Contemporary Music Review
ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20
Repurposing the Past? The Historical Basset
Clarinet in Creative Collaboration
Emily Payne
To cite this article: Emily Payne (2016) Repurposing the Past? The Historical Basset Clarinet in
Creative Collaboration, Contemporary Music Review, 35:6, 648-669
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1282625
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Published online: 01 Mar 2017.
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Date: 02 March 2017, At: 00:24
Contemporary Music Review, 2016
Vol. 35, No. 6, 648–669, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1282625
Repurposing the Past? The Historical
Basset Clarinet in Creative
Collaboration
Emily Payne
In this article I examine the role of the instrument in Evan Johnson and Carl Rosman’s
collaboration on a new work for eighteenth-century basset clarinet, ‘indolentiae ars’, a
medium to be kept (2015). Drawing on material collected over 30 months—including
interviews; audio–visual footage; and correspondence containing sketches, fingering
charts, and recordings—I consider the latent practices that lie within the instrument,
and their role in the creative process. From the aesthetic discourses that pervaded the
musicians’ discussions, to the transitional and sometimes ‘accidental’ moments of
instrumental interaction during workshops, I trace the micro-processes within the
broader creative trajectory, in order to understand how the instrument’s historical,
social, and ergonomic affordances were enmeshed within the here-and-now of the
collaboration. The article illustrates the dynamic character of collaborative work, shaped
not solely by the knowledge of individuals, but through a close reciprocity between
perception, action, and the discursive and material conditions of their surroundings.
Keywords: Clarinet; Composer-Performer
Instrument; Workshop
Collaboration;
Creativity;
Historical
In his dedication to ‘indolentiae ars’, a medium to be kept for eighteenth-century basset
clarinet (2015), Evan Johnson emphasises the significance of the contribution made to
the piece by its performer, Carl Rosman. He writes:
This piece is tailored in every possible way to Carl Rosman: his unusual instrument
and his explorations upon it (and therefore his multiphonics, his fingerings, his
microtones), his transcendent virtuosity, his penetrating intellect, his tolerance of
ambiguity, his immersion in musical history, his voice, his stage presence, his
control of silence, even his page-turning technology. In gratitude for almost ten
years of a relationship that has become one of the foundations of my musical life:
nothing I’ve ever done has been dedicated so profoundly. (Johnson, 2015, p. i)
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Contemporary Music Review
649
Commissioned by the Cologne-based ensemble musikFabrik and premiered by
Rosman in February 2016, the piece is the outcome of two years’ close work
between the two musicians, as well as a longer professional relationship and
rapport, to which Johnson alludes above.1 Indeed, ‘indolentiae ars’ is a distillation of
a sufficiently significant collaborative attunement such that Johnson acknowledged
that it might never be performed by another musician:
Unless I wind up making a version for a modern instrument (which I may or may
not do), it will be absolutely for the combination of Carl and this particular instrument—nobody else will ever play it—and, from his end, it involves developing a
technique, creating a relationship with an instrument, that will likely be useful primarily for this one piece, even if there turn out to be others written for the instrument. (E. Johnson, unpublished email correspondence to E. Payne, 15 April 2014)
‘Creating a relationship with an instrument’, as Johnson puts it, is the focus of this
article, in which I examine the processes through which new practices and musical
materials were developed over the course of the commission, in order to explore questions relating to musician–instrument interaction and their role in joint creative work.
Johnson and Rosman’s decision to employ a historical basset clarinet meant that
there was much about this collaboration that was unprecedented. The instrument
was made by the Dutch instrument maker Peter van der Poel, and is based on a
design by Theodor Lotz (1747–1792), the Viennese maker who is directly associated
with Anton Stadler, the clarinettist for whom Mozart wrote his Concerto K. 622
(1791) and Quintet K. 581 (1789) (Poulin, 1991). This is the first contemporary commission written for the instrument, whose extant solo repertoire is limited to that of
Mozart.2 Moreover, while Rosman has a reputation as an internationally leading performer of new music, he had never performed on this instrument in public before this
project, commenting at the first workshop that ‘I’m not quite there yet with it to do
something beyond just playing it to myself’ (Workshop 1, 4 April 2014). Thus, a significant aspect of the collaboration between composer and performer was the development of a new instrumental rhetoric and forms of notation with this distinctive and
initially somewhat unfamiliar instrument.
I examine the formation of compositional material from three angles: the wider historical and cultural dimensions of the creative ecology; the development of techniques
through various categories of engaged interaction; and Rosman’s embodied relationship to his instrument and his developing technical expertise in preparing for performance. The structure of the discussion moves from the broad to the specific, from the
wider aesthetic discourses that pervade the collaboration to the momentary and in
some cases ‘accidental’ outcomes that occur as a result of a specific interplay
between body and instrument. In this way, I trace the micro-processes within the
larger collaborative trajectory, in order to understand how the particular historical,
social, and ergonomic affordances of the instrument were enmeshed within the
here-and-now of the present collaboration. The article illustrates the dynamic character of collaborative work, shaped not solely by the knowledge of individuals, but
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E. Payne
through a close reciprocity between perception, action, and the discursive and material
conditions of their surroundings. Ultimately, I make the case for performance practices being co-produced by an interplay between performers and the complex
‘musical ecosystems’ (Clarke, Doffman, & Lim, 2013, p. 628)—consisting of people,
objects, histories, and processes—which they inhabit.
Johnson and Rosman’s commission forms a case study of a larger research project
investigating the creative processes of performance by documenting professional clarinettists and composers working together in various collaborative contexts (Payne,
2015). Employing a similar methodological approach to other recent studies of
‘real-world’ contexts of Western ‘concert’ musics (see, among others, Bayley, 2010,
2011; Bayley & Clarke, 2009, 2011; Clarke et al., 2013; Clarke, Cook, Harrison, &
Thomas, 2005; Clarke, Doffman, & Timmers, 2016; Donin & Féron, 2012; Donin &
Theureau, 2007), the material on which this paper is based was collected over a 30month period (November 2013–February 2016) and includes interviews with
Johnson and Rosman conducted at various stages during the process; audio–visual
footage of workshop meetings,3 rehearsals, and the premiere; in addition to email correspondence of c. 14,000 words, including audio recordings of techniques and passages, sketch materials, and score fragments (see Table 1 for a summary of the
audio–visual material collected during fieldwork).
The first workshop took place in Cologne in April 2014, and was followed by two
subsequent workshops, one during the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music
in August 2014 and one in Cologne in December of the same year. I attended and
filmed the first two workshops, and the participants made and shared with me an
audio recording of the third. Since there is a considerable distance geographically
Table 1 List of audio–visual material. Personnel are CR (Carl Rosman), EJ (Evan Johnson), and EP
(Emily Payne).
Location and date
Event
Personnel
Data
Huddersfield, 9 November
2013
Cologne, 4 April 2014
Semi-structured interview
CR, EP
Audio only
Workshop 1
CR, EJ, EP
Cologne, 6 April 2014
Darmstadt, 3 August 2014
Semi-structured interview
Workshop 2
EJ, EP
CR, EJ, EP
Cologne, 1 December 2014
Cologne, 8 February 2016
Cologne, 14 February 2016
Workshop 3
Complete run-through
Rehearsal
CR, EJ
CR
CR, EJ, EP
Cologne, 15 February 2016
Cologne, 15 February 2016
Sound check and rehearsal
Premiere
Skype, 16 March 2016
Semi-structured group
interview
CR, EJ, EP
CR, EJ, EP,
audience
CR, EJ, EP
Audio–
visual
Audio only
Audio–
visual
Audio only
Audio only
Audio–
visual
Audio only
Audio–
visual
Audio only
Contemporary Music Review
651
between composer and performer (Johnson is based in Massachusetts and Rosman
lives in Cologne) they pursued a regular and detailed email correspondence over the
course of the project, culminating with Johnson sending Rosman a ‘complete’ score
in June 2015. Rosman recorded a complete run-through of the piece and sent it to
Johnson on 8 February 2016, ahead of the rehearsals and premiere that took place
at the musikFabrik Studio in Cologne the following week. The concert was recorded
and will be released on Label musikFabrik.
Locating the Instrument in Creative Collaboration
This special issue on the subject of collaboration in contemporary music is indicative
of a recent but rapidly expanding body of research addressing joint creative work
in composition and performance. Over the past decade investigations of composer–
performer interactions have flourished, whether addressing the face-to-face encounters between performers and composers during the genesis of a work (Clarke et al.,
2016; Donin & Féron, 2012; Donin & Theureau, 2007; Fitch & Heyde, 2007; Hayden
& Windsor, 2007; Kanga, 2014; Östersjö, 2008); and/or composer–performer(s)
interplay and negotiation during rehearsal (Archbold, 2011; Barrett et al., 2014;
Bayley, 2010, 2011; Bayley & Clarke, 2009, 2011; Clarke et al., 2013; Seddon,
2004; Seddon & Biasutti, 2009). A small corpus of work has evaluated the composer–
performer relationship from the perspective of the clarinettist, addressing a variety of
questions including the socio-psychological effects of engaging with composers on
the performer’s creative practice (Roe, 2007); the expediency and contingency of the collaborative process, and the influence of external factors and other creative agents such as
conductors, recording engineers, and producers (Merrick, 2009); and the role of dialogue in collaboration (Roche, 2011). While these studies provide detailed accounts of
performer-researcher practices and are rich in terms of their artistic outputs, the instrument is often treated as an apparently passive object within the creative process.
Looking beyond the clarinet, a small number of studies have addressed the role of
the instrument within collaborative work. In their auto-ethnographic account of
working together on a new commission for speaking cellist, Fitch and Heyde (2007)
draw on Helmut Lachenmann’s (1996) metaphor of composition as ‘building an
instrument’ (Fitch & Heyde, 2007, p. 92) to capture the gradual tuning, or integration,
of the performer and instrument, evident in a figurative sense in relation to the new
instrumental techniques and sonorities that the musicians develop; and in one particular instance—the specialised execution of scordatura—quite literally. The final composition is tightly intertwined with Heyde’s own performance idiom to such an extent
that Fitch concludes that from his perspective, and echoing Johnson’s dedication
above, ‘there is no doubt that the piece in its final form would be unthinkable
without the input of this particular performer’ (p. 93). Engaging with his practice as
a classical guitarist working with composers on a series of new performance projects,
Stefan Östersjö’s (2008) relationship with his instrument appears to be as significant as
652
E. Payne
his relationship with his fellow collaborators, and in a statement that sums up the
complex interrelations that shape his experience as a performer, he writes:
[I]t is not possible to separate my critical reflections on my own practice as a performer from issues of the musical work, musical interpretation, authenticity and
intention, nor from the influence of an absent or present composer, from technology, my instruments, the score and other ‘texts’. (2008, p. 27)
Writing from the perspective of researcher rather than performer, Michael Hooper’s
(2012) examination of the oboist Christopher Redgate’s collaborations with the composers Dorothy Ker and Fabrice Fitch employing the redesigned ‘Redgate-Howarth’
system oboe (see Hooper, 2013; Redgate, 2007), identifies the instrument as a potentially powerful ‘agent’ within composer–performer collaboration, and deconstructs the
traditional understanding of the performer’s relationship with his or her instrument.
Hooper’s conclusion hints at a sense of the relational and distributed processes at play
in ‘a wide collaborative network that includes [the composer], Redgate, an oboe, works
in the oboe’s repertory, past practice, obsolete mechanism, new keywork and much
else besides’ (Hooper, 2012, p. 36). Rather than a ‘network’, Clarke et al. (2016)
have suggested that this more complex and fluid relationship might best be understood
as an ‘ecological mesh’ (p. 121; see also Clarke et al., 2013; Ingold, 2011). Their study of
the interactions between violinist (Peter Sheppard Skærved) and composer (Jeremy
Thurlow) in the creation, preparation, and performances of Ouija for solo violin
and electronics (2013) demonstrates how Sheppard Skærved’s embodied engagement
with his particular instrument, a Stradivarius once owned by Joseph Joachim, is of fundamental importance to his relationship with his sound, his co-performers, and the
audience. In this way, the authors argue, ‘the instrument and body […] act as a repository of history’ (p. 157).
The concept of an instrument as a ‘repository’ echoes the anthropologist Edwin
Hutchins’ (1995) account of distributed cognition in the navigation of a US Navy
vessel, in which he describes the ship’s tools as ‘repositories of knowledge […] constructed in durable media so that a single artifact might come to represent more
than any individual could know’ (Hutchins, 1995, p. 96). There have been few empirical investigations of distributed cognition in musical performance,4 but Jonathan de
Souza (2013) has applied Hutchins’ work to investigate the relationship between performer and instrument. He writes:
The interaction of body and instrument—with all its cognitive consequences—is an
interaction of individual and culture, of the present and the past. Instrumental
mediation engenders cultural learning beginning from the haptic level of physical
skill. Instruments, in other words, ground modes of music cognition that are embodied, technically conditioned, and historically situated. (de Souza, 2013, p. 50)
De Souza’s interests ultimately lie elsewhere, in the relationship between the performer’s body and instrument rather than the distribution of knowledge during co-
Contemporary Music Review
653
present collaboration, yet in drawing attention to instruments’ physical, technical, and
historical affordances, he offers a fruitful framework for approaching the basset clarinet in this project, which, like Sheppard Skærved’s violin, has powerful historical
and cultural resonances. Thus, attending to the social life of musical instruments
(see Appadurai, 1988; Bates, 2012) in collaborative work may offer an opportunity
to delve more deeply into the processes of music-making that might otherwise be overlooked. It is to the instrument, and its role in Johnson and Rosman’s collaboration that
I turn now.
The Historical Basset Clarinet
As is clear from Figure 1, the historical basset clarinet bears very little resemblance to
its modern counterpart, possessing a number of properties that are distinct from the
‘standard’ modern model.5 It is constructed from boxwood rather than the grenadilla
that is commonly used today, and as a consequence it is much lighter—in both colour
and weight. The mouthpiece is narrower, and requires smaller and softer reeds. It has a
wide bore, with larger tone holes that are positioned lower down the instrument, particularly those of the right hand (van der Poel, 2014). The B2 is executed by covering an
open hole located on the ‘knee’ joint, usually with the performer’s leg. In contrast to
the modern clarinet, which can have in the region of 17–22 keys in addition to 4–7 ring
keys, the basset clarinet usually has 9 keys, of which four operate the lower ‘basset’
notes. This minimal mechanical system, with keys that operate independently from
one another, has a number of consequences for the performer. On the one hand,
the lack of fully chromatic keywork presents ergonomic constraints in that cross-fingerings and half-hole fingerings must be employed.6 Intonation is extremely variable:
tuning the B♮3 is problematic, for example, as it is approximately a quartertone flat,
requiring a half-hole fingering and change of embouchure to adjust the pitch. On
the other hand, the open tone holes and lack of linkage between keys means that
many more fingering configurations are possible, affording huge flexibility of
colour. As well as its powerful historical significance, the instrument clearly offers a
large number of possibilities in relation to harmonic and timbral material—the question is the extent to which, and the manner in which, they were explored within the
collaboration.
Johnson describes his music as being concerned with ‘physical and bodily underpinnings of performance’ (Johnson, 2014), a point he elaborated on during interview:
With a lot of my work, I aim for this result which is this very gentle, very delicate,
very lyrical almost, ornamented, graceful thing, but (especially in solo pieces) I like
to try and get there through ways that take a lot of energy. So things that barely
sound that the instrument has to force out and you get a little squeak at the end;
or things that are just really awkward or really tiring to do but generate these
really soft and gentle results. So I’m really interested in those things that require
the sense of the body, the sense of the musculature and the embouchure and the
lungs, but completely privately. (E. Johnson, unpublished interview, 6 April 2014)
654
E. Payne
Figure 1 Video still from Workshop 2, 3 August 2014.
A performer of Johnson’s music is often pushed to an extreme position, but in a
manner that might not necessarily be conveyed to the audience—the material that
he writes is less about eliciting a specific sounding result than setting up a particular
circumstance of performative ambiguity. We can begin to see why the basset clarinet,
with its inherent instabilities, fragilities, and inconsistencies, might be particularly
attractive to him.
Given the specificity of the basset clarinet’s design, Johnson was reliant upon the
technical expertise of Rosman during the workshop stage in order to create a relationship with an unfamiliar instrument and performance practice. Part of Rosman’s role
was to share with Johnson a sense of his embodied relationship with the instrument
to such an extent that he was able to compose for the instrument, but not so much
that he would ever perform with it. Equally, Rosman was obliged to interrogate his
individual performance practices in order to develop a performance practice that is
heavily intertwined with this instrument and the specific performance circumstances
of their collaboration. This meant that their creative relationship was arguably symbiotic: as Rosman’s technique developed he was able to share his increasing proficiency
with Johnson, which in turn enabled Johnson to explore new aesthetic avenues
during their workshops. In this collaboration then, the development of knowledge
can be observed as distributed across the interactions of performer, composer, and
instrument—and importantly, is crucial to their creative agency.
Developing a New Instrumental Rhetoric
With this background in mind, the following discussion focuses on three instances of
the development of new musical material. A key question at the outset of the project
Contemporary Music Review
655
was the extent to which the basset clarinet’s historical lineage might play a role in the
creative process. Or, as Johnson put it, ‘To what degree is this just an exotic quasi-clarinet, and to what degree is it a specifically eighteenth-century instrument?’ (E. Johnson,
unpublished email correspondence to E. Payne, 15 April 2014; original emphasis).
Repurposing a historical instrument in a contemporary context engenders a certain
sense of cultural baggage, or what Johnson and Rosman initially described as ‘the
Mozart problem’ (Workshop 1, 4 April 2014): the weight of composing for an instrument that is so strongly associated with a single composer and in particular, with two
of his most prominent works. While Johnson acknowledged the significance of the
instrument’s historical context, he was keen to avoid drawing on it in too obvious a
manner, commenting:
It’s certainly not going to be based on Mozart and any sort of quote, but it’d be sort
of a shame not to have some thought given to that. […] It would be nice to have a
special thing that somehow implicitly addresses the historical context in some sense.
[…] It would not surprise me if there’s some sort of idea of Mozartian gesture or
ornamental practice or scales or something that wound up somehow, hopefully
subtly. I’m really allergic to pastiche. (E. Johnson, unpublished interview, 6 April
2014)
Nevertheless, when asked during the first workshop whether it was possible to
approach the basset clarinet in isolation from Mozart, Rosman replied: ‘Not for me!
[…] With this [instrument] it is very clear that Mozart or Mozart-type music just
fits it’ (Workshop 1, 4 April 2014). As well as the instrument’s aesthetic signifiers,
Mozart’s music was also impressed upon Rosman’s embodied relationship to the
instrument, since at the outset of the project his practice routine consisted largely of
working on the extant repertoire—the Concerto and Quintet; and, throughout the
workshops he played sections from, and improvised with, material from those two
pieces.
The Invention of Multiphonics
A striking compositional feature of ‘indolentiae ars’ is Johnson’s use of multiphonics,
which breaks new ground in two ways. First, as Rosman observed, ‘this might well be
the first time multiphonics have been specifically written for this instrument, or
perhaps even at all for a historical clarinet’ (C. Rosman, unpublished email correspondence to E. Johnson and E. Payne, 22 May 2015); and second, this is the first time that
Johnson has employed multiphonics in a significant way in his music.7 He explained:
I don’t tend to use multiphonics that way because my approach isn’t at all about
‘Here, listen to this sound, let’s linger with it and admire it … ’ but rather there
are always so many things going on, constantly compromising each other, that
the sort of ‘framing’ you often need to get a multiphonic doesn’t work with what
I’m trying to do. (E. Johnson, unpublished email correspondence to C. Rosman
and E. Payne, 20 May 2015)
656
E. Payne
‘Indolentiae ars’ contains multiphonics in various incarnations: dyads and triads resulting from cross-fingerings. At a later stage of the project, Johnson asserted that a motivating factor for employing multiphonics in a significant manner in this piece was his
desire to take advantage as much as possible of the material properties of the basset
clarinet, and of Rosman’s relationship to them. During the first workshop, however,
although Rosman stated that microtones and multiphonics were the sounds about
which he was most excited, multiphonics were not a significant topic of discussion,
with Johnson responding ‘I’m not really a multiphonic person’ (Workshop 1, 4
April 2014). At one point during the workshop Rosman began to explain how the
instrument’s minimal keywork requires cross-fingerings to be employed, making the
instrument more amenable to producing overtones and undertones, and thus multiphonics. He demonstrated to Johnson the fingering configurations used to bring
out the upper harmonics of a multiphonic and offered to investigate them further,
but Johnson appeared uninterested, stating ‘In general I’m more interested in
colour, microtonal fingerings and things that can be trilled’ (Workshop 1, 4 April
2014).
In the second workshop, however, a discussion of the instrument’s microtonal possibilities led to a more extended and participatory exchange, with Rosman exploring
multiphonics in the clarino register in greater depth (see online supplementary
material, Video example 1). At the beginning, it is unclear which direction the interaction will take: the discussion of microtonal flexibility could have been pursued
further, but it is Johnson’s response to Rosman’s demonstration (‘It sounds like
that’s multiphonic territory’) that directs it towards multiphonics. The relationship
between verbal elaboration and practical exploration in this episode is balanced,
with Johnson taking an active role in evaluating Rosman’s playing. He seemed intrigued by the multiphonics, and particularly interested in undertones caused by a
change of attack. The interaction during this episode has a sense of shared discovery,
with Rosman also uncovering techniques that he had not encountered before (‘That’s a
new one!’), and diagnosing ways of executing the sounds (‘That’s a kind of no-tongue
attack’). The musicians’ sense of engagement is apparent, with both of them apparently
interested in the execution of the sounds, rather than the sounds themselves. Their
conversation is also indicative of their familiarity with one another, with phrases
such as Johnson’s ‘As you know … ’ and Rosman’s statement ‘Except of course that
these are not your kind of intervals’. By the end of this exchange Johnson is clearly
more interested in multiphonic possibilities, particularly in terms of their potential
to create volatility. In a subsequent email he explained the way in which he had integrated the technique within his personal compositional aesthetic:
I resolved not to […] ‘frame’ these multiphonics as objects to admire—so that they
sometimes occur in the midst of other things so that they may not sound properly,
or not sound as written, and so forth—and even when there is more space around
them temporally speaking they are often forced to coexist with trills, vocal actions,
etc., that destabilize them in other ways. […] Several multiphonics are labeled ‘risk
Contemporary Music Review
657
not sounding’, ‘not quite enough time’, etc. […] Also—and here’s where my
approach to the topic is more or less the same as everyone else’s, I think—I tend
to think of multiphonics as vectors of energy, as expressions of surplus, of forcing
things out the ‘cracks’ of the instrument—so sometimes they are meant to have
more ‘energy’ to them (in terms of harmonic content, dynamic range, etc.) than
others. That also influenced what went where. (E. Johnson, unpublished email correspondence to C. Rosman and E. Payne, 20 May 2015)
The idea of multiphonics as symptomatic of excess energy, rather than solely a timbral
effect, made them a valuable element to draw into Johnson’s existing compositional
rhetoric.
The lowered G#4 / raised B♭4 dyad demonstrated by Rosman during this episode
subsequently took on a significant role in the architecture of the piece. Several
months after this workshop, Johnson emailed Rosman to obtain a more detailed
sense of the extent to which the multiphonic was easily accessible from other
pitches, and its potential interactions within the wider context of the piece. Rosman
responded by sending through the fingering chart and a recording of each multiphonic
with a verbal commentary describing how each sound is best reached, whether from
the upper or the lower note of the dyad (see online supplementary material, Audio
example 1). Figure 2 is an extract from the fingering chart with the dyad highlighted.
Here Rosman has recorded several possible multiphonic sounds and their corresponding fingering pattern.8 Underneath the transcription of each sounding result
he has provided a visual representation of the open and closed holes on the body of
the instrument, with the letters indicating which keys should be depressed. This
chart is a mapping of Rosman’s technical relationship with the instrument at the
initial stages of developing a performance practice. He used it to record the physical
properties of each technique, for example, by noting an unstable interplay between
two pitches, or to indicate that shading the first left-hand finger bends the pitch of
the G♭4. This is just one of several charts that Rosman produced, and is the
outcome of many hours of careful experimentation, showing the detail of his workings.
The chart is indicative of the intimate relationship performers have with their instruments: Rosman’s fingering charts do more than supply Johnson with static information about the execution of pitches; they share with him a sense of Rosman’s
embodied perception of the instrument. But how did they function within the creative
process?
Once Johnson had established that the dyad was relatively responsive and could be
securely executed (without requiring a gradual fading-in) he used it frequently in the
piece. It first appears in bar 24 (Figure 3). The multiphonic was also chosen for its harmonic function, since it fitted within one of the work’s primary pitch structures. It became,
in Johnson’s words, ‘a main “signal” of the piece’, occurring throughout ‘in a generally
canonic/self-referential way’ (E. Johnson, unpublished email correspondence to
C. Rosman and E. Payne, 20 May 2015). In this instance, there is a gradual transition
from the hesitant beginnings evidenced in the first workshop—where Johnson’s prior
conceptions appeared to distance him from investigating multiphonics in a significant
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E. Payne
Figure 2 Extract from one of Rosman’s multiphonic fingering charts (26 April 2014).
Reproduced by permission of C. Rosman.
manner—towards a point nearly a year later where the technique became a compositionally important element of the piece.
‘I almost feel like writing “I woz ere” …’
By contrast to the previous example, the following discussion shows how, at a more
advanced stage of the collaboration, Johnson and Rosman were working in a much
less exploratory and more direct manner. In April 2015 Johnson emailed Rosman
with a score fragment, on which he had marked up two places where he intended
to include a multiphonic on A 4 (see Figure 4).
Contemporary Music Review
659
Figure 3 First appearance of lowered G#4 / raised B♭4 dyad (b. 24) (Johnson, 2015, p. 4).
Reproduced by permission of E. Johnson.
Figure 4 Score fragment with multiphonic ‘voids’ (bb. 17–18) (11 April 2015). Reproduced
by permission of E. Johnson.
Below is an extract from Johnson’s email:
I’ve attached the current state of the passage for which I’m looking for multiphonic(s),
with the holes for which they are destined outlined in an eye-catching red. The first
would ideally be coincident with the end of a small lip-gliss down from the preceding
A ,4, and the second at the end of a tie from the preceding A 4.
I don’t remember what I told you before about the criteria but in an ideal world they
would be more or less as follows:
(1) not TOO nice—some crunch/energy is good—but not hugely honky either
(2) as secure/immediate an onset as possible
(3) dynamic p-ppp or so, although if they have to punch out a bit they can (and a slight
cresc. into them isn’t impossible either)
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E. Payne
(4) ideally they wouldn’t be the same; not sure at the mo which one I’d want to be crunchier
but my instinct at the moment is the first, if it matters. If there’s only one that works,
and it works both places, repeating is not the end of the world either.
If I can’t have it all, let me know and I’ll prioritize as needed. If it can’t be done at all,
I’ll just have to think of something else. (E. Johnson, unpublished email correspondence to C. Rosman and E. Payne, 11 April 2015, 03:50)
Johnson’s very specific request suggests that by this stage he had gained a greater degree
of familiarity with the technical possibilities of the basset, and had a much more developed sense of his compositional intentions. Rosman replied promptly, sending
Johnson four possibilities, with an accompanying fingering chart (Figure 5) and
recording (see online supplementary material, Audio example 2).
The subsequent email exchange proceeded as follows:
EJ:
CR:
EJ:
CR:
These are actually perfect, many thanks! The middle two I think will inhabit those red
rectangles in some order or other … speaking of which, are the middle two straightforwardly trillable (or more precisely mordentable) by means of—would that be L2?
You learn fast! Yes, indeed that is and indeed they are. There are also various little colour
trills possible, especially with the R4 A♭ key. The fourth one can be quite a pure twelfth
although that’s not how it came out on the recording if I remember right.
The results as they currently stand are attached. [Figure 6] Thanks for filling a pair of
holes that had been in the pencil sketches for weeks!
Hurrah! I almost feel like writing ‘I woz ere’ …
Taking place over the course of just a single day, the interaction here is more direct
than that of the previous example, with Rosman literally ‘filling in the gaps’ of the
musical material. Whereas in the previous scenario there was a sense of the musicians
investigating possibilities in a fluid and undefined manner that gradually animated
Johnson’s approach to multiphonics, in this case a specific compositional decision
was made from a limited number of options. There is a sense of mutual satisfaction
in the tone of their correspondence, and Rosman’s final comment articulates a
feeling of ownership over this specific material. Clearly, the nature of email communication necessitates a more economical way of working than when having the time to
Figure 5 Rosman’s fingering chart for multiphonics on A 4 (12 April 2015). Reproduced
by permission of C. Rosman.
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Figure 6 Score fragment with notated multiphonics (bb. 17–18) (12 April 2015). Reproduced by permission of E. Johnson.
explore possibilities in a face-to-face workshop environment. Yet there is also a sense
that the collaborative balance has shifted, with Johnson and Rosman apparently fitting
within the more traditional roles of composer and performer: Johnson requiring
Rosman’s expertise on a purely technical level, to address a particular compositional
‘problem’.9 It is also important to note that this particular episode was a consequence
of the earlier workshop phase, acknowledged by Rosman’s compliment, ‘You learn
fast’. It is unlikely that the musicians would have progressed to such an efficient
manner of working had they not had the opportunity to investigate the instrumental
possibilities so intensely in their previous meetings.
The Thwocking Effect
By contrast to the examples discussed so far, some of the techniques that are employed
in ‘indolentiae ars’ were discovered almost by accident, rather than being the outcome
of a traceable process of development. The term ‘(controlled) accident’ is employed by
Fitch and Heyde (2007, p. 92) to denote the unexpected discoveries that arose during
their workshops, although the strategies that led to their discovery were intentional.
This process is similar to the working method employed by Johnson and Rosman:
during their workshops they worked through a list of techniques relatively systematically, paying close attention to sounds and the actions that gave rise to them. The
intention to celebrate the unstable and chaotic qualities of performance is also
evident in Liza Lim’s Invisibility for solo cello (2009). Lim (2013) describes employing
a ‘guiro’ bow (where the bow hair is wrapped around the body of the bow to create an
irregular surface) in order to produce ‘accelerations, glitches and slippages as the
undulating surface of alternating hair and wood passes over a string’ (Lim, 2013).
The practices described by both Fitch and Heyde, and Lim, focus on the instrumentality of performance: foregrounding the materiality of a specific instrument in the hands
of the performer. In the present collaboration, however, rather than preparing the
instrument to encourage unexpected performance outcomes, the liminal sounds
were an outcome of three interrelated circumstances: the particularly unstable
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ergonomic properties of the basset clarinet; Rosman’s relatively raw relationship to it
during the earlier stages of the project; and Johnson’s compositional concern to experiment with the physicality of sound production. Thus, this third section concentrates
on an ‘accidental’ playing technique and its incorporation into the sound world of
‘indolentiae ars’: nicknamed ‘thwocking’ by Johnson.
Video example 2 (online supplementary material) shows an episode from the first
workshop where the somewhat volatile relationship between Rosman’s technique
and his instrument became a source of creative exploration. The clip opens with the
musicians discussing specific cross-fingerings that are required by the instrument’s
design, their prominence in Mozart’s Quintet, and the implications of the technique
for performance (Rosman describes the placement of the hole on the bore of the
instrument: ‘The hole’s in the wrong place: that’s too high, that’s too low, so I need
something in the middle’, with Johnson responding that the cross-fingering is ‘a compromise, fundamentally’). This exchange is followed by a short period of exploration
and discussion of the role of B flat and its employment at significant or ‘pivotal’
moments in the piece. Listening to Rosman, Johnson remarks on the liminal noises
caused by the transition between alternating fingers covering and uncovering the
open holes: ‘The changing of those fingers is making a little bit of a hiccup’. While
Rosman responds that these sounds generally tend to be avoided in classical clarinet
technique, Johnson comments on their appeal for him. During an interview after
the meeting, Johnson expressed his enthusiasm for this unexpected sound:
The sound of the fingers opening and closing—those little pops that you get—that’s
the sort of thing that never would have occurred to me sitting at home that that
would happen. […] This is completely new thing for me; it’s something I’m
really excited about. (E. Johnson, unpublished interview, 6 April 2014)
It is significant to note that, as Rosman remarked in the video, the transitional
‘hiccups’ that piqued Johnson’s curiosity tend to be avoided in classical clarinet performance practice. In the third workshop (see online supplementary material,
Audio example 3) these sounds were pursued further, with Rosman exploring the
sonic outcome of executing tremolos of increasingly wide intervals, which required
more fingers to move simultaneously. The musicians’ exchange is guided by their
mutual close attention to Rosman’s embodied relationship to the instrument and
the variations in the resultant sounds, with Johnson expressing a preference for particular combinations of notes (‘The ones with all three left-hand fingers, that
tremolo is really nice. […] There’s a minor sixth that was nice’) and diagnosing
ways of executing the sounds, noting the combinations of fingers that generate the
strongest sound (‘So it’s really the right-hand trills that have the thwocking effect’).
As Johnson comments at the outset of the episode, he could have sought out
various sonic effects by consulting the fingering charts that Rosman produced and
sent to him (as in the ‘I woz ere’ example), but their moment-to-moment interactions
during the workshop afforded a more reflexive investigation of the possibilities.
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663
Rosman’s relationship to his instrument offered a particular kind of unstable state that
Johnson was curious about, and in response to Johnson’s questioning, Rosman was
able to manipulate the ‘cracks’ and ‘edges’ of the technique in such a way that
Johnson found aesthetically interesting. The exchange concludes with the pair laughing
over Johnson’s use of the term ‘thwocking’, with Rosman joking, ‘I expect to see that in
the performance notes’ and Johnson playfully elaborating the term into an Italian
expressive direction (‘Thwockando! Quasi thwockando, ma espressivo!’).
Audio example 3 (online supplementary material) illustrates the importance of an
instrument offering pleasure in itself. Johnson and Rosman were exploring the resistances and instabilities of the instrument in a systematic manner, but there is also a
sense of them simply playing (in the recreational sense of the word) with this somewhat
strange instrument to see what kind of sounds it can make. Looking beyond the lighthearted situation, however, the joke is indicative of the wider aesthetic and cultural
forces that permeate their collaboration. By invoking a conventional musical term
humorously, Johnson (who himself uses Italian performance directions extensively in
his work) is on one level perhaps making light of their situation by referring to his
own compositional rhetoric in a somewhat self-deprecating manner; more broadly,
however, the joke positions their interaction within a specific cultural and historical
ecology (broadly speaking, contemporary Western ‘concert’ music). Drawing on Byron
Dueck’s (2013a, 2013b) work on musical ‘intimacies’ and ‘imaginaries’ (or ‘publics’),
Clarke et al. (2016) have characterised the dialectic between the immediate and present
interactions between musicians and the wider ecology that they evoke as ‘Inside/outside
the room’, whereby ‘dialogue that references materials, persons and practices outside the
room, as well as the immediate references to these things in the room, brings out the
mesh-like qualities of creativity as distributed over time, materials (notations, images,
instruments), and people’ (2016, p. 143). Johnson knows that Rosman will appreciate
his ‘thwockando’ joke because they share the same frames of reference; his remark thus
simultaneously intersects their intimate relationship and the ‘broader imagined sphere’
(Dueck, 2013a, p. 100) of contemporary Western concert music which they inhabit.
In this instance an unforeseen quality of Rosman’s technical relationship to the
instrument was employed in a significant manner in the eventual piece. Johnson’s performance notes in the final score reflect his enthusiasm for the sound, instructing the
performer that trills and tremolos should be executed
[…] with fingering ‘noise’ (in particular, perceptible timbral disruption from the
opening and closing of the open holes) encouraged (i.e., the secondary pitch
should not necessarily be one as close as possible to the main pitch in terms of fingering action. (Johnson, 2015, p. iii; original emphasis)
The thwocking effect celebrates the material qualities of the instrument and the physical energies employed in its production. Paradoxically, it is possible that if Rosman
had possessed a more ‘developed’ technique at this stage, these transitional sounds
might have been completely eradicated from his playing, and would never have
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appeared in the piece. However, it is also important to acknowledge Johnson’s role in
these events. It is his interest in performative ambiguity that focussed his attention on
these particular sounds, leading him to encourage Rosman to pursue them further
during the workshops. Despite its apparent liminality then, the thwocking effect was
embedded in an entanglement of relations including the cultural and historical resonances of the basset clarinet and its physical idiosyncrasies, the tactility of Rosman’s
fingers on the instrument’s open holes, the musicians’ personal relationship and
their mutual aesthetic concerns, and the sustained periods of experimentation afforded
by their workshops.
Conclusions
Johnson’s dedication is certainly justified in acknowledging the crucial role that
Rosman played in ‘indolentiae ars’, to the extent that it is difficult to imagine the
piece being performed by another player. Analysis of the development of compositional material renders visible the co-constitutive and relational nature of that
collaborative work. In the workshop settings the musicians actively explored the
possibilities afforded by the basset clarinet, guided by attentive engagement with
Rosman’s bodily capacities and their changing relationship to the instrument.
Johnson’s compositional rhetoric was realised in almost symbiotic collaboration
with Rosman, through processes of gradual development and experimentation
such as those that resulted in the multiphonics; efficiency (‘I woz ere’); and
through ‘accidents’, where a transitional aspect of Rosman’s technique was encountered, embellished, and then incorporated into a performance practice—the
thwocking effect.
It is important to acknowledge that I have focussed solely on the production stage of
Johnson and Rosman’s creative collaboration: the process of preparing and performing
the piece inevitably raised other possibilities and questions that are beyond the scope of
this article. This point raises a broader issue: the importance of focussing on relationships and processes over products or outcomes. A number of elements played an integral role in the collaborative process, but did not result in material outcomes in the
score. This is particularly apparent in the influence of Mozart which, although certainly
present in Johnson and Rosman’s discussions, is evident only in an opaque or concealed manner in the eventual score.10 Mozart played a significant role during the
workshops, as part of an aesthetic discourse that facilitated exploration of performance
practices, and in terms of Rosman’s embodied relationship to the instrument. Thus the
historical lineage of the basset clarinet is addressed implicitly—it is one of several
avenues through which performance possibilities are explored, rather than a source
of ‘concrete’ sonic material.
A crucial factor in the collaboration was the musicians’ personal relationship and its
intersections with their shared professional spheres and frames of reference. The
assumptions that underpin their conversations, practices, and the aesthetic discourses
that motivate them are informed by and respond to the institutional and professional
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665
traditions which they inhabit, but they are also facilitated by an existing level of trust
and mutual respect that had been established over a number of years before the outset
of this project. In fact, as Johnson expressed during interview, the very motivation
behind the commission lay in their shared interests and aesthetic concerns. What
are the implications of this familiarity for the dynamics of the collaboration? It at
least partially eliminates the anxieties of working with a collaborator with whom
one has a limited prior relationship. For instance, the need to demonstrate one’s competence and craft (see Clarke et al., 2016, pp. 140–142) in order to reach a level of
shared understanding was less of a concern in this scenario. Their trust was conducive
to risk-taking, which was particularly beneficial in light of the unfamiliar instrumental
and technical territory in which they were working.
If this observation sounds overly positive and confirming, a final point inflects the
potential ‘illusions’ of collaborative equality: although this commission certainly blurs
the boundaries of creative ownership, with Johnson and Rosman’s workshops and correspondence playing a crucial phase in the genesis of the piece, it would be wrong to
overemphasise the collaborative nature of the project. Not all of the developments in
the piece can be ascribed to the shared input of both performer and composer.
Johnson was clearly responsible for a number of decisions, and undertook a significant
amount of ‘private’ work independently of his interactions with Rosman, the nature of
which has not been explored in great detail here. Moreover, as was evidenced in the ‘I
woz ere’ discussion, sometimes Rosman’s role was to provide Johnson with material
without having any input into how it might be employed—as Johnson put it, he
was literally ‘filling a pair of holes’. This is not to deny the evidently distributed and
interactive nature of their work; and any case, in no way did Rosman appear disenfranchised by this manner of working (indeed, his ‘I woz ere’ comment appears to express
quite the opposite). But it is important to recognise the more directive ‘filling holes’
approach as a valid manifestation of creative activity. As I have suggested, a wide
variety of working practices are manifest within shared work, some more obviously
‘collaborative’ than others. The musicians demonstrated various working processes,
with some exchanges functioning more directly, while others were more expansive
and emergent in character, in addition to the ‘private’ work that Johnson undertook
in creating the score. These apparent paradoxes suggest that the concept of collaboration could benefit from being broadened to allow for the sometimes more distributed
character of creative work. It is important to acknowledge the limits of the term in capturing the variety of interplay and exchange that can occur. Nevertheless, while the
three examples of the development of musical material discussed in this article represent particular dimensions of ‘indolentiae ars’, they show quite subtly how musical
instruments can be understood as, in Hutchins’ words, ‘repositories’ of different
kinds of knowledge and practices that are animated through collaboration. It is arguably the case that all musical works are contingent on a particular combination of the
performer’s body, skills, and instrument; and ‘indolentiae ars’ demonstrates this reality
particularly vividly. As musicians work together, their interactions are enmeshed, both
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with the ‘concrete’ material tools of their environment and with the implicit but no less
significant aspects of their craft—the embodied and tacit processes of performance.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Evan Johnson and Carl Rosman for their generosity and goodwill throughout the
project. I wish to thank Laura Anderson, Eric Clarke, and Philip Thomas for their helpful comments
on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This research was undertaken at the University of Oxford, with financial support from St Peter’s
College, the Faculty of Music, and the Royal Musical Association.
Supplemental Data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at 10.1080/07494467.2016.1282625
Notes
[1] Rosman has played a number of Johnson’s ensemble pieces before as a member of musikFabrik; he also gave the premiere of A General Interrupter to Ongoing Activity for Solo Voice (2011),
and was the dedicatee of Apostrophe 1 (All Communication is a Form of Complaint) for two bass
clarinets (2008). However, this is the first time that the musicians worked closely together on a
solo work.
[2] The aria ‘Parto, Parto’ in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito K. 621 (1791) includes a part for basset
clarinet in the key of B flat, but the Concerto and Quintet are the only two extant solo works. It
is reasonable to argue that historical basset clarinets are made today with the sole intention of
performing the Mozart repertoire.
[3] In the specific context of this paper, the term ‘workshop’ denotes an environment (either faceto-face or online) of artistic work, trial, and development in which composers and/or performers interact during a work’s compositional stage. As such, I make a distinction between the
activities of ‘workshopping’ and ‘rehearsing’, in contrast to the definition proposed by Zubin
Kanga (2014) who includes rehearsing within the definition of workshop. I do not mean to
suggest that the musical ‘work’ is a fixed and final object by the rehearsal stage, but my understanding is based on the language employed by the participants of my research. As one musician put it, ‘The word “workshop” can mean about a million different things. Every single socalled “workshop” I’ve ever attended has been an utterly different entity’ (Participant interview, cited in Payne, 2015, p. 5).
[4] Linda Kaastra (2008, 2011) has investigated distributed cognition in ensemble coordination,
but her work is more concerned with processes of live music-making.
[5] The following account is not intended to be an exhaustive investigation of the basset clarinet,
but aims to attend to the properties that were pertinent to this particular instrument within
Contemporary Music Review
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
667
the context of the collaboration. For detailed organological discussions of the eighteenthcentury basset clarinet, see Hoeprich (2008) and Shackleton (1995).
Cross-, or ‘fork’ fingerings, are fingering configurations where the fingers are raised and
lowered out of serial order, a technique that was eradicated with the development of the
Boehm key system. See Lawson (1995, 2000).
Johnson’s Largo Calligrafico/‘Patientiam’ for baritone saxophone (2012) contains a single brief
dyad.
Rosman’s first sketch corresponds to a five-key historical clarinet, with the subsequent diagrams relating to the nine-key basset clarinet.
Hayden and Windsor categorise this manner of working as ‘interactive’ (2007, p. 33).
Johnson described the triadic character of the opening passage of the piece as ‘a sort of wink at
the characteristic gestures of the Mozart Concerto’; and that certain pitch structures were
derived from transformations of the opening phrase of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet (E.
Johnson, unpublished email correspondence to C. Rosman and E. Payne, 20 May 2015).
This subject is explored in further detail in Payne (2015, pp. 215–222).
ORCID
Emily Payne
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2109-8126
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