A selection of interviews on a range of topics.
printable version of interviews can be found here
18.06.2003, WARSAW, BEFORE A NAKED CITY CONCERT
MICHAL LIBERA
KRZYSZTOF TRZEWICZEK

We had this strange idea about starting with the question of melody -
what do you think about it?
What do you understand by melody?
that was the question we wanted to ask you…

Actually it's an interesting question because I think melody is at the very center of what I do, but rather loosely defined, or defined and used in a number of different ways. At its most mathematical melody is a series of durations, so it's not necessarily a tune, for example.
And it's not necessarily a theme, is it?
No. For example, I work with a construction principle which I call 'block-melodies'. This is a way to construct linear narratives out of widely different kinds of material. First I generate a set of durations. Sometimes the numbers for these durations come from reading the newspaper - the Wall Street Journal is very good in that respect - so I may have a random set of numbers like 4, 9, 17, 1, 37 and so on.
These numbers correspond to durations, and for each duration I can create a sound-world, say, distorted flute, percussion and somebody dropping rice onto a violin or something.

Now every time the same number occurs in the series, I might make that same sound-world - that's one way to do it. In the studio when I construct these blocks of material I can record each block separately, I don't even need to listen to everything else.

All the fives first and than all the fours and all the nines and in the end you'll have something, which sounds like euhh, ee, uuu, e huu [I don't really know how to notate that]. And for me that's the melody, made out of blocks…
How many blocks are there?
Oh, it could be any number. That depends on what you're doing. Do you know Accidental? There's a lot of 'block-melodies' in that.
Does this have anything in common with another compositional principle, which you called 'melody extraction'?
'Melody extraction' is a principle of seeing if you can derive all of your material from one central melody in a continuous, chronological sequence. Pacifica, for example. Pacifica consists of 14 bars of quarter notes, a quarter-note melody, very regular.

This is also necessarily harmonic - just as you can't have two notes succeeding each other without creating the idea of an interval, so you can't have three or more notes next to each other without creating the idea of a harmony.

The quarter-note line in Pacifica, which is rather slow, goes through a kind of harmonic contour, and our perception of that contour is constantly changing. What was interesting for me was to take this melodic line and say: "well, if I take the second note of the second measure and use that as a starting point for a new melody and let it sustain until the fourth note of the ninth measure than it will create a kind of slow counter-series with its own harmonic and intervallic possibilities".

The whole piece was a way to see if I could be consistent to that idea. Always in chronological sequence, but trying to create new information out of it. Eventually there are subtexts - eighth-notes or sixteenth-notes in between the quarter notes - and they have potential for melody extraction as well. So it can become quite complex.
But the main idea is to take…
…is to take information out of one melody and to create other melodies out of it, without using compositional techniques associated with serialism, like retrogrades and other inversions - the chronology is the key to the technique.
It's easy to hear when it's slow like Pacifica, but in a piece, do you know my record with Ferdinand Richard called Dropera? There's a lot of melody extraction in Dropera, and that's quite fast. In a way it's just deciding to emphasize certain notes in a sequence, which creates melody, or more accurately, which draws attention to a melody which is already there, but which is only subliminally there unless you start making that accent. But the principle is to derive all the material absolutely clearly from the same source.
And how is it related to the guitar quartets and string quartets?
Most of the guitar quartet pieces that I've written - The as Usual Dance… or in some places Motormouth, - have 'melody extraction' parts and also The as Usual Dance… has some 'block-melody' parts. So there are ideas like that. But sometimes I work in a very different way, but since you want to talk about melody we're talking about melody….
We - I mean we as listeners - always thought about your music as something spacious… let me try to explain this: it's like the lines of different instruments are well prepared to interrelate with each other to make everything integral whole. Maybe a metaphor of constructing a space would be a good one; or maybe of organizing a space by particular instruments, melody lines or whatever?
I think any music making, of any description, involves a specific relationship with physical space and its properties. When I talk with my students about improvising I often make the point that being a soloist does not mean filling a space - it means owning a space. And that these two things are not the same. And if, as a soloist, all you can do is fill the space - than you're probably not listening because you haven't got time to listen. And therefore owning a space just means "this belongs to me - how am I going to use it effectively?"

But those two things will be important. So having a relationship with the musical space is really important.
In the terms you're talking about - creating that kind of space - I think I'm very much influenced by the cinema. I think actually most musicians are very influenced by the cinema.
I don't think it's avoidable; I think that since 1930s all music has to have some kind of relationship with film. Because film is the predominant popular culture in the world and music is used by the cinema for very different kinds of significations.


We know that if you take a piece of Schönberg and ask somebody like these people here [Holiday Inn gardeners] to listen to it, they will probably find it completely horrible. But if they go to a movie and hear the same kind of music they won't even notice it - it will be a part of the total experience. And so there's a complete disjuncture between the idea of what you sit down and listen to as Music, and what's going on when you watch a movie, where you get all kinds of styles and music used to serve the narrative.

And I think as a musician you can't avoid having some kind of relationship with that. It's not just about doing a film soundtracks but about watching a lot of movies and being aware how music has developed in the history of cinema. And this way of creating narrative structure I think has changed music forever.

I think also as a rock musician my fundamental learning about being a composer didn't take a place in the Academy or as a virtuoso - because I'm not a virtuoso and I never went to the Academy - it took place in recording studio. And for me as a composer most of my techniques come from what happened to me in the studio. So in my composition, even when I'm notating, the ideas about what I can do in the studio become the things that I put in the music score.

The recording studio process is a parallel for the film process. And I think most rock musicians have been through this process of creating music in the studio using what Brian Eno eventually referred to as 'using the studio as a compositional tool', which in fact is what everybody who has ever used a studio has always been doing. This is a process that necessarily goes along with what's happening when you're putting things together in the recording studio.

And it's very similar to the process that goes on when you're editing a film. When you have material and you have to try to make it work in the right and convincing amount of space. What fascinates me in the situation that we're in right now is that it is only in rock music that the significance of the invention of the recording has been fully realized. In the world of classical music the studio is still used as a way to create a kind of idealized perfect version of a piece. And nobody actually uses the studio as a way to create structure or the way to create a piece from scratch…
…do you mean they want to make it as neutral as possible?…
… I mean it's very interesting because obviously the studio is used in a very sophisticated way in a classical music. If you hear a piece of Wagner opera there are probably 350 edits and it's taken from 20 different performances in the studio so obviously they are well aware of the advantages of working that way but they're creating an illusion - just like Hollywood is creating an illusion - of a certain kind of reality, which has nothing to do with what's actually happening.

And it seems to me interesting that the composer could get into that situation and actually use the fact that you're recording. Stretching and editing everything to create a piece of music in the studio;
using it as a technique with musicians. Whereas that has only really happened in the world of rock music. Jazz music is considered to be a performance medium and so with the exception of the period during the seventies when Miles Davis was doing a lot of editing, it's still fundamentally about getting the best performance possible.
And the irony in this case is that jazz would never have developed at all if it wasn't for recording. I mean basically this was the first time that anybody could actually study a solo so all those people out there playing a Charlie Parker solo they are doing it because they can actually hear a Charlie Parker solo on a record and learn it. So the music developed as an intellectual construct because of the birth of the recording, but recording didn't actually change the music except from this point of view of people learning how to play it.

And in classical music it changed what could be done in a studio to make the music absolutely perfect realization of what composer wanted. But in rock music because they didn't have to deal with virtuoso-technique and they didn't have to deal with a composition which is already in existence on paper, the studio was something quite different. In other words it was the beginning point and not the ending point.
That reminds us about 'Maybe Monday' project or Henry Cow - did the idea about using the studio start with those projects?
Well in the case of Henry Cow back in the early seventies when we first went into a studio we were really young and naïve and we were entirely a performance band so our first record was about 'how to do our music' and we soon discovered that it was just an incredible tool - a 16 track tape, we didn't really all have to play at the same time or we could do something later or when we made a mistake we could do it again and this was completely exciting! But it also led us to think that next time when we do a record why not take it as a starting point rather than the ending point. So on our record 'Unrest' we spent two weeks improvising and then listening to the improvisation and say if we take this little three minutes here it'll be a song if we add this part to it.

So it was about notating and adding parts and making loops - creating the music out of the improvisation and turning it into something else. And I still think that that was a fairly revolutionary thing to do at the time.
I've done a lot of recording using similar methods but with the improvisation I had the feeling that I got to the end of a certain way of dealing with improvisation and I wanted to use a studio as a way of 'kick-myself-in-the-ass', I suppose. So there were two or three projects I did in the same period starting with the record with Michel Wintsch and Franziska Baumann - I don't know if you know that one: it's called Whispering - which is similar project inasmuch as we were improvising and afterwards Michel edited it and made it into something else.
And after that I made a record with Jean Derome and Pierre Tanguay, All is bright but it is not day, which is about live treatment in the studio, and Maybe Monday came after that so we have three records that are all about how to alter the possibilities of what the improvisation can be, using the studio as a mechanism which can change how we react, how we play…
…so the improvisation was like producing the material to work on…
…in a case of Maybe Monday, which is the furthest the process became for me it was quite complicated. Actually Myles Boisen was altering the sound that we were making while we were recording - some of us could hear what he was doing and some of us couldn't.
Because when you are playing acoustic saxophone without headphones you're just hearing saxophone so Larry [Ochs] had no idea what Myles was doing. So first of all we generated a lot of recordings, which were manipulated by Myles while we were recording so there was no choice.

What was very important for me was that this was not an option - it had to be something where there was no going back. If we had done it separately - effects on separate tracks so that we could take them away if we wanted to - in the end it would just be the same kind of improvising. What I wanted it to be was something irrevocable.

And then it was all on two tracks - we didn't do on multi-track, so everything went to two tracks - and when I took two-track tapes away and started categorizing it and I had this list: this amount of density or this particular key or this particular kind of solo structure - started to make blocks of material and than I invented an imaginary possibility of how I could make that into something else. So I wrote a theoretical narrative of parts into my notebook.
And I went into a studio and I told the engineer exactly what I wanted him to do: we're gonna take minutes 3.20 till 5.16 and put it in the computer and we're gonna take minutes 7.01 till 7.21 and put in the computer - put all those pieces of material in the computer and I said 'ok, I want to overlap those two and I want you to cut that out and put this here' - just not listening to it, just doing it - and then we had the seventy minutes of music and then we listened to it and said 'oh, that's terrible' [everybody's laughter], or 'that's great….
Do you treat that kind of work as a work of composer?
Of course, but I think it is very important not to get too involved into aesthetics too soon. So if I have been saying to myself 'we cut that and listen to that' and you say 'well, it's not quite right' you don't have the sense of the whole thing. So for me it is important first of all to make a whole thing and not really worry too much whether it works or not. And then apply your critical process to the totality of the material.
So do you think that what you said about owning a space is only valid for a composition or also for performing or improvising?
No, for everything. I think this is a question of your responsibility to yourself as a creative being - you're trying to, as best as you can, crystallize an idea and you don't necessarily need to know what the idea means. Francis Bacon, the painter, said something about how he was trying to make images as accurately as possible off his own nervous system and I think this is a good way to put it.
You don't know the intellectual, theoretical definition of what you're doing and sometimes it's very powerful and you don't know why, and sometimes it doesn't work at all and you need to throw it away.

Are you trying to teach that to your students?
I'm trying to teach my students not to waste their time, to be very consequent about how they work, to realize their own ideas as accurately as they can. So it's not so much about how I work but about discovering how they work and how they can best do that.

What's interesting about Mills is that we don't have the restrictions of a normal music collage where you're learning how to do certain specific technical things. They're not trying to teach new complexity or minimalism or whatever, you know, basically you can come to Mills with any agenda you want. What's important for me as a teacher is that you define your agenda and then you try to work it out. And you spend your time doing that as consequently as you can. So you come to work extremely hard and trust yourself.
Is there any learning process for you as well?
Of course, if I wasn't learning something from anything I would probably always try to do something else. There's nothing like having students, many of whom are more rigorously formally trained than I am - that constantly keeps you thinking about what you do. When I have students who have studied longer than I have, who have technical skills that I don't have, they're studying with me but they may actually write music better than I can, on a certain level.

But on the other hand they may be confused, they don't know what they want, they don't know where they're going, so what I can provide them with is a context to define better the direction for themselves.
And by so doing I have to define for myself the direction that I want. Because I always have to separate myself from the people I'm teaching. I don't want to teach them how to be me.
We also thought about 'Gravity' - the record you made with Scandinavians. Was that the similar experience of learning? Or maybe a specific one?
Music is a social process, a collaborative process, it's always a collaborative process, you can't make it without collaborating, even as a soloist there's a process that goes on before you arrive at a solo performance that is collaborative on some level.
So if you ignore that you're denying an important part of who you are. It's not an accident that painters are painters because they're alone with their work, and musicians are musicians because they are not. Everything I've done is dependent on other people.

And that's how you move forward. And the art of choosing which people you work with is probably the most important. It's like saying, you know, a musician who can do anything probably will [everybody's laughter]. And similarly, choosing to work with 'anybody' means that you probably won't ever discover who you are. As you always choose your partners, you can put yourself in a position of challenging yourself.
We can't avoid that question we keep on asking ourselves: what does that mean, we always wonder, that you're in a blues tradition. Where can we find in your latest music the blues tradition you always keep in mind, as you usually say?
I said that? I'm not sure, but obviously as a teenager in England in the sixties, blues had a transformative effect on my life. At the same time it was uncomfortable because it had nothing to do with me. When I was a 16 year old kid, singing those old songs from the American south was great and liberating but also naïve.

When I was 16 years old it was more that I was getting rid off my classical background and learning how to be free of paper and learning that I could make stuff up. And identifying with the oppressed or whatever political idea I may have entertained.
So it was valuable process to go through. And as you'll hear tonight I can still play the blues [everybody's laughter]. But in my own music this is something that I can't see clearly anymore. It's just a part of who I am….
Yea, that's what we thought…
But have you heard the record with Aki Takase? This is a record where she invited musicians to play the music of W.C. Handy -

I played guitar, it was only two years ago so in a way it was a road back to blues which was unusually interesting for me.
This is also a question we had an email exchange on - the question of overcoming the blues tradition by European guitar players and the strange discussion and article in the Polish press about it. Do you agree with that?
Huh?