A focussed listening project
(currently in development)

If you could only hear a piece of music one time, would knowing that fact impact the way in which you listen to it?

I am deeply gratified to have so many highly talented musicians collaborating with me on this project. They each bring their own unique sense of musicality and expressiveness to the work.

Musicians:

Tim Kaiser
Mira Kehoe
Tom Kehoe
Peter O’Gorman
Pat O’Keefe
Mike Olson
Nirmala Rajasekar
Gary Schulte
Steve Sklar
Matthew Smith
Steve Tibbetts

Current Production Status

All of the source material has been recorded, and the initial round of editing all of that material into musically useful components has been completed. This initial round of editing, which I think of as “harvesting”, involves listening through all of the raw recording sessions, identifying musical elements that I believe will be useful in the finished piece, editing them out and saving them as discrete assets. I ended up with over 1,300 of these carefully selected and edited musical sounds and gestures. Now that this has been completed, I have moved on to the construction phase, where I build the finished composition in the computer. I am anticipating that the finished piece will consist of approximately 20 short movements.

Photo Gallery

Narrative

I’ve always been something of a contrarian, at least in as much as I tend to cast a jaundiced eye at all things popular and trendy. It raises in me a basic question of motivation. Why do we choose to do the things we do? A thing, an idea, an action. What motivates it’s creation and/or our relationship to it?

I would argue that an act of deliberate human creativity, must be based upon some form of authentic and deeply personal human expression. It must transcend the materiality of craft. It must speak to something more than the conscious intellect, and becomes something that can be felt. And when it’s working on this level, it can be experienced as sacred.

We live in a world where virtually all music is available to be listened to anytime we like, online for free. This is something which we now take for granted, but just think about that for a minute. It’s ALL online. Everything. Any genre of music from any part of the world, ancient to contemporary. In a sense , this is truly miraculous. It’s a resource that we all take advantage of and it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. The absolute global ubiquity of music is the new normal and it’s here to stay.

There is however a significant downside to this state of affairs. I have found that having unlimited access to any and all music has changed how I feel about the music I listen to. It’s a painful admission, but I must confess that I value music less than I used to. For one, it’s free, and that does color how we value the experience of listening to it. But beyond that, it used to be that searching-out interesting music in the pre-internet world presented real challenges. Listening to the radio, reading reviews, word of mouth, random encounters with music being played somewhere. There was a scarcity that people just can’t relate to now.

This loss of scarcity has also carried with it a loss of intentional listening, or the deliberate act of focusing on the experience of listening. We’ve become a society of passive listeners. The sacred experience of connecting deeply with a piece of music through focused listening has become quite rare. But that is precisely what I’m trying to do with this Gestural Distillations project. I am creating a focused listening experience for an audience. This will be a piece of music that will only be available to be listening to one time, on one date, in one place. It will never be available as a recording or online. The only way to hear the piece will be to attend the one time event. By doing this, it is my intention to reintroduce scarcity, specialness and a sense of the sacred to the experience of listening to music.

At the live event, the audience becomes part of the piece. They must agree to participate fully as active listeners and remain completely silent during the performance. I am asking a lot of the audience, but it is through their active participation that I will be able to give them a unique experience. The audience members will not be allowed into the performance space in advance. They will be held in a separate area prior the start of the music, at which time cell phones will be collected and held for them until after the performance. They will be fully briefed on how their participation is integral to the piece. They must agree to be completely silent from the moment they enter the performance space, until the music comes to an end. I’m striving to reinforce a sense of the sacred for the audience, by calling on them to participate fully as attentive listeners. In a sense, they are being included almost like performers.

There will be a theatrical aspect to the experience. When the audience enters the space, it’s as if they are walking onto the stage. The audience will be lead into a theatrically lit space and seated in a circular arrangement of chairs. Once everyone is seated and the ushers have left, the lighting will fade to near darkness. The audience will be held in this darkness for what might seem like a somewhat longer than anticipated length of time, to encourage them to listen intently for the first sounds of the piece. The piece runs. After it’s done, the lighting fades up and everyone is free to talk, clap, interact with other audience members, and everyone is ushered into another space where there will be a catered reception and where they will be encouraged to discuss their experience with each other.

About the Live Event

This will be a fixed media project. There will be no live instruments used in the live event. The music will be presented as an audio recording. This recording will be created at my studio and presented at the live event using a high quality sound system. I am choosing to do this as fixed media, because I want to exercise a very high degree of control over the finished product.

The venue will have to be exceptionally quiet and acoustically accurate. Most likely it will be in a larger live room of a recording studio. I’ve already been in touch with a number of them.

The audience size will be strictly limited. Maybe only 30 people seated in a circle facing inward. The overall duration of the music will be relatively short. So, multiple groups will be able to experience the work in succession if needed.

The Music

All of my projects begin with the establishment of meaningful limitations. Having strict limitations within which to work fosters creativity and provides focus. For this project I have chosen to impose three extreme limitations. The first of which is the one-time-only experience discussed above. The second is actually the first extreme limitation that I settled on, which has to do with duration. The work will consist of a series of very short movements, probably on the order of around one minute each. Each movement will be it’s own coherent and complete entity, capable of standing alone. That being said, the sequencing of the various movements will also convey compositional intent and will work together to articulate a greater whole. Imposing this extreme duration limitation also plays into the concept of specialness discussed above. Every moment of each movement will be finely sculpted to perfection. I find this extreme duration limitation to be rather interesting and challenging. I could also say compelling and stimulating. I’m thinking of these short duration movements as if they were perfect little jewels. Each one a highly refined distillation.

The third extreme limitation is something that I only settled on later, after choosing to impose the other two. And that is the idea of “one note”. Here’s what I mean by that. In the recording sessions with each individual musician, they were asked to play only one note, and make it the most beautiful, expressive gesture that they are capable of generating. One breath. One draw of the bow. One articulation. One focused moment of personal human expression. Make it interesting. Make it change over time. Make it a singular entity. We recorded multiple takes to get at this idea. Once this was accomplished, we usually moved on to other short focused notes and gestures, some of which were not what one might consider to be conventionally “beautiful”, but my main focus with them was to get that first one-note expression of “beauty”, however they might define it. I felt it was important for the musicians to come to the session with this kind of focused intent and intensity.

Once all of these recordings had been made, I moved on to the initial editing phase, where I went through all of the raw session recordings and harvested out any and all musical elements that I believed may be useful for the finished piece.

Once the harvesting is done, I will start to construct the finished piece of music in the computer, drawing from this diverse palette of unique and carefully prepared musical elements. Time consuming but deeply gratifying. This is where the piece comes to life and crosses the boundary between thought and feeling. It is here that audio production, musical performance and the manipulation of the musical materials converge into one integrated process. A process I have been developing for many years now, and one which has yielded my strongest and most personal work.

Video

This music will never be available to be listened to ever again after the live event, but Dawn Schot is making a documentary film of the entire process. Obviously, the actual music will not be included in the video, which is another interesting limitation for the videographer. The documentarian will be shooting some of my discussions with the various musicians, where I’m explaining the conceptual underpinnings of the work and what it is that I will be asking of them. The videographer will also be shooting some of the musicians in their homes and creating background profiles of them and their work. There may be some footage from the recording sessions as well. Of course, there will also be video of the people in the lobby who are attending the live event, both before and after they have had the listening experience. Capturing their feedback and reactions will be an important part of the documentary. I find the idea of making a film that is all about a singular musical experience, and not include any of that music in the finished product is in itself rather compelling, (and amusing).