Marc Duby
Dept. of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
University of South Africa
dubym@unisa.ac.za
Free improvising ensemble in 1990s
Johannesburg, consisting of
Bruce Cassidy: leader, trumpet, EVI
Rashid Lanie, David Hoenigsberg, Marc Duby:
synthesizers
Rob Watson: drums
Mostly spontaneous music with some notated
elements based on Hindu mantras
Performed concerts at the University of the
Witwatersrand
To consider what perspectives might enhance
(or not) our understanding of two instances
of the band’s freely improvised material:
1) The original concert
2) The YouTube version
Body Electric at Bozzoli 1994
“The history of reflection on the nature and
value of music is a game of hide and seek:
hide the body and its materiality, its
subjectivity, its temporality, and its
specificity; then seek compensatory value in
characteristics deemed durable, objective,
and trustworthy ― the formal, the structural,
the ideal.”
Bowman and Powell (2007:1087)
Unlike typical jazz, free improvisation tends to
eschew “the structural,” and may only flirt with
ideas of structure and form
It follows that there can be no “…compensatory
value in characteristics deemed durable,
objective, and trustworthy.”
Rather, the musical conversation is fluid,
capricious, playful, kaleidoscopic, and the
persons (musicians and audience) involved focus
on “micro-processes of interaction” (R. Keith
Sawyer)
Insider’s perspective
(“How did I experience this event?”)
Real-time, fluid
Embodied, tactile experience
Collaborative, co-creative (in the moment)
“The challenge facing the human science researcher is
to describe things in themselves, to permit what is
before one to enter consciousness and be understood
in its meanings and essences in the light of intuition
and self-reflection.”
Clark Moustakas
Focus on one’s perception of the unfolding event
Create the music as it happens
Keep it open; use the “Yes, and…” gambit
Musical relationships understood as shifting lines of
force
Playing instruments: touch, then sound
Muscle memory: habit (acquired understanding of
“where things are”)
Merleau-Ponty 1962 167ff: discussion of
organist’s performance
“…Habit has its abode neither in thought nor in the
objective body, but in the body as mediator of a
world.”
I consciously chose to play analogue synthesizer,
not my more customary acoustic or electric bass:
to subvert/circumvent this habitual framework
Work together to create the musical event
Not exhibit technique for its own sake
Listen carefully as things unfold
Avoid competition so as to favour
conversation: “let the music speak”
“Prosthetic technologies are materials that extend
what the body can do ― for example, steam
shovels, stilts, microscopes or amplification
systems enhance and transform the capacities of
arms, legs, eyes and voices. Through the creation
and use of such technologies actors (bodies) are
enabled and empowered, their capacities are
enhanced.”
Tia DeNora: “Music in Everyday Life”
Invented by Nyle Steiner, the EVI is an
electronic wind controller which generates
MIDI data such as pitch, volume, vibrato, and
so on. Designed to be connected to a
synthesizer for sound production, it is
capable of producing a theoretically infinite
variety of timbres and has a far wider range
of available notes than its acoustic
counterpart
Outsider’s perspective
Once a given performance is recorded, theory has
it that it takes on the status of a “text”
Susceptible to analysis, located in the public
domain, objectified/reified
Musical and social interactions as seen from the
film-maker’s perspective
More participative for the viewer (change volume,
change the channel, turn it off, etc.) ― illusory
freedom of choice
I Sing The Body Electric:
Walt Whitman 1855
I Sing The Body Electric:
Ray Bradbury 1969
Weather Report 2nd
album 1972: like the
Body Electric, also
featuring electronics, free
improvisation, and sense
of the spatial
Notions of intertextuality
tempt us to make these
links, but emphatically
denied by BC (Skype
interview June 2011)
From a performer’s perspective, I tend to treat
with caution this particular event’s elevation
to textual status, as reduced to two
dimensions of sight and sound, digitised,
flattened out.
Posted on YouTube for public access, the video
clip may serve to remind us of the
unrepeatable immediacy of the original
performance, “through the wrong end of the
telescope of time.”
“The paradox of contemporary times is our belief
that technology can restore for us lost
immediacy: lost because we live in a complex and
separated community. It seems to us that
modern technology ― air travel, the phone, the
electronic chatroom* ― is able to bring us back
together. But we never had the full community we
think we lost. We were always at a kind of
distance (geographical, emotional, political,
generational, cognitive) from each other. And we
never accomplish the instantaneity we think is
promised by new technologies.”
Penelope Deutscher 2005:63
(* or the Internet)
Trusting in what it felt like at the time and
depending on the mysterious processes of
memory, nostalgia, the evidence of the tactile
and auditory, ethnography (conversations
with ensemble and audience members): is
this not perhaps how we might “make
history”?
At a unique moment in history, on the eve of
the first democratic elections in South Africa,
a group of musicians created a specific series
of musical events in a particular space.
This quasi-ritual, as it unfolded, had the effect
of creating a temporary sense of community
between players and audience:
In sum, a glimpse of the fragile wonder of what
it is to be human, and alive.
IASPM
Unisa
This work is based upon research supported by
the National Research Foundation and any
opinion, findings and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material
are those of the author and therefore the NRF
do not accept any liability in regard thereto.