‘The presumption of something being impossible presumes that we have the knowledge of the future, that I am not sure is always warranted. Maybe if we hold open what future will be or even understand that future by its definition is something unpredictable, something different to what we know will appear.’ – Andrew Herscher ^[1]

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 Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices or Eugene Ysaÿe’s six solo Sonatas. Interpretations have been influenced by the time and social environments in which a performer is/was active, and also by technical achievements and changes that the instrument and, subsequently, playing technique have gone through. Although they are still considered difficult, the mindset today regarding the performative accessibility of these works has long surpassed their consideration as “impossible”.

However, next to this now-standard repertoire stand pieces written for violin in recent years that continue to be ‘marked to a large extent by the disregard of the instrument and its limitations’.^[2] Or rather, I would argue, not by this disregard but instead by the desire to find still undiscovered ways of using the violin, often reflected in explorations of extra-musical content, the use of the instrument as a whole (as opposed to using only the sounding portion of the strings), as well as limits of human physicality. Combined, these aspects can shatter our perception of the parameters conventionally considered crucial for judging the values (such as tone, melody, brilliance, virtuosity) and hierarchy of information in musical content and material, with consequences for interpretative decisions and for how the success of a performance is judged.

In my research I focus on pieces riddled with complexism, often described as almost impossible to play.^[3] As Ben Spatz notes, ‘we should be wary of declaring things impossible, since technique is never more than an incomplete and unfinished engagement with the affordances of reality’; my approach to this repertoire was to examine what is the current state of my technique and what might contribute to having a continuous expansion of my ‘affordances of reality’.^[4]

The mythology surrounding John Cage’s Freeman Etudes impelled me to gather, as a starting point, very difficult pieces from violin repertoire written after 1977. In addition to creating a list of mostly solo violin pieces, there was a selection of string quartets and violin plus one instrument pieces, which in a broader sense contributed to the discourse of the research.^[5] Further, in 2018 I launched a call for scores, which resulted in my commissioning and collaborating with Dario Buccino on the piece Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16; this work too became a substantial contribution to my repertoire and research.^[6]

To find which pieces from the vast repertoire might constitute my repertorium materia prima and would serve as the ‘starting-point of knowledge’^[7] in my quest to redefine my performance practice, I first had to establish the common difficulties across these pieces. To achieve this, I relied on the feedback loop between theory and practice/performance. As a performer, approaching a piece of music analytically to aid performance does not mean solely analysing its structure and form from a compositional point of view, but also analysing and understanding all its performative aspects.^[8] Through playing and analysing, a performer has to find a way ‘to channel all this information, not rearrange it to suit their own perceptual need’.^[9] Each of the pieces is unique in its combination of extreme, multilayered demands, both technically and aesthetically, but working on them revealed that there are common threads. I used these common threads to define areas of difficulty that posed challenges for the performance practice.

George Steiner develops a ‘theory of difficulty’^[10] in contemporary poetry and proposes a typology of four classes:

• ■ The Epiphenomenal Difficulty – the apparent or contingent difficulty which for Steiner resides in the use of unusual or obscure words, i.e. the specific type of language;
• ■ The Modal Difficulty, which for him is the most difficult of difficulties as it deals with double meanings and questions of tone; whereas epiphenomenal or contingent difficulties are ‘tractable’,^[11] modal difficulty fully ‘lie with the beholder’;^[12]
• ■ The Tactical Difficulty, in which the writer deliberately withholds something;^[13]
• ■ The Ontological Difficulty, which 'confront[s] us with blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have, with more or less rough and ready consensus, come to perceive as a poem'.^[14]

Borrowing from this thread of thinking, and adjusting it to be more in tune with my repertoire, I devised a six-class system:

• ■ The Epiphenomenal Difficulty – understanding notation as a ‘type of language’ in Steiner’s sense, this is further broken into several subdivisions: the use of tablature notation (for violin writing), the surplus of notation symbols, new symbols (expanding on “traditional” western notation), and finally, cases of fully custom designed and unique notation language (figure 1.1.1);
  

  Figure 1.1.1: Subdivision of the epiphenomenal difficulty

• ■ The Modal Difficulty: a surplus of notation / information density which might impose dual meanings, contradictory meanings, or near-impossible executions that demand performative and interpretational decision making by the performer – a difficulty whose meaning ‘lies with the beholder’;^[15]
• ■ The Tactical Difficulty: diverging from Steiner’s definition, in contemporary violin repertoire I consider tactical difficulty not as any kind of deliberate withholding of information, but rather as a tactical choice in composing the piece to employ (extensively) one or more of the following features:
  
  • ◦ Polyrhythmic gestural complexity: overly complex rhythmic structures; overly complex rhythmic structures based on tuplets with different rhythm for each of the hands; double-, complex rhythmic structures based on tuplets, with double- or triple-nested tuplets, rhythmic pacing and tempo, changes, division and subdivision, all of which affects the physicality of engagement of the performer and has an effect on the outcome
  • ◦ Polyrhythmic accidental-sonic complexity: use of complex rhythmic structures (as above) with a complex system of nested repetitions; fast-paced changes between highly contrasted and distant sonic objects/motives
  • ◦ Altering the instrument: preparations, scordatura/alternative tunings of the instrument,^[16] alternative stringing of the instrument – drastically changing the physicality of the instrument, thus creating a disorienting environment that demands re-evaluation of the known relationship between the instrument and the performer and the sonic expectations
  • ◦ Non-fixed form: the piece is designed so as to generate its form only in the moment of the performance (yet without improvisation with the material)
  • ◦ Non-hierarchical approach to material, serving to equalise everything, and in all directions
  • ◦ Physical acrobatics in relation to holding the instrument during the performance. While minor changes to the position in which the bow or the violin itself is held are common, here I refer to drastic mid-performance changes occurring throughout the piece
• ■ The Unpremeditated Difficulty: unplanned withholding of information caused by an inherent difficulty in making an absolute notation of the sound
• ■ The Ontological Difficulty: finding both practical meanings of the notation (for example a diamond notehead represents a harmonic finger pressure) and the contextual meanings of and within the piece
• ■ The Practical Difficulty: this is a “practitioner’s” specific area and it covers the wide spectrum of ways in which to enact both practical and contextual meanings, separately and together, by finding the right techniques for playing (everything that is related to the gesture and movement of the player – one example would be finding the right type of left-hand finger pressure), as well as the demands on concentration when dealing with the notation of difficulties and near-impossibilities.

However, these classes of difficulty on their own are not the cause of “impossibility” when it comes to performance. This “impossibility” arises when multiple classes are present in a piece in relation to the complexity that is live performance, which influences and affects everything. While all of the pieces I initially gathered continue to represent various aspects of complexity, my focus narrowed to pieces with a very detailed and highly determined writing which ultimately, precisely due to this complexity, have sonically unfixed forms and demand a reconfiguration of a performer’s practice, wherein the interaction of all the agents of difficulty create an environment in which impossible situations arise (figure 1.1.2). These are pieces that demand of a performer to situate themselves between, on the one hand, the existing traditions and conventions that accompany difficult pieces from the canonical repertoire and, on the other, the position ‘of openness, of inquiry, of uncertainty, of discovery’^[17] that characterises experimental practice – to arrive at a position where transfer of knowledge from each side is welcome and where ‘speculation takes place by repeatedly creating the conditions for alternatives to appear, or not to appear, in and through the practice’.^[18]

Figure 1.1.2: Interaction of classes and sub-classes of difficulty

My examination of the relation between difficulties, material, and demands on a performer revealed a densely intertwined network of influences. I organised these difficulties and identified three challenge areas for the process of redefining my practice:

• 1. Challenge Area 1 – clarifying sonic identities;
• 2. Challenge Area 2 – physicality in general and physicality as material;
• 3. Challenge Area 3 – process and memory.

These challenges can be addressed in various ways. Even once “conquered”, each of these challenge areas can still be expanded, through new paths towards accomplishment, either for a similar result but through different/easier methods, or through finding alternative methods of execution that might bring improvement to the resulting technical execution, sounding results, or aesthetic expression. Challenges are a forever moving target, but this does not mean they are a futile quest: each conquest is one point of victory on the continuous road that is a performance practice. Even while identifying these challenge areas, it is in fact difficult to isolate only one element and deal with it completely independently. Each of these challenges becomes ‘an independent force, affecting other materials in unpredictable ways’,^[19] yet they are in an almost constant state of interaction. This is, after all, the reason why I see these pieces as complex, and not just complicated.^[20]

Figure 1.1.3: Web of difficulties

Evaluating the repertoire through this lens, example of which can be seen in figure 1.1.3 using three of the pieces, my focus pieces, my repertorium materia prima, became:^[21]

• ■ Dario Buccino: Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 (2019), for violin or viola
• ■ John Cage: Freeman Etudes (1977-80 & 1989-90), for solo violin, with a focus on Etude XVIII
• ■ Aaron Cassidy: The Crutch of Memory (2004), for indeterminate solo string instrument
• ■ Miika Hyytiäinen: Impossibilities for Violin (2019-2020)
• ■ Clara Iannotta: dead wasps in the jam-jar (i) (2014-2015), for solo violin
• ■ Evan Johnson: Wolke über Bäumen (2016), for violin (with gut strings and Baroque bow)
• ■ Liza Lim: The Su Song Star Map (2018), for solo violin
• ■ Rebecca Saunders: Hauch (2018), for solo violin

I also considered the ‘web of difficulties’ when it came to planning performances with my focus repertoire, and would present a selection of pieces with a specific concept, theme, which would focus and present pieces that are more representative for one of the areas.^[22]

Although John Cage’s Freeman Etudes is amongst the case studies in Chapter 4, because of the insights it provided, and due to the noticeable distance between the year of its creation and those of the other works listed above, I consider it a ‘mother piece’. As such, I address this work in detail in Chapter 1.2. [available in the full thesis]

• ^[1]Andrew Herscher, speaking at ‘International Lecture Series: Settler Colonial City Project’ (Royal College of Art, London, on 7 November 2020).
• ^[2]Klaus K. Hübler, ‘Expanding the String Technique’, Interface, 13 (1984), p.187.
• ^[3]Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, ‘Complex Music: An Attempt at a Definition’, pp.54-64.
• ^[4]Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), , p. 66.
• ^[5]The list of all the pieces that contributed to the research in addition to repertorium materia prima can be found in Appendix B. [See full Thesis [pdf available via University of Huddersfield's repository]
• ^[6]The call for scores was launched on 6 July 2018. By the closing date, 25 September, the panel received 86 applications from composers of a very diverse origin (31 countries). The call for scores can be retrieved via: http://temporalityoftheimpossible.com/happenings/call_for_scores_2018.html, and the announcement of the selected composers here: http://temporalityoftheimpossible.com/happenings/announcement_call_for_scores_2018.html
• ^[7]Rudolf Steiner, Truth and Knowledge (Weimar: Steiner Books, 1981), p. 26.
• ^[8]‘In fact we have to rethink the term “structure” fundamentally, since structure implies fixity (and conventionally, linearity). When infusing non-identity (non-fixity) on a structural level I not only aim to liquefy or destroy fixity but intend to capture a dynamically active structure – active in itself – a certain multidimensional heterogeneous continuity (continuous multiplicity), an interweaving, twisting and folding activity, where they all continuously “dovetail into one another”’. Bergson (1992), quoted in Einar Torfi Einarsson, ‘Desiring-Machines: In between Difference and Repetition, Performer and Conductor, Cyclones and Physicality, Structure and Notation’, Perspectives of New Music, 53.1 (2015), p.19.
• ^[9]Marc Couroux, ‘Evryali and the Exploding of the Interface: From Virtuosity to Anti-virtuosity and Beyond’, Contemporary Music Review, 21.2-3 (2002), pp.53-67.
• ^[10]George Steiner, ‘On Difficulty’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36.3 (1978), 263-276.
• ^[11]Steiner, p. 268.
• ^[12]Steiner, p. 270.
• ^[13]Steiner, p. 270.
• ^[14]Steiner, p. 273.
• ^[15]Steiner, p. 270.
• ^[16]I use both terms, scordatura and alternative tuning, interchangeably throughout the text.
• ^[17]Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p.1.
• ^[18]Annette Arlander, ‘Artistic Research as Speculative Practice’, Journal of Artistic Research (2017), at https://jar-online.net/en/artistic-research-speculative-practice [accessed 22 May 2023].
• ^[19]Einarsson, ‘Desiring-Machines’, p. 6.
• ^[20]Paul Cilliers makes a distinction between the notions of “complex” and “complicated” by stating that: ‘If a system – despite the fact that it may consist of a huge number of components – can be given a complete description in terms of its individual constituents, such a system is merely complicated. Things like jumbo jets or computers are complicated. In a complex system, on the other hand, the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be fully understood simply by analysing its components. Moreover, these relationships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organisation. This can result in novel features, usually referred to in terms of emergent properties. The brain, natural language and social systems are complex.’ Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.viii-ix.
• ^[21]Publisher and reference information can be found in Appendix A. [In full Thesis available via University of Huddersfield's repository]
• ^[22]See Appendix D. [In full Thesis available via University of Huddersfield's repository]

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