Temporality of the Impossible

Memory and Score
as a Prompter

Dario Buccino’s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 demanded rethinking the process of work and especially rethinking how and what to memorise. This is not an isolated case in respect of challenges to process and memory. Works by John Cage, Evan Johnson, and Miika Hyytiäinen also provoked reflection on the matter of process, memory, and memorisation. Much like Buccino’s piece, Miika Hyytiäinen’s Impossibilities for Violin cannot be practised in advance in its final form. The score for this piece is a two-channel...

Memory

In the perpetual process and situation of everything in between, ‘without any fixity to hold on to, with no common grounds’,[1] in Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 memory and memorisation also became a challenge. If there is no fixed form and everything is equally important, everything must be memorised without any order, but with the ability to create orders when triggered by the HN system. The realisation that the form is a potential of becoming, and not one fixed iteration that must be learned, had at first a...

Process

With Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16, Dario Buccino sets up a hovering web of possibilities. The score does not provide information for only one way to play the piece but contains a super-abundance of information that must be always held in mind when performing. Predetermining a specific sounding result is not possible, as relations between material, instrument and performer do not rely on an embodiment of actions linked to a specific sounding result. The score does not include fixed pitch material and the left-hand relation to the instrument is susceptible to change through principles of the HN system, obscuring the ...

Learning Methods,
Rehearsal Processes,
and Memorising
Unfixed States

In this chapter I will focus on the third challenge area, process and memory, that impelled me to find new rehearsal methodologies for how the mind and body can be trained to remember and embody complex and densely superposed material in music. The main discussion will be based on Dario Buccino’s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16, which is a piece without a predetermined fixed form and therefore becoming only...

Physicality Interpreted
as Material in Dario
Buccino’s Finalmente il
tempo è intero n° 16

When I first encountered Dario Buccino’s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 in December 2019, I was already engaging with pieces and submerged in developing my approach to performance practice where there was need for separation of physical movements that are more commonly considered to go together. Nevertheless, Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 still managed to bring new insights regarding understanding a depth of physicality through its exploration of polyphony of gestural interactions and intentions.[...] I will focus here on my consideration and mental conceptualisation of one unit of gesture in this work as an ecosystem consisting of atomic, subatomic, and meta-atomic matter...

Physicality Interpreted
as Material in Aaron
Cassidy’s The Crutch
of Memory

In The Crutch of Memory Aaron Cassidy constructs a piece which brings high levels of minute detail: demands for the left and for the right hand both together and individually. The right-hand actions and techniques all have the potential for clear sonic identity. However, once put in motion, although very precisely and clearly written, the combination of density, pace of flow of events, and the way the left hand is used create a performative situation in which the sounding outcome can vary from one performance to another...

Physicality Interpreted
as Material in
Dmitri Kourliandski’s
prePositions

Kourliandski writes in the performance notes that the ‘performer has to achieve the maximum possible differentiation of sound between each line and each playing technique, as if each line is played by a different, separate musician. The piece is to be treated rather as an ensemble piece than as a solo one.’[3] Observing the behaviour of my body during my first tryouts of the piece, I noticed the extreme gestural virtuosity that is imposed with the way the right-hand playing techniques in combination with the mapping of the instrument were used. The instruction 'as...

Physicality as Material

Three pieces from my research repertoire, Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16, The Crutch of Memory, and prePositions, brought openings for thinking about the physicality of a violinist's actions being the musical material of the piece.[2] Each of these pieces challenges the habitual relationship and expectations of use and the results of gesture and movement in the relationship between the body of the performer, the instrument, and the music. Examining the meaning gesture and movement can have when learning the piece allowed me to better understand their gestural virtuosity and find more holistic interpretations of this specific repertoire. My particular focus of interest became...

Establishing Potentials
of Sonic Identity
in Pieces with
Alternative Tunings

Finding a sonic identity in case of alternative tuning is a specific task for each scordatura and piece. Each alteration of the tuning, in combination with all the other musical materials in the piece and their interactions, influences the sonic outcome. Before embarking on tackling the details from the piece and creating an interpretation, I found that it is important to discover and create an initial feeling of the timbral world a specific scordatura opens up and of the potentials of this sonic environment (figure 3.2.1). The process is based on...

Finding a Sonic
Identity for Clara
Iannotta’s dead wasps
in the jam-jar (i)

In dead wasps in the jam-jar (i), Clara Iannotta extends the violin with three preparations – metal paperclips, a metal mute, and a metal thimble – that transform and destabilise the usual relationship between finger, string, and sound. The piece is based on the ‘Courante’ and ‘Double’ from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B minor. The piece is...

Locating Imagination:
tactile sensorial
conception of the
unheard

To imagine a score, a performer must conceptualise music from written text preceding its actual sonic-auditory experience. Reading and hearing music is 'never a simple matter,'[2] and in this section I will concentrate on conceptualisations of sound through their possible pre-gestural tactile experiential states. While I introduce the conceptual process of thought behind the topic of imagination and imagining of the sounding of scores mainly using examples from Dario Buccino’s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16, Liza Lim’s The Sun Song Star Map, and Rebecca Saunders’s Hauch, in chapter 4.1 I further elaborate on clarifying sonic identities through and in practice. Works by Saunders and Lim might seem “simple” to imagine in conventional ways but they turn out not to be, and the sounding of Buccino’s piece is unimaginable in common conception. As such, ...

Inhabiting and Understanding
the Structure of
Dario Buccino’s
Finalmente il tempo
è intero n° 16

Dario Buccino’s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 was perhaps the most challenging of spaces to inhabit. While some elements in the score seemed relatively familiar, the unfamiliarity and the unknowns were far more present, and this ratio made even the familiar feel uncertain. The score of Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 demanded a complete remapping of my understanding of how the score can function, as well as an intensive learning process relating to Buccino’s unique use of vocabulary, symbols, and language. Before even getting to the point of building my first space, I had to learn how to read the blueprint...

Score as First Space

As a performer, I always ask what all the aspects are that lead to performance: what are the temporalities which the piece enacts, and, especially, what are the spaces in which the piece exists. In my practice, the first “time-space” of the piece I must inhabit became the score itself.[3] I started seeing the score as a three-dimensional space, a habitat that is a meeting point between the music, the composer, and myself, a place that I must learn to feel “at home” with, and whose notation is my map. Thus, the score became the first space...

The Melody
of Movement

The combination of all the indications completely changed my understanding of how to interpret the work. The extreme detail of the notation does not depict the sound that will be reproduced. The pitch might be the basis, but it is all the attributes of each sounding event, with its specific time-space relation, that in fact determine the character and quality of the sound. In a way, the notation is a map for hand gestures, and the destination – the sounding result – is partially unknown...

Equalising
the Optics of
the Space:
reading the “blown-up”
segments

As described in Pritchett’s report, one of the first and main givens for the piece, that was decided before any of the notes/pitches were generated, was organising of the spatial layout of the score.[1] The second operation in the chance process – that of deciding pitches – started accumulating a significantly larger number of notes per bar, so much so that there would not be enough space to write them all properly in their respective spaces. Etude...

Approaching
the Infamous
Etude XVIII

Etude XVIII is one of the densest and most difficult of all the Freeman Etudes. In section 1.2.1 I examine one possible methodology of learning how to deal with the extreme technical challenges at hand, through which I can incorporate as much detail as possible while creating a state of readiness to react to the unexpected that will appear in the moment of performance. Section...

Finding my Repertorium
Materia Prima

Many pieces considered today to be a standard part of the solo violin repertoire of course also once brought challenges to violin playing, technique, artistry, and musical understanding. The repertoire offers numerous examples of the surprising and the unconventional that provoked not only performers but also audiences. To name just a few of these once fresh and “impossible” works, now established as masterpieces not only of the standard performance repertoire but also the academic curriculum, one need look no further than...

What’s in a Name?

Robert Adlington argues that there is a type of musical movement which creates the possibility for path-like metaphors to arise, leading listeners to perceive music as an event of motion in linear time, with forward direction. As a listener to a music performance, even if I can decide to engage in non-linear listening, my experience of the moment of the act of performance will undoubtedly be influenced by the common linear perception of time, that everyday perception of time, the ‘single time: the time of our experience: uniform, universal and ordered’. As a performer, I cannot give in to that common perception of time but must question every aspect of the time and temporality of performance. These questions of time and temporality became pressing in connection with the pieces from my focus repertoire...

PhD Thesis Contents

Overview of the Contents, from the PhD Thesis

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