Steenberge, Laura, artist.

Three Studies for Viola da Gamba.

[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2019.

1 online resource.

Lateral Addition ; 50

"Words sit on the page differently if they first existed as sound versus writing; they crystallize differently. I've been thinking about this a lot recently in relation to scores, feeling a little suspicious of writing things down, and wanting to take a step back to review what happens when sound is transduced into image. I've gotten interested in orality studies because the relationship of literacy and orality seems to have a lot in common with the relationship of notated music and aurally-composed music. In the 1930s, Milman Parry upended long-held assumptions about the past by demonstrating that the Homeric epics were not great works of literature, but rather great works of oral performance. It was a combination of the poetry's prosody and pneumonics that caused the language to crystallize differently. In this kind of oral performance there is a distinctive kind of repetition, a repetition of stock names or phrases that assist both the listener and the performer. But in writing these kinds of repetitions are tedious, which is why many translators of the Iliad and Odyssey do away with them and alter the language to be more graceful in written form. Homeric epic in the original Greek is rhythmic, set in the meter of dactylic hexameter: each line having six beats of long-short-short or long-long. The poets were probably very good at improvising this rhythmic speech three-thousand years ago; Herodotus wrote that when the Oracle at Delphi delivered her prophesies, she spoke in perfect dactylic hexameter. We know that poets and prophets back then could develop this skill, because these practices have persisted in various languages and meters through the millennia. In order to gain insight about ancient bardic practices, Milman Parry traveled to then-Yugoslavia in the 1930s with an early tape recorder to record bards who perform Serbo-Croatian epic poetry and accompany themselves with the gusle, a 1-string bowed instrument. Shortly thereafter, Milman Parry shot himself in a hotel room in Los Angeles, quite possibly by accident. His student Albert Lord carried on the work, continuing to record Serbian bards into the 1950s, and in 1960 published The Singer of Tales in which he analyzed the performance practice of the oral poets. What Parry and Lord wanted to understand was how the form of the oral poetry was shaped by the absence of reading and writing because, while the bards could belong to any economic class, they all had one thing in common: they were illiterate. Yet, without knowing what a syllable is, they would still put the same number of syllables in every line of poetry just by knowing what feels right. Avdo Mededović was considered to be one of the great bards of his generation, not for any exceptional vocal or instrumental abilities, but rather for his storytelling. A bard's personal style, their unique way of providing the details of an archetypal story, is the measure of their skill. The same story can be told in 2000 lines or 6000 lines. The difference is in the poet's embellishments, with each section of a poem being expandable or contractible, based on the needs of the circumstances and the whims of the performer. Here is a short video of Mededović performing with the gusle. There are also a handful of recordings by Mededović and others available on Harvard's Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. It is a hypnotic sound, hovering between music and language. There are two recent pieces that I would like to share that were somehow inspired by the performance practice of epic poetry. The first one, Three studies for viola da gamba, led to the second, Four studies for viola d'amore. A few years back, prior to learning about Milman Parry and reading Albert Lord's book, I had begun a practice of improvising repetitive sounds on the gamba for long periods of time, so long that I would lose my mind and stop really paying attention to what I was actually playing. Reaching that mental state felt like a point of arrival, a place where I could finally let my body establish its own patterns and start building up ideas based on those tendencies. About 6 months later I came to learn about these bards and started to have a framework to understand the difference between sounds produced through memory recall vs. spontaneous formation. Over the years, bards develop their craft by gradually adding more and more material to their repertoire, repeating lines and learning to embellish them until the language is written into their bodies. While this bears some similarity to rote memorization, in terms of embodiment is a very different practice and sensation. Similarly, both of these pieces for solo string instruments emerged gradually through a repetitive practice and, as much as is possible, without writing anything down. They sound generally the same from one performance to the next, even though much of the specific rhythmic, harmonic, melodic and timbral material is quite variable. I have been developing and performing Three studies for viola da gamba since October 2018. The first study is inspired by the early recordings of the bards captured on imperfect tape recorders, quiet and staticky and warped. The second study is also very quiet, hissy and tenuous. The third study repeats noisy 7 chords and then there is a coda. Four studies for viola d'amore, developed in collaboration with Marco Fusi from November 2018 to March 2019, grew directly out of Three studies for viola da gamba as a first attempt to create a piece for another person that would, in a similar way, harness their own mindless inclinations and internal rhythms. Fusi was a perfect person to work with, being someone who researches collaborative relationships between composer and performer, and also just so happens to play a 7-string bowed instrument even more obscure than my own. The studies explore unique features of the viola d'amore, such as the sympathetic strings (which can also be plucked) or the shallowness of the bridge (which allows for the easy production of triple-stops and even quadruple or quintuple in the right situation). There is no score for the gamba studies, but for the viola d'amore studies some things still needed to be written down due to the long-distance nature of the collaboration: a couple sketches along the way, and also a text score that was made after the fact. Even though these works weren't created that differently from others, having a focused awareness of the process and a deliberate suspicion of notation feels like something new. I'll keep at it for a while, writing nothing down or at least as little as possible, while still working to create mannered little pieces that feel very composed. It's not that I don't love writing and notation and paper, but things can be written down in the body as well, and sometimes the act of putting something on the page works in contrary, inadvertently taking the music out of the body more than intended. - LS"-- provided by distributor.

Art and music.
Art et musique.

Music.

Laska, Eric, editor.
Library Stack, distributor.
Library Stack.