient Greek word for “hearing”) articulates a “theory of world
harmonics” as a holistic gestalt-series rooted in Pythagorean acoustics (Lipari
27). Kayser appears to mitigate dissonances in attunement, and prefiguresby several decades R. Murray
Schafer’s disciplined “ear-cleaning” of European music . I’m
less sanguine about what I know of Kayser, however; without refusing the
hopeful tenor of his thinking, I worry that he only re-instates a cult of primeval
innocence, a re-tooled Ptolemaic naïveté. It helps me, instead, partially to
recover the etymology of akroasis,
which occurs in Aristotle as a term for audience and hearing: notably, not in The Poetics nor in the sections of his Politics focused on music, but in his Rhetoric. The ἀκροατής (akroates), frequently
translated as “hearer,” is actively implicated in discursive exchange: “Now
the hearer (akroatēn) must
necessarily be either a mere spectator or a judge (kritēs), and a judge either of things past or of things to come.”
That is, listening—at least, to speech—is inherently active and deliberative,
and those deliberations, within a polytemporal reciprocity, include critical
intellection. Akroatic listening, close listening as thinking, becomes more
agonistic than syncretic, more unsettling than epideictic. (Compare George
Lewis: “In its marginalization, its often-unseen, intangible presence, which
generates new discourses, in its mobility and facility with hybridization, and
in its locus, the contestatory space where difference can [be] and is enacted,
improvisation’s general importance to the underlying health of the musical
ecosphere and the public commons must be recognized, valued and protected
[138].”)
In a 2014 interview, Sonny
Rollins repudiates any sort of reflexive intellection as disruptive to
improvising, invoking the demanding temporality of playing: “I
don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at
the same time — believe me, I've tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast.”
Rollins appears to be suggesting that, when you listen to yourself as you play, you lose your through-line, lose the formal sense of your music. But his point, I think, isn’t to romanticize or mystify his artistry—he focuses on his lapses, not his genius—but to assess the cognitive velocity at which that agon, that deliberation, can even occur. What Lipari calls compassionate openness wants to happen not as immediacy but on the fleeting lip of the present, closer to reflex than reflexive. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to “sonorous time” as “a present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on” (13). The challenge, the risk posed by such a hysteresis, is not merely the neglect of what is other—and this is perhaps why thinking about solo music, about the improvised solo, helps us to re-conceptualize otherness as such, not as a condition of the co-presence of individuals but even as a porosity of self, of voice—but also an issue of technique, of the virtuosic coordination of enharmonic singularities as they pass in and out of our membranous bodies. Listening, writes Nancy, “—the opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’ . . .” (12).
Rollins appears to be suggesting that, when you listen to yourself as you play, you lose your through-line, lose the formal sense of your music. But his point, I think, isn’t to romanticize or mystify his artistry—he focuses on his lapses, not his genius—but to assess the cognitive velocity at which that agon, that deliberation, can even occur. What Lipari calls compassionate openness wants to happen not as immediacy but on the fleeting lip of the present, closer to reflex than reflexive. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to “sonorous time” as “a present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on” (13). The challenge, the risk posed by such a hysteresis, is not merely the neglect of what is other—and this is perhaps why thinking about solo music, about the improvised solo, helps us to re-conceptualize otherness as such, not as a condition of the co-presence of individuals but even as a porosity of self, of voice—but also an issue of technique, of the virtuosic coordination of enharmonic singularities as they pass in and out of our membranous bodies. Listening, writes Nancy, “—the opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’ . . .” (12).
I want to read Evan Parker’s solo
saxophone technique as a crucial instance of this intensely vacillating
subjectivity (if that’s the right term for a solo voice), of the surging
disavowal of self sounding itself. Here is an excerpt of the solo music, recorded
without overdubbing, from his 1989 album Conic Sections:
Writing in the early 1990s, John Corbett describes Evan Parker’s seemingly linear, monophonic instrument as more of an “assemblage” of body—“[f]ingers, mouth, tongue, teeth, lungs”—and horn—reed, ligature, keys, pads, bell—“constellated in such a way as to break the seeming unity of melodic expression” (82). But in Evan Parker’s solo playing, both live and on recordings, those fractures are not ends in themselves, and rather initiate—as what Lipari describes as “challenges” to passive listening—the possibility of tonal and linear multiplication, of what the reedist calls, with measured self-deprecation, a form of “polyphony”: “There’s a more complex sense of linearity,” he says, “to the point where the line folds back on itself and assumes some of the proportions of vertical music, and some of the characteristics of polyphonic music” (qtd. In Corbett 83). Combining circular breathing, cross-fingering, tonguing and biting the reed, Evan Parker is able to generate layers of overtones and nearly-simultaneous contrapuntal arpeggios at high velocity, effectively producing a continuum of cascading choruses from a single breath. But while Corbett is keen to endorse Evan Parker’s virtuosity and instrumental mastery, he also notes, as the saxophonist himself does, how accident and uncertainty find their way inevitably into any performance, subverting claims to absolute technique or intention and undermining the “notion of the unitary, intending subject”—that is, of self-expression—in improvisation. As Evan Parker puts it succinctly in a 1997 interview with Martin Davidson, “It's to do with layering stuff that I don't know on top of stuff that I do know.” Here, I think, is exactly the looping of self and other, of expressive intention and unruly, noisy sound, that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as listening. Evan Parker’s descriptions of his improvisatory practice align remarkably closely with Nancy’s philosophical investigations of listening:
Writing in the early 1990s, John Corbett describes Evan Parker’s seemingly linear, monophonic instrument as more of an “assemblage” of body—“[f]ingers, mouth, tongue, teeth, lungs”—and horn—reed, ligature, keys, pads, bell—“constellated in such a way as to break the seeming unity of melodic expression” (82). But in Evan Parker’s solo playing, both live and on recordings, those fractures are not ends in themselves, and rather initiate—as what Lipari describes as “challenges” to passive listening—the possibility of tonal and linear multiplication, of what the reedist calls, with measured self-deprecation, a form of “polyphony”: “There’s a more complex sense of linearity,” he says, “to the point where the line folds back on itself and assumes some of the proportions of vertical music, and some of the characteristics of polyphonic music” (qtd. In Corbett 83). Combining circular breathing, cross-fingering, tonguing and biting the reed, Evan Parker is able to generate layers of overtones and nearly-simultaneous contrapuntal arpeggios at high velocity, effectively producing a continuum of cascading choruses from a single breath. But while Corbett is keen to endorse Evan Parker’s virtuosity and instrumental mastery, he also notes, as the saxophonist himself does, how accident and uncertainty find their way inevitably into any performance, subverting claims to absolute technique or intention and undermining the “notion of the unitary, intending subject”—that is, of self-expression—in improvisation. As Evan Parker puts it succinctly in a 1997 interview with Martin Davidson, “It's to do with layering stuff that I don't know on top of stuff that I do know.” Here, I think, is exactly the looping of self and other, of expressive intention and unruly, noisy sound, that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as listening. Evan Parker’s descriptions of his improvisatory practice align remarkably closely with Nancy’s philosophical investigations of listening:
It's
clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to
do it, but if you can't imagine it, whether or not there is a technical
solution never occurs to you because there's no need to. So it's very necessary
to listen closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at
the fringes of what you're producing is something that you're not really in
control of - that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of,
and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come
with the central thing that you're in control of, whether it's a wisp of breath
escaping from the side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push
harder, or some key noise which you can't escape. There's always something
there, and if you're listening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the
centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other
possibilities.
The collision of
self-possessed declamation and open-eared deliberation in what he calls
“trying”—and what I’d suggest in fact takes the form of a musical essay—points
up the irresolute multiplicity at the edges of extemporaneous sound, its
tensile present tense.
Roulette TV: EVAN PARKER from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.
Gently pushing back at Sonny Rollins, I
hear Evan Parker—playing at velocity, going by too fast—as negotiating between
an organic immediacy and an akroatic self-scrutiny, as both listening to
himself and not in the same breath. Corbett calls this tensioning a form of
“research” (85), a science or an intellection, and I’m inclined to agree: this
music is, it’s my contention, one instance of practice-based research into the
possibility of inoperative community. So, to think about community, and to
close my remarks today, I want to listen to a recording of a recent performance
of Evan Parker’s electro-acoustic septet at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in May,
2014. Evan Parker supplies a typically ironic sleeve note: “My art of
composition consists in choosing the right people and asking them to
improvise.” He playfully refuses the “rampant egomania” both of the improvising
soloist and of the composer, preferring an unregimented collectivity. At the
same time, the consistent spatial arrangement of the septet onstage—which can
be seen both in the inner sleeve of the VICTO cd and in the video taken of a
performance at Roulette in New York City, positions Evan Parker at the centre
and apex of the group, facing out like the others but occupying the
conductor-leader’s chair. There’s much to note about this music, but I want to
make just a few points. The three laptops to Evan Parker’s left are able both to
sample and re-figure the live improvisations and to contribute other electronic
sound textures—this is the key concept of most of Parker’s electro-acoustic
groups—which means that the instrumentalist is displaced across the ensemble.
On the Victoriaville recording, Evan Parker doesn’t initiate the performance,
and—if my ears are right—doesn’t even enter as an contributing voice until the
six-minute mark: not through diffidence or even deferral, necessarily, but as
an audible disavowal—silence amid sound—of egocentric voicing: he starts by
listening rather than playing. A version of his own solo practice emerges into
the swirling sonic layers of the ensemble around eighteen minutes into the
performance, combining both self-parody—inserting his long-established
unaccompanied voice into the group dynamic, which both pushes the tutti back, but also opens up a series
of interstices into which other voices might enter. As a model of community,
what the group manages around this moment of solo horn is what Jean-Luc Nancy
calls “a mutual interpellation od singularities prior to any address in
language,” a corporeally-based multiplicitous nudging that, despite the
reflective stillness of many of the players onstage – particularly the three at
their laptops, who enact the reflexive, deliberative aspect of the music, as
opposed to the apparent organicism of the improvisers to his right: the point,
for me, is the co-creation of a virtual in-coherence, a playing apart together
that inheres in the shared differences among the ensemble members, the byplay
between egocentric voice and a yielding to the voices of others. Community,
Nancy writes, is not the panacea of delusive
“communion . . . nor even a communication as this is understood to exist
between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by
sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others” (IC 25). Well-being, as listening otherwise, means neither
self-satisfied holism nor ludic conflict, but a sharing that nurtures our mutual
unknowing.
Works
Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and
Language in a More-Than-Human
World. New York:
Vintage,
1997.
Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John
Cage to Dr. Funkenstein.
Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an
Ethics of Attunement.
University Park: Pennsylvania
State
UP, 2014.
Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical
Practice.
Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. 2002. Tr. Charlotte Mandel.
New
York: Fordham UP, 2007.
———. The Inoperative Community. Tr. Peter
Connor.
Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1991.
