So the stroke sounds

So the stroke sounds Calligraphic gesture as a noise-articulating tool

Manuel Jesús Sánchez García Composition, MA Conservatorium van Amsterdam, 2015 Research advisor: Wim Henderickx Research coordinator: Michiel Schuijer

1

NON-PLAGIARISM STATEMENT

I declare 1. that I understand that plagiarism refers to representing somebody else’s words or ideas as one’s own; 2. that apart from properly referenced quotations, the enclosed text is fully my own work and contains no plagiarism; 3. that I have used no other sources or resources than those clearly referenced in my text; 4. that I have not submitted my text previously for any other degree or course.

Name: Manuel Jesús Sánchez García Place: Amsterdam Date: 15st of February 2015 Signature:

2

“Those who know me really well know that I think one of the most exquisitely sensual sounds in the world is the scratch of a quill scribing on vellum.�

(Ivonne Frindley)

3

Table of contents

Foreword ....................................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 9 Chapter 1: Calligraphy: the trace of a gesture ............................................................................ 13 Chapter 2: The importance of Gesture in music performance ................................................... 16 a.

Minimal gesture to put the instrument to work ............................................................. 16

b.

Performer’s awareness of his/her own gesture.............................................................. 17

c.

Deliberated use of gesture per se in performance ......................................................... 18

d.

Audience’s awareness of the performers’ gesture ......................................................... 19

Chapter 3: The gesture in calligraphy ......................................................................................... 21 Chapter 4: The sounds of calligraphy .......................................................................................... 24 Chapter 5: Variables of the calligraphic gesture in terms of sound production ......................... 29 a.

Materials ......................................................................................................................... 30

b.

Practice ............................................................................................................................ 34

c.

Amplification ................................................................................................................... 37

Chapter 6: Writing systems and their sonic implications............................................................ 40 The ultimate boundary: creating new sound-oriented alphabets .......................................... 43 Chapter 7: The calligrapher as a performer ................................................................................ 48 Chapter 8: Calligraphic gestures on traditional music instruments: implementation and mapping....................................................................................................................................... 55 Chapter 9: The challenge of notating calligraphy for musical purposes ..................................... 60 Chapter 10: collaborations derived from this research .............................................................. 66 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................. 70 Reference list:: ............................................................................................................................ 72 Appendix I: .................................................................................................................................. 73

4

Foreword

I find myself in what will probably be my last year as a formal student (at least for a long period of time). The completion of this last two years mean to me a very important switching point that will lead to a totally free relation with the artistic world, outside of the protective environment that Academia provides, and outside its implicit and explicit rules of duties, rights and behaviors. This feeling of freedom contrasts with that other of fear: some strange fear for that what is yet to come, for the unknown, for the foggy future in these days of economic crisis and apparent undervaluation of culture and the arts. It seems to be the time for us to say something with our own voice, but who will listen? Will they care? - too many questions at the edge of an otherwise promising horizon. The third important feeling, also In conflict with the desire for academic freedom, is that of a certain attachment to this institution. I got my foundational higher education in composition in a not-so-rewarding environment: certain styles had to be followed for each piece, with almost no opportunity of hearing our compositions live. I consider that only my year as an exchange student in Estonia saved me from total destruction at that time. Then I came here and I saw how, from the very early stages of preliminary Bachelor students, people are encouraged to find their own voices by doing what they feel they should do, coached by excellent supporting teachers who, instead of imposing their own criteria, nurture the goals of their students, teaching them by guiding. One half of myself wishes to go back in time and be enrolled not as a Master student, but in the first year of Bachelor. Things might have gone differently, then! I’m not a regretful person, anyway, and I’m happy of the way that brought me to this point.

5

For the ending work of this two-year period I have chosen to delve into a topic that I had chosen to study some time ago: that of merging two of my artistic selves: the composer and the calligrapher. Having that idea in mind, and trying to provide some useful material for those who will come after, here I present “So the stroke sounds: calligraphic gesture as a noisearticulating tool”. I hope it will be enjoyable to read.

A first matter to clear might be why a composer writes about calligraphy. Usually we have those side activities; those interests, somehow more than simple hobbies, that drive an important part of our lives and give us the pleasure of dedicating our time to something as important as our main vocation, but way less mandatory (which makes it even more enjoyable). In my case, after I took music as a most probable life-driving profession, guided by my love for history and material-oriented activities and by the serendipity that continuously surrounds us, I became interested in calligraphy. What started as a mere imitation of those ancient alphabets which I had believed were no longer possible to emulate (besides printing or literally “drawing” contours of letters as if they were pictures) ended up being a devoted passion: the historical, material and practical reasons behind each of those alphabets, as well as the more aesthetical side of an activity between the art and the craftwork delighted me almost obsessively for a while. It was as if a lost-thought paradise were suddenly found.

During years I took both my passions (music and calligraphy) side by side, totally separated from one another. At some point the idea of trying an uncertain marriage started to strike into my mind. That ended up in the development of my ensemble piece Ductus (2013) for onstage calligrapher, ensemble, live video and live electronics. If I thought that period of investigation would have a beginning and an end, it turned out it didn’t stop with that piece. Even if at times I think the connection is somehow a bit sterile, something inside still pushes me to retry once an once again exploring the dialectics among those activities in successive pieces that could, at some point, conform a consistent cycle in my catalogue. Notions such as contrast, void, refinement, precision and physicality are of primal interest. The present work deals with 6

something much more “materic�: the point where it all started, where the interest for this marriage first took place, and that has been developed through otherwise non-calligraphic musical pieces: the noise we produce when we trace any graphic sign. If you don’t believe me, take any piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Listen carefully, write something. Do you understand me now? Welcome.

7

PART I: CALLIGRAPHY AS A SOUNDING ACTIVITY

8

Introduction

The present work will explore some points of connection between two seemingly unrelated fields: calligraphy and music. The perspective will be that of a composer or sound artist taking the scratching sound of the pen on the paper as an inspiration and a tool to articulating noise in a simple, effective and efficient way. This approach is neither a common one, nor a totally new one. We will see, through the different chapters, how many composers have perceived as aesthetically interesting some of the various features that calligraphy provides, and, among those features, this very special and often dismissed sonic output. The main goal is to provide some basis for others to experiment further with this aspect of calligraphic performance oriented to sonic arts.

For me it was a changing experience not only to read about, to practice or watch calligraphy, but actually also to listen to calligraphy. Each basic stroke has a particular sound that contains, for the expert listener, information about the style, the hand, the quality of the paper, the tool used and the pressure and speed employed. This sound, quite rhythmical and barely surpassing silence became a very pleasant companion during my nights in front of the writing desk. It was only a matter of time that I used it to contribute to my music. It’s not unknown to me how noise has become, since the beginning of the 20th century, a widely used resource for composers and musicians of both “cult� and popular styles. From the Manifeste du futurisme released in 1909, through the static noise of the radios of John Cage to the distortion of the electric guitar in some styles of rock, the work of renowned composers such as Lachenmann or Sciarrino or the extensive use of noise (not noises) made by Peter Ablinger, this century-long

9

history of noise usage permeates music across styles and geography. Lately, the very term Noise has even come to designate a sort of musical genre by itself.

When facing this research I realized that the field of “Music and calligraphy” that I was tempted to assume was growing too vast and giving place to so many subordinate fields of investigation. Certainly, there was a need for some sort of concretion in order to make the workload fit with the feasibility and the goals of the research. The premise of trying to make the research useful for future possible readers brought me to the decision of focusing on the potential of calligraphy to endow noise with some, in my opinion, highly poetic and flexible qualities. I consider that calligraphic gesture does that, due to the reminiscences it carries of the human (and cultural) activity of writing, implying even the possibility of “hidden verbal meanings” in the noise stream. It also brings the often cold and mechanic world of noise to a new warm and human dimension. While many composers and theoreticians have already dealt in many ways with the meaning, role and aesthetics of noise in music, none of them, as far as I know, has approached the topic from a perspective such as this one we are about to discover; a perspective that puts the stress in the non-electronic production of highly flexible noise based on a daily activity that most human beings are able to perform (whether we look at it as writing or drawing).

If we are going to continuously deal with the concept of “noise”, though, it is mandatory for us to agree about what we are meaning by such a polysemous term. A lot of literature has been devoted to the concept of “noise”. I have left aside the work of Paul Hegarty (Noise/Music: a History, 2007) which deals with noise as a cultural aesthetic related to style and genre, involving movements such as glitch electronic, Japanese noise music or early 20th century. The reason to leave this volume aside was the fact that my interest in noise doesn’t lie in issues of genre, but in more materic and speculative aspects of the study of noise. Therefore, I have chosen to refer myself to Cassidy’s and Einbond’s Noise in and as music (2013). In it, many artists, composers and authors unveil, through essays and interviews, a myriad of conceptions 10

and usages related to this perhaps apparently simple phenomenon, ranging from highly poetic dissertations to more scientific-oriented approaches. There are in this volume several points of view involved, all of them belonging to noise-devoted people, instead of a single point of view treating the topic from the distance, as in the case of Hegarty, and was this aspect of multiplicity and poietic closeness what took my attention and my interest. The other book I have been using is that of Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art (Wishart 1996). A big part of it is dedicated to defend the sonic material that goes beyond the notions of stable and clearly defined pitch. Essentially, the negation of those two characteristics (therefore, the assertion of instability and non-clear pitch) will be the defining points of our conception of noise for this work. The “noise” that we will be dealing with, here, won’t depend on any sense of like/dislike or on being desired/undesired from the perspective of the listener (one of its most traditionally understood definitions). It will have nothing to do, either, with an informational overload or channel saturation. The sound-stream I refer in this work as “noise” carries characteristics such as a somehow wide band of close frequencies (hence a general lack of concrete pitch) and a subtle balance between a predictable stability in the long term and an unstable chaotic behavior in the short term. Therefore, they are its intrinsic qualities and not its perception-inspired descriptors what define it.

As we will elaborate on in subsequent chapters, calligraphy provides a trustworthy way to ensure that the desired noise is produced if we make it in-the-way-that-it-has- to-be-produced, keeping, when needed, the unpredictable deviations to a lesser level than many other ways of asking for noise production. In that sense this study deals to a certain extent with the possibilities of controlling what is ultimately otherwise uncontrollable: to add a certain boundary of activity (to limit the possibilities) around the randomness that is characteristic of noise, and often it’s most valued characteristic. “Control” will be, hereinafter, a quite common word, and we will see how this control becomes itself a variable at play both in notation and in performance of these calligraphic gestures we are dealing with (cf. chapters 5 and 9). Besides 11

this somehow deterministic aim, the application of calligraphic techniques in noise production pursues the goal of unleashing certain qualities of malleability, flexibility and sophistication out of that sound stream; qualities that are, otherwise, very restricted or too complicated and specific to attain. Plus, it provides the music with an extra layer of poetry and meaning, especially, but not only, in the case of using a text. Perhaps the whole point of it is that noise can be sophisticated, meaningful, enjoyable and beautiful, when approached with the right perspective.

Hopefully this work will offer new ideas and new tools to many composers, calligraphers and performers interested in the field of experimentation, noise, physical performance or interdisciplinary studies, as well as many other artists and, of course, any interested reader.

The organization of this work aims at readers with some musical and not necessarily calligraphic background. The work is mainly divided in two parts. Part one (chapters 1 to 6) will discuss some notions of the art of calligraphy, extending its dichotomy of gesture plus traces to the musical field, to end up with an exhaustive list of the parameters to be considered in experimenting with the sonic output of the calligraphic practice. Part two (chapters 7 to 10) deals with the practical and performative applications of the theory in part one, extending the field beyond the sound of “pen-and-paper� to the instrumental field, with a brief discussion on gesture notation. The last chapter, prior to the conclusions, is dedicated to the collaborations I have gone through during this period of study, and those ones at sight that are yet to come.

12

Chapter 1: Calligraphy: the trace of a gesture

The next question that might arise regarding this topic could be: “why are you talking about calligraphy and not just about handwriting? Indeed, when we often refer to “calligraphy” (in Elementary School, for example), we’re simply meaning handwriting. Calligraphy is much more: there is a consciousness involved, a special awareness about gesture and shape - an awareness that almost overcomes the meanings of the words at play. This is what Gerrit Noordzij refers to when defining calligraphy as “the art of handwriting realized as an end in itself, at service of the quality of the forms” (Noordzij 2009). In this way we can make the distinction between calligraphy and chirography (or just handwriting). This awareness of the forms seems to be documented in western history more or less together with the invention of the printing press by Guttenberg (in the East it is in 687 A.D. that the Shu pu, the most outstanding of the early treatises on Chinese Calligraphy, is written). It is in 1522 that Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi releases La Operina,1 the first treatise on the proper writing of a concrete style of calligraphy.2 We must suppose, though, that early styles would have been orally taught according to a model, since there is a certain consistency of uniformly changing scripts that can be observed over the centuries.

1

La Operina di Ludouico Vicentino, da imparare di scriuere littera cancellarescha can be seen online in the digitalized version from the Library of the Congress at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgith bin/ampage?collId=rbc3&fileName=rbc0001_2010rosen0807page.db (online the 14 of February 2015) 2

Regarding the word calligraphy itself, the first documented appearance goes even later. The historian Douglas Harper, in his Online Etimology Dictionary, tracks the earliest English usage of the word in the th 1610s, and Esteban Terreros gives us the earliest Spanish usage (caligrafía) as late as in the 18 century.

13

After Arrighi’s Operina, centuries came of calligraphic awareness, with notable contributions in the different European schools of calligraphy. After the hegemony of the styles coming from Spain (Juan de Icíar), the Netherlands (Simon de Vries and Jan van den Velde), France (Louis Barbedor, Louis Senault and Lucas Materot) and England (William Brooks, John Bland), the advance of the industrial revolution made the art of handwriting marry the new trend of posters and advertisement. The negative consequence of this was that there wasn’t an efficient instruction in calligraphy anymore, and the technical and theoretical knowledge about the writing were very inaccurate and, in some cases, according to later research, manifestly wrong. Since the “second calligraphic renovation” led by Edward Johnston in the early 20th century (and continued since then by many others in countries like United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Netherlands or Finland), artistic calligraphy has returned as a profession, having once again a place (though a modest one) in our society.

Trying to understand this relationship of writing with awareness gesture, we end up splitting two basic components in the calligraphic activity: the gesture itself and its trace, the visible mark left on the paper. Both are indispensable parts of the calligraphic experience, although much of the focus is often put upon the traces, disregarding the gesture in which that trace was contained. In this way, we can speak about the traces as the visible remaining part of the gesture: a gesture that exists before, during and after leaving such a trace fixed on the writing surface. For a good calligrapher, the proper education of the whole gesture is the safeguard to a proper letter (a proper trace).

This conceptual separation is, for me, a very important one, since it can be extended, by analogy, to the gesture in music performance and its traces, constituting a new and very fruitful point of view for musical organization. The trace of the musical performance could be said to embody a multiplicity of levels, connected by a generally temporal relationship: the score with its notation signifiers as traces from the composer’s idea, often conveying gestures; the sound as a perceptive trace driven by the gesture of the performer (evanescent in time, 14

but shortly fixed by resonance in the air and by memory in the listener), and, finally, the mental trace, the impression got by the listener or attendant, hopefully fixed in his or her longterm memory. This chain of traces can be further extended by the means of recording, the only actual material trace of the musical experience (although, for me, it’s the mental trace the one bearing the uttermost importance).

15

Chapter 2: The importance of Gesture in music performance

Even if, technically, it goes slightly out of our field of research, a brief discussion of gesture of the performing musician is relevant for the present discussion, in view of the dichotomy between gesture and trace as two distinct elements of the calligraphic experience. The topic of the trace of the musical and calligraphic gesture (specially the sonic one) will be discussed in later chapters. Thus, having made clear the importance of the gesture in a good calligraphic activity, we shall now approach the gestural content in the field of music performance. There have been several researches covering this topic, including the research of Óscar Santiso, a Masters alumnus of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (Santiso 2014). In his research, Santiso classifies the gestures by typologies, level of energy and instrument, devoting one chapter to the movement-related injuries. As we can see from this, a deep insight on the subject could lead us to greatly exceed the intended length of this monograph. It is possible, however, to bring to discussion certain aspects of the topic. For this purpose, I’ve limited the discussion here to some very concrete aspects of the topic that will show enough of the importance of gesture as appearing in four stages:

a. Minimal gesture to put the instrument to work The most evident and yet not totally obvious gesture is that amount of energy and movement needed in order to start the sound in an instrument. In this regard, some instruments need more energy than others, with a more or less complex set of muscle coordinated movements to induce the sound out of the instrument.

16

The primary task of the musician is, generally speaking, being able to control his or her body as precisely and efficiently as possible. This involves the minute exercise of some sets of movements that are almost unknown to the non-musician. Therefore, a number of gestures that are totally imperceptible, often “taken for granted” by the educated musician and simply unknown to the audience, have been practiced during years for so many hours as to make them instinctive. The exploration and manipulation of these very foundational gestures of the instrumental practice has been exploited by composers, given that the modification of them can lead to very interesting sonic results. This way of facing the instrumental performance has often received the name of “gestural music”, “gestural composition”, “parametrical composition”, etc. Because these “elementary” gestures and the importance of its control have been so consciously stressed in the early stages of instrumental practice, they constitute sometimes a difficult point for composers to solve, especially when dealing with players that are not willing or capable to unlearn the basis of their technique. The possibilities behind this frontier are, though, enormously rich for some musical purposes.

b. Performer’s awareness of his/her own gesture The very first lessons on an instrument are normally dedicated to body-posture and, as new matters start to be studied, a very strong emphasis is set in the awareness of the own gesture by the performer-to-be. This may well be one of the reasons why a musical education is helpful right after the early stages of childhood when the kid starts to take control of his/her body and being self-aware, in terms of motion.

Over time, by patient study and practice, all the gestures that needed lots of attention at the early stages of instrumental learning slowly become automatic, reflex-driven, as we mentioned above in section a. The awareness of those gestures starts to disappear, right when it is, at this point, even more important, I would say. It is actually the lack of awareness coming sometimes after years of practice that can cause different sorts of harm. The higher education of professional musicians is often a re-discovery of their own bodies from the very simple 17

single movements that constitute their instrumental or vocal practice. This return to the selfawareness is what allows the players to avoid injuries to come after many hours of practice and rehearsal. The awareness of the performing gesture starts, then, to be carried on to the next level: the deliberate use of it in a concert situation.

c. Deliberated use of gesture per se in performance Besides the strictly essential gestures needed for music performance, there are a myriad of gestures made by performers to convey different expressions or to attain different goals in any kind of context. Among those goals, we can recall the communication of expressive character (both for oneself and for the audience), the ease in articulating a passage (think of the pianist opening his or her right elbow before addressing a fast scale down) and the leading of a chamber group, to name only a few.

These are gestures that are deeply connected with the music, to the point that we may consider then as “essential” as the act of pressing the keys, blow the air in or throwing the bow down. It certainly depends on the players and their own tendencies to control more or less the movement of their bodies. Gesture per se has come to be a composed part of the music in some cases. The most evident ones coming to my mind are Inori, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, scored for large orchestra and two mime performers enacting religious-derived gestures, and the visual musis (specially the live visual music) of my colleague Flora Koene, where the sonic component of the performance is totally removed, giving place to a purely gestural performance that is often identified with either ballet or visual arts (serving the polemics at hand).3 This is, anyway, a first instance where either the performers themselves or the composers acknowledge the usage of the gesture beyond the “trace” (the sound). It is no longer just a necessary accidental companion, but a main character by its own right.

3

http://www.florakoene.nl/visual-music/index.html (online the 15th of February 2015)

18

d. Audience’s awareness of the performers’ gesture In the end, many of the gestures occurring in music (and we include here much more than classical music) are intended to have an effect on the audience. They are very much linked with everyday communicating gestures, and are instinctively understood by an audience, almost regardless of the verbal language they would be using. Things as simple as the atmosphere and attitude created by a solo jazz player heading down, eyes closed, or the facial expressions of an opera singer histrionically enacting the content of an aria. From the tiny differences and nuances marked by the face muscles in performance to the accents that are present in the movements, it seems (mostly in expressive music practices such as those of Romantic players or, quite often, early music performances) that the performer has the possibility to guide, first him or herself, and, then, the audience, through the musical discourse.

“Theatricality” is a term that is often used when gestures assume importance over the “sounding” part of the music. Such gestures include faking a performance, or mocking a strong attack that actually turns out to be a soft one. The audience seems to respond in a very heterogeneous way: some of them appreciate an extra vehicle of expression, while some others state to be “distracted” by the visual aspects of the performance. In general, though, it seems to be a very fruitful resource (and a powerful one when it gains a sort of ritual element, such as in certain pieces of Hosokawa to be later on recalled).

Besides all this “anatomical” or body approach, there have been many authors, composers and theoreticians who have discussed the concept of “musical gesture” as well, referring to musical material rather than to physical body movement and therefore having, in principle, little to do strictly with our currently discussed topic of performers’ gesture. Among others, we can recall the names of Adorno, Ferneyhough, Xenakis, Smalley or Wishart. Some aspects of their study, though, may be useful in order to define what we understand here by such a term. The most clear and concise definition I have come to find is that one of Trevor Wishart when he states 19

that “Gesture is essentially and articulation of the continuum” (Wishart 1996, p.17). This definition is at the same time clear and open enough to be applied to both the musical and the calligraphic domain. According to Hèctor Parra, the gesture has a vectorial quality that is not present in other conceptions of musical material. This relates to the notion of “physicality” that is often coupled with that of gesture in different authors. One composer who is well known for the “physicality” of his music is Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). Besides his approach and discussion of “musical gesture” in his Notes sur un geste electronique, his compositions are often regarded as very much gesture-driven (Iliescu 2005) (van Maas 2005). Perhaps the composer who has made the most extensive use of the term “gesture” in his writings is Brian Ferneyhough. The term is used to determine a sort of dynamic component, energy-driven and carrying some sort of meaning or affective content, running in his theoretical writings parallel to the concept of the “figure”. In any case we can agree with Lois Fitch when he considers Ferneyhough a “post-gestual” composer (Fitch 2005), going beyond the intentionality towards the physical movement of the performer. Inspite of that assertion, however, we must admit that, as with many other composers, there is in the music of both Xenakis and Ferneyhough a kind of “physical choreography” that drives to a big extent the musical drama, its expression and realization in front of the eyes of the audience.

20

Chapter 3: The gesture in calligraphy

Having already discussed the role of gesture in musical performance and musical thinking, let’s now return closer to the main subject of our work. Again, in this case the “gesture” can be approached from an anatomical point of view or talking about it as something else. Compared with the musician’s gesture, those of the calligrapher have no public-performative role, at least in our Western culture .4 No audience is ever supposed to watch and appreciate the gestural content of the calligraphic practice: it’s an inward aspect of the profession; a way (the best way, if not the only one) to obtain high-quality graphic results. Let’s take, therefore, a closer look at this non-performative mode of motion.

In our daily handwriting, we tend to use a constant gesture configuration: depending on the size of the letters, we normally shape our rather small-sized writing with gentle and precise finger and wrist movements. Our shoulder, and occasionally our elbow, has the role of following the writing line. The calligrapher, however, often employs a wide variety of limb combinations in order to obtain the intended results: the need for a constant pen-edge angle with the scripture line in most of the western writing styles makes necessary for the calligraphy to drive every single letter shaping movement from the shoulder. This shoulderdriven gesture will be much more needed as the letter size increases. The fingers have here normally a more complex role, controlling the changes in the nib’s angle by rotating the tool.

In some oriental calligraphic styles, though, the fingers and wrist have almost no movement at

4

In Japan we can find public calligraphy performances constituting a sort of team sport, where their set of gestures is definitely oriented to be watched by an audience.

21

all, keeping the verticality of the brush while the shoulder and elbow make the whole work.

These two contrasting examples show, without any further need of reviewing all the known calligraphic styles, how the calligrapher is fully aware of his/her body movements when approaching the practice of his/her art. For now, I think it’s worth realizing how close calligraphers and musicians are related in this aspect: in fact, we see now how the calligraphers, just as much as the musicians, are “athletes of the little muscles”. Precision and control (even controlling how much precision) make possible a quality result, even for the most avant-garde and abstract calligraphic styles.

Besides this purely anatomical approach to the notion of calligraphic gesture, we can go on and expand the meaning of these terms. If we go back to Wishart’s definition of gesture as an articulation of the continuum, we may well derive that, in calligraphy, a gesture might be the articulation of a line, for example, or of a movement. We can consider each of the uninterrupted strokes forming a letter as a “gesture”. This assertion doesn’t try to distinguish gestures on the basis of their visible trace, but of the movements of the performing “hand” and its articulation. We could recognize these gestures by the visible trace on the paper or, in certain obvious cases, recognize parameters of those gestures by the sonic components of it (what can allow us to distinguish, sonically, between a fast and a slow calligraphic stroke). The difficulty of this aural recognition lies in the high number of variables that can influence one single parameter of the sonic trace of a calligraphic gesture. These matters of discussion shall be further explored in the next chapter of this work.

In the special case of cursive scripts, where every word becomes a single “stroke”, so to speak, each of the inner impulses of that strokes may be called a “gesture” (perhaps a “sub-gesture” or a “gesture-component impulse”). There are, possibly due to our education or to our natural motion patterns, certain uncontrolled and unplanned responses or tendencies when we draw certain shapes, including the strokes that constitute a character or a letter. Things like little pulls that accent each of the “downbeats” of a letter “m”, for example. Those are, to me, like 22

micro-gestures that happen naturally in our daily handwriting. Part of the goal of the calligrapher is being able to control those tendencies in order to control when and when not to articulate the continuum of stroke and line in his or her own calligraphic composition, as well as drive them with all the energy when it comes to more “gestural” and abstract styles of artcalligraphy. All these mentioned “tendencies” might help us to predict the sonic output of some basic calligraphic gestures.

23

Chapter 4: The sounds of calligraphy

Once reviewed the different approach of musicians and calligraphers regarding gesture, we have landed to the key point of this work. The first assertion is as simple and obvious as saying that the very act of writing by hand creates, by rubbing, a very subtle sound stream.

When one pays attention to this stream, it is easy to discover some sort of singularity, midway between repetition and chaotic unpredictability. This hypnotizing sound supposes a very familiar sonic-gestalt to those who have been used to long periods of lonely handwriting. It is, though a normally ignored “background noise”, and, therefore, the appreciation or it comes only after a shift into awareness that happens often casually. Once it happens, the relationship built is a very particular one. One starts to recognize patterns in sound that go harmonically with the movement of the pen, as two people breathing in synchrony. Gesture, trace and sonic output become therefore deeply related, and this is the point where we can start taking [musical] advantage of it. In my case, the process happened following this sequence: -

Writing

-

Awareness of gesture – calligraphy

-

Awareness of sound

-

Awareness of gesture as sound-shaper

After that fourth stage, I already arrived to the starting point of a shift in my musical language; one that would take me to very different directions than the ones I had been exploring. This

24

has lead me, indeed, to a sort of parallel line of music making, often supporting or contrasting with my more “pitch oriented” music, and characterized by a much more radical, gestural and experimental approach.

At this point it may be interesting to have a brief break to review what other composers have done in this area. If, at first, I thought I had come with a very new idea (naïve me), after some research I have to acknowledge that there has been a myriad of approaches connecting, in one way or another, letter/writing /calligraphy/ gesture/rubbing and music. I will obviate here, for practical reasons, authors or pieces that merely use the “rubbing” technique in the percussion; a fairly common one since many years and not only in the field of contemporary-classical music. I often divide the composers taking calligraphy as a source of inspiration in two main groups: those who claim to be influenced by it in their titles and/or concepts, and those ones in whose pieces one can infer some clear involvement with the abovementioned elements (letter, writing, calligraphy, gesture, rubbing). In the first group we can place, for example, the Spanish composer José M. Sánchez-Verdú, who, in his many interviews and program notes, mentions the term “calligraphy” as related to ornamentation, especially thinking on Islamic calligraphy. This composer, even if dedicated an opera to the act and history of writing (Gramma) does not present a clear and consistent knowledge or usage of calligraphy or handwriting in his pieces. Other occurrences in this first group are Hans Zender (Kalligraphie IV), Toru (and etc._...) Takemitsu (Le son calligraphié),. R.Vali (Calligraphy), C.Camarero (Caligrafías) et al. I won’t stop here since the concept of calligraphy as present in composed music is not the main subject of this work.

Concerning the second group, we find composers who have treated truly calligraphic notions in their pieces. Among them, we can mention H. Lachenmann, especially in pieces like Pression, Gran Torso or Schreiben. This last one, whose title is translated as “Writing”, Lachenmann treats the energy and sonic outcome of writing as the main material. In a personal conversation I had with the composer Toshio Hosokawa, who is a close friend of 25

Lachenmann, he mentioned the fact that the title, Schreiben, was also taken, as an inspiration, acknowledging the overlapping of the words “schrei” (cry) and “reiben” (rubbing, see Figure 1), a fact easy to grasp, once you know it, when listening to the piece.

Figure 1

Hosokawa, himself, has a strong calligraphic inspiration that he sets to work in terms of gesture and silence, as in his piece Sen VI, where the physical gesture of the percussionist is as important as the sound produced. His awareness of void, gesture-and-trace relationship and calligraphic energy have its roots on his knowledge of traditional Japanese culture. Matthew Kaner, in his pieces Calligraphic Study and The Calligrapher’s Manuscript, takes the idea of a base text full of ornamentation in order to make variations on basic melodies.

Two special approaches are the ones taken by the American composers James Tenney and Alvin Lucier. This last one, in his piece Letters, translates the strokes of a basic message into sonic shapes. His mapping (of vertical axis to pitch and horizontal axis to time) results, in my opinion, in a very reductionist approach and a very little appealing piece. James Tenney, in his orchestral pieces Available Forms II, alternates pitch-based passages with some sort of graphic gestures to be freely interpreted by the performers, constituting part of the basis of the “open form” of this piece (see Figure 2).

26

Figure 2

Further pieces, by Dmitri Kourliandski, and Alastair Zaldua, will be later recalled in chapter 8 regarding the implementation of calligraphic gestures to traditional instruments. Besides this review, I have found, while researching on the topic, that, perhaps due to a certain mental predisposition, there are pieces that recall some sort of “calligraphic perception” for me. I couldn’t describe this perception better than saying that they awaken in me the “energetic feeling” of writing, perhaps a slow-paced gothica rotunda, perhaps a nervous lettre bâtarde.

Sometimes it’s even impossible to explain, but I feel myself relocated in that sort of “time-outof-time” that I often experience when practicing calligraphy. Pieces in this context would be,

27

for example, Fragmente der Liebe by Walter Zimmermann or practically anything from Morton Feldman.

As we can realize, different approaches have taken the idea of calligraphy into a musical domain. In my approach to noise-through-calligraphy, this is not different, just somehow inversed (taking musical ideas such as noise production and control to the calligraphic domain). In the next chapter we will go through the different aspects to be taken into account in order to be able to control how our writing, through gesture-awareness, becomes sound.

28

Chapter 5: Variables of the calligraphic gesture in terms of sound production

As has been stated already, the sonic qualities of the handwriting stream are particular ones, related to noise in regard of inharmonicity and instability. To be precise, there are many variables that might transform that noise stream to exploit its plasticity and expression potential. Some of the variables that we are about to list are more likely to be planned in the long spam of the piece, since they imply changes that might be quite time-consuming. Some others are much more dynamically possible to be transformed moment-by-moment in the shorter spam. The original intent for this chapter was to provide the reader with an extensive and minute list of concrete parameters that get affected by the alteration of these variables, accompanied by sound samples of the performance of each of the variables alone and grouped, and sonogram images of those samples. The experiences during the preparation of the research and the planning of time have shown how this detailed approached was beyond the feasibility of this study: the number options inside the scope of each variable was growing exponentially as we were going deeper in the study; the recording process was showing itself as more and more time consuming, and the sonogram images didn’t provide with any relevant information in most of the cases. Therefore, we provide instead with an extensive list of variables set of general description and advises concerning each of them. The view is, even so, wide and detailed enough as to give enough insight to the potential possibilities of the calligraphy and calligraphy-inspired performance practices for producing varied, rich and dynamic sonic results.

29

First of all, let’s approach how the sound of calligraphy is actually made. I invite all of you to an imaginary travel: let’s become all together just one millimeter tall and let’s walk over a surface of a sheet of paper being just written. What we will see, basically, is how a big metallic or wooden or plastic-like edge is scratching over a quite irregular and granulous surface of fibers.

The position of the tool and the characteristics of the movement cause the qualities of the scratch, which causes a myriad of vibrations that are translated as sound by our ears and brain.

The randomness of the fiber disposition causes the inharmonic quality of the sound produced.

This is slightly amplified through, I guess, the surface of the paper acting like the sounding membrane of a loudspeaker.

Changing any of the mentioned parameters (or some others that we didn’t mention yet) will affect the way that our calligraphy actually sounds. The list below has been made considering three aspects of the calligraphic sound production: material, practice and amplification.

a. Materials The supporting surface: This aspect, perhaps seemingly an unimportant one, comes to be of a great importance in several factors: on one hand, its hardness or softness will determine the comfort feeling when writing on the paper. It will also determine how clear the sounds are transmitted, if we are amplifying the noise stream through it. A harder material will imply a clearer and sharper attack. Softer materials will blurry a little the general sound. Besides this, if we are actually taking this surface and not the paper as a contact surface for the microphone, we must be sure that it vibrates properly and that it diffuses the vibrations caused by the pen as much as possible over its surface. For this reasons and after many experiments, I’ve come to use a grained and hard watercolor paper as supporting surface. Framed in wood to add strength and make it easier to handle, this solution provides all what is needed to amplify the sound

30

happening over the real written paper placed on it, thanks to both its thinness, hardness and grain. Further experiments with ceramic and glass materials will have to be performed.

Paper quality: here we can mention two main features of the paper: grain and thickness. The grain of paper will affect the general frequency response, being generally the more grained the paper, the lower the frequency band. More grained papers will be easier to amplify, as well, since the perturbations caused by the friction with the tool will be bigger. The thickness of the paper (measured in grams per square meter) together with the supporting surface will alter, specially, the ease of amplification (by contact microphone) of all the writing happening onto it. Thin paper is often better amplified from the supporting surface, while thick paper is better amplified from its own surface.

Paper size: as with a drum skin, in equal conditions of tightness, the bigger the sheet, the lower the sound.

The writing tool: Pointed brush: the pointed brush is the standard graphic tool in many Asian traditions, as well as in Ancient Egypt. It provides contrast between thin and thick strokes by means of pressure and direction. The acoustics of the brush are, I must admit, the least familiar to me. The nature of their functioning, much softer in general than the pens’ one, makes its amplification harder to control. I have speculated about the idea of having a small microphone at the core of the brush hairs, instead of amplifying it from the paper, but I haven’t yet made any test about it. It certainly can provide smoother soundscapes, with an always longer attack time, in terms of dynamic envelope of the sound. Different flexibilities and thickness of the brush will provide slightly different sounding characteristics, being the level of moisture another sound-defining parameter, especially when taken to extremes.

Flat-edge nib: the flat-edge nib is the standard tool for calligraphy in the Western world since Antiquity until the XVIII century, when it shares the field with the expansion nib. It provides the

31

contrast between thin and thick strokes through changing the direction of the stroke while keeping constant the angle between the edge and the horizontal writing line – reason why Noordzij calles it “translation” pen (“translation” here bearing its meaning as geometrical function that moves every point a constant distance in a specified direction). It provides faster response than the brush in terms of both visual and sonic trace. The changes in thickness are accompanied by a change in sound, both depending on the contact surface at play, and therefore on how much resistance does the pen presents to the movement. Depending on the material we have different sorts of flat-edge pens, each one bringing its own characteristics.

Feather (quill pen): its plastic-like quality makes it highly flexible, very apt to unconventional pen movements that change the contact surface from the full edge to the thin ends. Because of its thin walls and its high flexibility that makes its point, at a microscopic level, “jump” more often between the grains and fibers of the paper, he overall quality of the sound is very noisy, with a very clear and recognizable “scraping”. In most of the cases (excluding some very curated – and therefore hard – exemplars) it doesn’t endure big amounts of pressure, cracking or folding down in those cases.

Reed (calame): it vibrates with a much smoother sound and feeling, something between the brush and the metallic edge-nib. Generally thicker than the quill pen, it endures bigger pressures, although, especially being wet for a long time, the point may lose its edge with relative ease. The overall timbral quality is somehow darker than the quill pen.

Metallic nibs: the metallic nibs are, in many aspects, a middle point between reed pens and quillpens. The possibilities for thinness are bigger, being able to have the strength of a reed pen with the delicate stroke quality of the quill, and with no limits in what concerns width. The sound made is, equally, halfway between the dark smoothness of the reed and the sparkling quality of the feathers, adding the expectable high-harmonics metallic quality to the mix. It endures even bigger pressures than the feather and the reed, and, depending on the material, it might crack or fold under big amounts of pressure.

32

Sponge nibs: sponge nibs are better suited for big sizes of letters, since the edge is almost never able to be thinned enough as to write small-size letters with a good calligraphic quality.

The sound provided is very stable in timbre, recalling the sound of felt-tipped markers. The resistance to pressure is much smaller than in any other tool, but the flexibility provided instead can be of great interest for some special features.

Expansion nib: the expansion nib (figure 4) is a thin-point pen having its tip divided by a very thin indent that opens when some pressure is applied to the pen. They are usually metallic, although some estrange examples are made out of feathers (quill pens) having in those case, generally, a less sharpen point. The thinness of the writing point (especially in really sharp models) makes the sound to be even more noisy that that of the quill pen. The continuous usage of pressure in its writing technique can provide extra elements of accent and “scraping” sounds. This kind of pen, depending specially on the angle of the tool respect to the paper, is at the same time really sensitive and really enduring to big amounts of pressure.

Thin point tool without expansion: Each other tool with a thin point and unable to broaden the stroke by expansion will sound in one way or another depending on other factors such as direction, gesture applied, etc… Ballpoint pens, pencils, chalk and markers have each one its personal timbral qualities that all of us recognize pretty well. Equally, any other tool that we can imagine will sound, generally and timbre-wise, according to its material.

Round point tool: semi-spherical shapes of pen are not common, but could constitute a point of technique-expansion for both the calligrapher and the sound artist. The roundness of the tool would make much smaller the difference between “pulling” gestures and “pushing gestures” (see below, at the end of the chapter). Depending of the material, we could have, for example, soft rubber balls that will react in a very sensitive way to the pressure, and that will eventually stick slightly to the paper, providing it with some extra texture by means of tearing.

Wooden and crystal balls had been used by Arabic scribes to smooth the paper. They could go

33

further with this and develop a change in the surface of papers that will affect how the piece goes on afterwards.

Tool size: In general terms, regarding sound, tool size will determine the amount of contact surface, with the consequent changes in volume and density (see below). This will be of major importance in what concerns to bigger or smaller flat-edge pens, given that thin point pens, with or without expansion, are supposed to keep a writing point “as thin as possible”, regardless of their total size.

b. Practice Grabbing zone of the tool: Even if this point doesn’t change the timbral characteristics of the sound by itself, it is very much related to the sense of control or loose of control from what we’re writing and, therefore, sounding like. Imagine the difference between writing with a twenty centimeter pen and writing with an eighty centimeter pen, grabbing both by the zone that is further from the paper. That is the point. With a longer holder, the movement become less controllable as its size gets multiplied, and the point of the tool tends to abandon contact with the paper, resulting in a very faint, non-continuous and somehow nervous outcome.

Tightness in grabbing the tool: The same as the previous variable, it relates to the amount of control that we apply both to the sonic and visual outcome. In this case we are not multiplying the amplitude of our movements, but rather increasing their flexibility, resulting in a somehow hyper-looseness, drunk like movements and strokes Position of the tool regarding the paper: Different zones of the paper might be differently posed on the supporting surface or differently curved (even slightly). Different zones, anyway, will have different distances to the 34

edges of the paper (the edge of the main vibrating matter). Our own awareness of being writing towards the center or the borders of the paper will affect, in a perhaps not-soconscious way, other parameters of our writing. All that will result in a different sort of resonance and frequency response of the strokes.

Contact surface of the tool to the paper: The contact surface determines how many grains are passing under the tool when scratching the paper surface. Therefore, it controls the spectral density and the volume of the sound.

Especially with flat-edge nibs, the contact surface can change dynamically while writing, going from using the whole edge to using only one of the corners of the pen, and therefore causing a decrease in both volume and number of frequencies at play.

Angle of the nib related to the writing line: The differences in nib angle will relate to both the direction of the stroke and the contact surface. One same text in one same script will look and will sound different when employing different pen-angles, even keeping, by means of gestural content, the same sort of articulation.

Angle of the tool related to the paper surface: If, keeping the contact surface of the pen to the paper, we vary the angle between these two (until having the pen perpendicular to the supporting surface and beyond) we will see how the motion of the pen starts to sound “sharper”. This is due to the fact that, when the angle is, as usual, smaller in our side and bigger in all other directions, the edge of the pen receives mechanical support by the whole body of the tool when being moved, regardless of the direction. If the pen is perpendicular to the paper, the forces we’re applying downwards and horizontally are not balanced, and therefore the quality of the “scratch” changes, making, to have an idea,

Figure 3

35

a metallic nib sound like a quill pen (See Figure 3).

Direction of the stroke: Depending of the type of tool, the alteration of the direction of the stroke will condition the amount of contact surface from the pen to the paper, or the pressure applied. In flat-edge nibs, for example, it will determine whether the pen is opposing the flat side or the thin side to the movement along the paper. That will determine the output in terms of sound volume and frequency.

Pulling and pushing the tool: As we will explain later, there are some movements that are more easy-going than others.

Given the natural inclination of the pen towards our arm (and against the paper) when we hold it, the gestures that imply “pulling” the pen (that is, going downwards or from left to right for right-handed people) are smoother that those ones that imply “pushing” the pen (going upwards or from right to left for right-handed people). That difference, especially when playing together with the grain of the paper or the angle of the tool respect to the supporting surface, can provide us with two contrasting feelings, not very different than the couple upbow and downbow in string instruments or inhalation and exhalation.

Speed when writing: The speed in the writing, besides expressing a certain affect or energy, affects the frequency behavior of the calligraphic noise. It is very easy to understand when we think that the faster we move the pen, the more fibers per time-unit are passing under its point. Therefore, a higher writing speed will Pressure when writing: The pressure of the writing is determined to a big extent by the general usages of the human body and the concrete needs of each script. Pressing the pen on one hand makes difficult for the pen to move fast, and therefore reduces drastically the frequency. On the other hand, 36

depending on the material of the pen, it increases the spectral saturation of the sound, adding as well an extra level of grain if the pen is barely moving, but in small leaps. Features such as very light pressure and extreme pressure (to the point of cracking the pen) can be highly effective and expressive in live performance.

Timing: This variable extends the notion of “speed” to a longer spam of text, adapting it to a general sense of rhythm. The equivalence with traditional music would be that of tempo.

Size of the stroke: In general, bigger strokes are made with wider movements from the shoulder and elbow. They gain in “lyricism”, freedom, so to say, compared with the more detailed and strict small strokes.

For other aspects of the calligraphic practice that might affect the sonic result, (script characteristics and continuity-discontinuity of the writing) see chapter 6.

c. Amplification Type of microphone: In study situations it might be wanted to use a highly directional microphone that will capture the contextual sounds of the writing act; something that won’t record only what is happening “in the paper”, but “on the paper” and around. However, and specially in live situations, this kind of microphone will capture alien and perhaps unwanted sounds, such as breath, ambient noise or the activity of other eventual players and people around. The level of amplification required to hear the calligraphic noise is a pretty high one, and any external sound would be amplified as well. The most common solution is using a contact microphone attached to either the paper of the supporting surface. It provides the amplification needed, losing a minimum of external noises (the important ones are actually transmitted by the surface and the body of

37

the paper and the supporting surface) and preventing from accidentally amplifying our colleagues.

Distance to the microphone: In both cases of using directional or contact microphones, the distance to the real happening calligraphy is essential. That is one of the problems of using a single contact microphone: it is quite sensitive to the changes in distance between the writing point and the area contacted by the microphone. Perhaps a solution would be to use several contact microphones, mixed to get an equal level of signal all through the paper.

My recommendation to work with all these variables is to pick one of them at a time, maximum two, and consciously experiment with them. In this way we won’t be overwhelmed by the myriad of possibilities and potentials of the list. By this kind of work we will learn which variables are we more comfortable with, which of them interest us the most, and which of them don’t really offer us what we are after in performance. As we had anticipated in Chapter 3 concerning calligrapher’s gesture, there are some inherent tendencies in the human anatomy that affect the way we articulate our writing and our strokes. As it will be clear to anyone, out arm weights, and its tendency is to go down. A tendency that we control thanks to the muscles attached to the arm, shoulders and thorax. It is not different than parking our car uphill: the motor of our car, via acceleration prevents our car to fall down, and the easiest way to drive downwards is accelerating less. In that way, the natural tendency of our arm is to write downwards. Another easy to perform experiment to understand this is drawing in continuous circular motion and listen to the sound: some sections of the gesture (generally those going downwards) sound more accented than others. That’s part of the reasons why the “pulling” strokes are easier to perform than the “pushing ones”, for example, or why there is generally more pressure in the downward strokes. In general, the articulation of calligraphy is highly defined by these “built-in” characteristics. Handling the pen in an unusual manner (so that, for example, the nib is pointing to us, making the “pulls” “pushes” and vice versa), or 38

trying to write letters upside-down are some ways of exploring these boundaries in a conscious manner, one that can lead to very interesting conclusions.

39

Chapter 6: Writing systems and their sonic implications

If we stick to the variables concerning only the letter shape, we can describe writing systems in terms of their sonic implications, that is, when letters are actually being written. We will speak here indistinctly about “writing system”, “alphabet” and “script”, knowing, though, that those words don’t mean, technically, the same. We will cope with these inaccuracies for the sake of our understanding, given that this is not the main topic of the work. There are, in truth, several kinds of writing systems: logographic, syllabic or alphabetic: all of them serve to symbolically represent expressible language elements.

For the sake of variety and inclusion, we would have included in this study an account of alphabets from all possible writing cultures along history. On the other hand, practical reasons push us to make it brief and concise. In fact, when diving into the different scripts around the world, we see that most of them have such a variety of styles that, for our purpose, it’s much more efficient to make the grouping by style than by script. A square-stroke Latin script will sound much closer to a square-stroke Arabic script than to a round-stroke Latin script, to put an example. Therefore, and, again, for the pure convenience of practicality, we will see all the possible examples as related to a standard English-Latin alphabet.

The study of the sounding characteristics of the scripts is intuitively understandable, since they are very much present in the way we draw, in general. It is not necessary to show more than two or three script examples to get an overview of how these rules work in general terms. To start with, Gerrit Noordzij distinguishes two different two-fold divisions of the scripts: on one hand, fluent versus interrupted scripts (depending on how each letter is made in a single stroke

40

or by accumulating several of them yuxtaposed). On the other, translation scripts versus expansion scripts (depending on whether the pen is flat-edged and just needs to be moved around or the pen is pointed, needing the pressure of the tool to get that appreciate reality of calligraphy as it is the contrast between the thin and the thick segments of the strokes). The first division will clearly affect the sonic perception of a text being written, since it will differentiate sonic streams with continuous interruption with more fluent scripts that stop the contact between the pen and paper just to separate words. Interrupted scripts are, for example, the early gothic, uncial and rustic, to name some of them. Fluent scripts are the cursive ones, such as the so called English or Copperplate, the cancellaresca or the gothique batarde. The second division is a more subtle one. The ”expansion” pen works by pressure, and therefore it marks the rhythm and the weigh of the letter in a very special way. The flatedge pen doesn’t really need to apply more or less pressure to the pen than what is naturally decided by our hands. The rules regarding shape are very easy to understand, and it relates as well with how fluent or articulated will a line of text be. We have chosen three contrasting scripts (see Table 1, below).

Script

Characteristics

Sounding effects

Uncial

Interrupted stroke;

Highly regular, coming from

translation tool, round

the fact that most of the

shapes.

strokes have a very similar round shape, without dealing so much with corners.

Cancellaresca

Fluent, non interrupted

Highly accentuated patterns,

stroke; translation tool,

derived from the existence of

energic motion, rounded

many close corners and

shapes.

articulation points .

41

Batarde

Fluent, non interrupted

In practice, a script that is full

strokes; translation-driven

of edges and clearly defined

outil, many edges.

corners feels, even if being fluent, as if being based in interrupted sounds.

(Table 1)

We can see basically how the smoothness in the shape of a letter will lead to certain smoothness in sound/noise. It is, in fact, such a simple and intuitive comparison, that it shouldn’t need a theoretical explanation at all (smooth gestures produce smooth sounds; sharp gestures produce non smooth acoustic results). It makes possible, on the other hand, for the inexperienced calligrapher to produce consistent articulated noise. Another important notion for an alphabet to sound in one way or another is the level of consistency, in terms of style, of an alphabet. The measure of this is attainable by counting the maximum of reduction that an alphabet can hold in order to reduce their components to the most basic strokes, and from there being able to rebuild the same alphabet again. The best-known gothic script or “textura quadrata”, for example, is almost only based on the stroke forming a dot-less “i”.

Almost every stroke in that script can be retraced to the shape of that vertical stroke with a rhomboid figure at its top and bottom ends.

A question arises: if we are supposed to be able to infer, by watching the traces, the sonic outcome, is it then possible to take the opposite direction, that is, to listen to the sonic outcome in order to guess which letter shape has produced that sound while being written?

The question is to me of little interest for my artistic goals, and therefore I haven’t personally tried the experiment in a serious way. It would have involved the recording of several sets of strokes and characters varying every one of the aforementioned variables and their 42

combinations, with the subsequent survey of several groups of people, with and without calligraphic education, in a long, slow and consuming process. Whilst this was out of my scope and resources, I have, however, compared the outputs of small sets of characters on my own.

By these minimal tests I’m willing to say that only a very trained ear would be able to distinguish letter shapes just by listening to their sonic outcome, given that the subject knows beforehand the identity of some of the variables, like the style, the quality of the tool and the paper, or maybe the language. As it was mentioned near the end of chapter 3, the compound condition of the noise produced by calligraphy makes hard for the human ear to distinguish with certainty more than some separate parameters of the gesture causing that sound. Like the process of learning a new language, where an important task consists in being able to “chop” the oral discourse by recognizing words and then making connections between them, the recognition of a chain of written words comes after the herculean challenge of recognizing the possible conforming strokes and making the connections. The added difficulty is the multiplicity not only of languages, but even of calligraphic styles, “hands”, and all the aforementioned variants of that stream of sound. It is therefore apparent that just the task of mentally translating a stream of sounding strokes into their separate letters is quite an odyssey on its own.

The ultimate boundary: creating new sound-oriented alphabets

We already know the factors that shape the sonic outcome of a calligraphic gesture, or a set of them. Why not, instead of adapting to the already existing alphabets and styles, creating a “customized” writing system (alphabet) to provide us with the sonic qualities that we need for a particular case? Our own [calli]graphic system specifically intended to serve as a sound-art tool. The history of scripts combines the adoption and adaptation of other cultures’ alphabets as well as the invention of new ones (the Cyrillic alphabet, created for the Slavic languages 43

from uncial Greek and Glagolitic scripts). If, in chapter 1, we mentioned the earliest treatise on western writing (La Operina), we must now recall, regarding the invention of alphabets, another treatise by a contemporary of Degli Arrighi, Giovanni Battista Palatino, entitled Libro nuovo d’imparare a scrivere (…) con un breve et utile trattato de le cifre. As Lina Bolzoni states in The Gallery of Memory: “From its very title it is clear that Palatino’s book associates calligraphy with ciphers. This association had already become a tradition, and it was indicative of the variety of the ideas that were coalescing around the letters of the alphabet. The writing models intended to be used for the different scripts were intertwined with ancient models (or, in some cases, pseudo-antique ones) and with exotic, imaginary alphabets. The expansion of the known world and new antiquarian studies stimulated not only better documentation of the various types of alphabets but also wonderful games of variation and invention. (Bolzoni, p.88) As we see, since the beginnings of what we could call the first “calligraphic era” there was a tendency to invent new alphabets to fulfil different requirements, like, in the case of the text above, the transmission of enciphered messages. Later attempts of inventing alphabets have been more or less famous. To cite some of the most transcendent, we can recall Morse code (in fact, both a graphic and a sounding alphabet), the International Phonetic Alphabet or (in a different order of transcendence) the Tengwar script devised by J.R.R. Tolkien to write some of the languages created by himself5. Constructed scripts (also called just “conscripts”) are used for the most diverse ends, such as providing a non-writing culture with a way to encode their knowledge in writings, for linguistic experimentation or for purely practical purpuses (shorthand scripts, for example). Thus, we’re just following a tradition, in a way, when we set up an alphabet for purely sonic-calligraphic purposes. Shaping the desired “letter” or set of strokes, we can design the gesture, and therefore, the approximate sonic outcome.

5

For an extensive list of constructed scripts you can visit http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ (online the 23th of December 2014)

44

A possible path to start with could be, for example setting up (in a way, explore and decide) the sonic world or worlds that we want to recall in our calligraphy-oriented pieces. By defining its boundaries and characteristics we could arrive at a close idea of what kind of script we’re looking for. The size of each new “alphabet”, in terms of number of characters, is just up to our needs and/or our imagination. The level of coherence (that what in a graphic alphabet would determine a consistent style or hand) is also widely flexible and will be related to the previous aspect of “how big” our alphabet is. Factors of coherence are attained by, for example, having a limited set of basic strokes and make different characters by combining them (in the same way that the letters p,b,q, and d are but variations of the same elements). The conspicuousness of some characters will be given by their difference in respect to the most “normalized” group of characters.

In order to respond to the characteristics set to our new script, we will leave our intuition free, as we stated in the previous section of this same chapter. We may create, thus, sets of very wavy gestures that will provide fluent sounds, together with sets of shaky or angled characters that will show a much more articulated and interrupted noise stream. The difference from just doing it randomly is a strong sense of coherence and consistency, which will be more evident as the sets go smaller. I don’t hide that this might bring a sort of regressive usage of noise segments as motives. A set of letters wouldn’t be, finally, but a set of them. If we conceive noise as a means to confusion or overload of hearing this might not be the best option to choose (even though it will be a very interesting balance or unbalance between the clearly stated materials and the unclear nature of each of them). But I acknowledge, at the same time, the structural possibilities derived from the idea of specific, differentiable and identifiable noise segments. Instead of thinking of “motives”, which brings our mind to the traditional practices of the classical tradition, we might as well think of it as a sample library; a more modern view and, due to the characteristics of our scope, a more accurate one. Our sonic

45

alphabet is nothing else that a “live” sample library, with the flexibility advantages that it provides for live performance.

One additional and perhaps quite obvious application of the idea is, of course, encoding.

Having a set of calligraphic-sonic gestures in an alphabetical manner would enable anyone to “codify” verbal messages in an imperceptible manner. Because, as Bolzoni keeps writing: “It was only natural, then, for a calligrapher (…) to be fascinated by ciphers, and more generally by the metamorphosis of the alphabet” (Bolzoni, p.89). I certainly am.

Having considered both the general variables for calligraphic sound production and those ones that concern the choice of a script (or the invention of one for our intents) it is very clear that, due to the ease to control the interface (an interface we start controlling during our childhood) and the intuitive approach that relates writing movements to character gestures, the performance of calligraphic noise is a very fruitful and user-friendly way of sound expression, suitable for children and adults, and very open to be used in sound improvisation. It seems it is already time to move our focus to the more practical issues of calligraphic performance, in both its original “pen and paper” form and as applied to other musical instruments.

46

PART II: LIVE PERFORMANCE

47

Chapter 7: The calligrapher as a performer

When I started this way in the search for unity in both my musical and calligraphic endeavors, I tried, at first, to obviate the most straight-forward and reductionist approaches. I tried, on the other hand, to focus more in the possible conceptual and aesthetical possible connection points, feeling that a mere “translation” or “mapping” was not interesting to me. Curiously enough, after filling pages and pages of notes regarding notions such as contrast, void enhancement, gesture, experience and so on, I ended up deciding to write a piece that would include a calligrapher writing live on the stage (in a way, the ultimate straight-forward way of putting calligraphy into my music). Fair enough, I haven’t taken the path of translation but rather the one of confrontation, since my music doesn’t pursues transforming the calligraphic pieces into something musical, but rather including the calligraphy into the music, confronting it with the traditional instrumental aspects and transforming them.

Posing myself at the center of the stage (with the desk, the paper, the ink, the pen and the camera) I was able, after so many years, to be performer again. At the same time, I was putting the stress on the most evident seed of this whole adventure: the very sound of the pen rubbing against the paper while writing. In this way, the onstage calligrapher has become, for me, a kind of new kind of sound performer: one deeply related to the life of the common person, and therefore deeply human. With the addition of the present research, it is also about a performer capable of producing beautiful and compelling pieces of calligraphy while coherently controlling the sonic outcome. This idea of anyone being able to go onstage and “perform a text” makes me at times feel discomforted: we tend to go after players who know very well their roles by life-long practice. That feeling of esotericism that causes the wonder in 48

front of classical music is, in a certain way, taken down by the idea of having a person merely writing in front of the audience. It strangely swings between the too obvious and the too esoteric. It seems, on the other hand, to work well, so far.

The process from the first idea to the real performance hasn’t been an easy one. It involved many technical difficulties, and, in the process I came through the work of some people who had directed themselves towards paths (as I stated before, it was very naïve of me to think I was the first one to have an idea about something – we normally tend to have just new perspectives on already existing ideas). Some of the material found (in video, mostly) was mere superimposition of calligraphy and music, with a wide palette between the creepily tasteless and the potentially good. Some other approaches, more underground, seemed to lead me in the right way. Hyperion, by Walter Zimmermann, supposed the ultimate evidence of artistic telepathy in the middle of the composing process of Ductus: a piece of classicalcontemporary music that actually requires a calligrapher. There is a video in the website of the composer that shows part of the score, in a notational approach that I’m yet to understand.6 Some other names will be given at Chapter 10.

When I had already decided my future implication in the piece as performer, I had then to decide how to do it in a most efficient way: some issues to be taken into account were the ability to blend with the sound of the ensemble, the amplification of the noise stream (essential part of the concept itself since the very beginning) and, possibly, the video projection of the evolution from the blank paper to the different calligraphic results. These last two components (bringing to the audience something that uses to be a very private experience, only for the calligrapher him/herself) were decided to be electronically processed and manipulated, in order to control and expand the sonic and visual possibilities and to imply different messages by sonic and visual means. I decided, advised by my teacher back then,

6

http://home.snafu.de/walterz/hyperion.html (accessed December 27, 2014)

49

Antonio J. Flores, to use a contact microphone on the paper and a web camera as input devices. The rest of the “hardware” was still to be produced, but that would be the basis to derive information to the live processor. Then, a patch was written in the programming language provided by Max/MSP/jitter. It serves as interface between the calligrapher and the audience, integrating the scribe as a new performer. The patch is in its majority a rather simple one, since the aim wasn’t for the audience to perceive a “piece with electronics”, but to allow the calligraphic noise to reach some acceptable levels of sonic presence such as to be felt as a part of the whole ensemble. It divides in two main sections, controlling each of them the video and the audio input. The video processing part includes a caption module (with controls for brightness, contrast, saturation and zoom, and possibilities to take snapshots and record video fragments), a playback module, a crossfade module and an ambitious and still to be improved color tracking module. The idea of this last module is to recognize the position of the writing point and send their coordinates to the panning module in the sound processing part, for a goal that we will explain in a moment. The sound processing part includes an amplificatory, a delay module with two independent outputs, a reverb module a filtering module and a panning module to diffuse the sound through four channels around the audience. The goal of this was to map the position of the writing point onto the space of the room, transforming therefore the hall into a gigantic paper on which the sound is “written”. The audience becomes the support, in a way. This panning module allows also recording trajectories and triggering them later. Both the sound and the video processing sections are inside a main patch including elements such as general gain levels, events trigger, presets and video preview of both the raw signal and the processed signal.

50

Figure 4

Figure 5

51

Figure 6

In a way harder than the electronic programming, the quest for the perfect hardware-interface was a relatively later concern. For the premiere of Ductus I had a table of about 120x60cm that allowed me to put the “desk�, the inks and tools, blank paper, a lamp, the laptop and the soundcard (I was myself controlling the electronics at the same time) and some paper towels.

As mentioned in chapter 5 section a, the desk was as simple as a wooden frame with a thick watercolor paper inserted and fixed, having in the middle a guitar pick-up as a contact microphone. The sound caption was irregular but good and accurate. The inclination of the desk was controlled at that occasion with the cardboard box of the soundcard, in a rather unsophisticated way. The mounting of the camera was a bit problematic, since, on one hand, it had to compensate the inclination of the desk and, on the other, allow myself to see the paper and have enough freedom of movement. The piece to hold the camera was sculpted in 52

polystyrene and was able to hold inserted by each side a microphone stand and the webcam.

At the same time that the piece was being composed, a good choice had to be made every time regarding graphic tools and materials, since, as we have already discussed, on them depends a good deal of the timbral characteristics of the sonic outcome. The writing devices become, in this way, new types of musical instruments. And, like the percussion player, the calligrapher needs to have a wide palette of tools: brushes (hair and foam), reed-pens of different sizes and flexibility; fountain pens, quills, papers of different grain and color (the visual component is also to be taken into account, although the white was chosen for its clarity of impact), and different inks in color, transparency and thickness. A book that expanded my fantasy about all these matters was, many years ago, El calĂ­grafo de Voltaire, by Pablo de Santis.

For my second performance as a calligrapher (El mundo era tan reciente, Gaudeamus Muziekdagen, Utrecht, 2014) I chose a much simpler set-up. No video, just amplification, and just black ink on white paper. It gains in power through simplicity and portability, but loses the visual component and much of the audio refinement given by being able to adjust the reverb, spatialization, and all the other parameters that were controllable by the live-electronic device.

The most difficult part keeps therefore being getting the optimal “interface� to translate the calligraphic activity to image and sound. There is still a set of difficulties to be surpassed in the way: how to get an uniform sound-stream coming from the paper without taking in any unintended noise, even the ones coming from the rest of the ensemble (in the supposed case of ensemble situation)? How to set up an image-caption device (camera of any kind) that will capture the image of the calligraphy being made, without showing too much of the body of the calligrapher and without becoming an obstacle for a natural freedom of movement? How to properly track the position of the writing tool in relation to the paper (X and Y axis) in order to be able to control digitally, with such information, other parameters of the sound or video 53

streaming? This set of difficulties has led and will continue to lead to a permanent trial-anderror process that, hopefully, will go on spurring my imagination until a good enough system is found. In the same way, I have the intention of going on with these calligraphic performances that take the scribe as a new form of instrumentalist, mixing it with as many art forms and stage companions as possible.

In the same way that anyone is capable to sing, almost anyone is capable to write, and, thanks to this new approach to the figure of the calligrapher, many possibilities peep out in the horizon: a performing role that almost anyone can take, with minimum practice; virtuoso calligraphic musical parts, on the other side; choirs of scribes performing writing symphonies of strokes, together with ensembles that (we will know how in some chapters) will perform calligraphically with them; even audiences who can join the musicians in writing the music that they want to hear, and that will be projected right on them as a huge book whose pages are the layers of air in the room…Who knows? The calligrapher may well be a standard performer in the future!

54

Chapter 8: Calligraphic gestures on traditional music instruments: implementation and mapping.

My aim when I decided to approach calligraphy with artistic-sonic intentions was beyond the purely calligraphic performances. In fact, I haven’t yet developed a piece based solely on the pure calligraphic sound. My aims were, from the beginning, to bring the gestural reality of calligraphy to a traditional instrumental field. When deciding to extend the calligraphic sound beyond the limits of the composer’s desk, we immediately face the reality of how different it turns to apply it (whether in terms of sound or gesture imitation) into one instrumental family or another. For some families, like the percussion, the mapping is quite obvious and straightforward (take any surface instrument and “draw” letter shapes on it with a mallet). This approach has been taken, for example, by the Russian composer Dmitri Kourliandski, who actually employs very untraditional ways to use texts in his music, more related to inner reading by the performers or this sort of “writing on percussion” (Porras García 2014). For some others a certain amount of extra invention has been required, and some families present serious obstacles to really achieve the gestural or sonic qualities of the original calligraphic inspiration. The final results, however, have proved to be very enriching for the sonic possibilities and very widening for the instrumental palette of techniques at disposal of performers and composers.

In this way, the new “calligraphic” approach appears sometimes as a further step in the development of new and unusual instrumental sound: a step towards output-refinement, to be concrete. In the wind families (woodwind and brass) the implementation of the calligraphic technique was way less evident than in the percussion. Several options were 55

weighted: the simply gestural approach seemed quite evocative (drawing the strokes on the air with the instrument) but somehow felt unnecessarily theatrical and, in some cases, not nice to see. A refinement of vibrato was also a possibility, but it was already driving us away from the focus here, the special “calligraphic” sonic output. The final choice was to try to mimic in a way the noise itself. This lead to a scale of calligraphic-inspired air-noises for winds (and later for voice) based on four consonantal filters and five vocalic filters for each consonant (unvoiced vowels, just embouchure shapes). Together, they could be ordered from low to high frequency-band. The result, when sliding from one phonetic configuration to the next one, is a sort of frequency ascending band-pass filtering of noise, with some interruptions: χ(u)-(o)-(a)-(e)-(i) f(u)-(o)-(a)-(e)-(i) θ(o)-(u)-(a)-(e)-(i) ∫(o)-(u)-(a)-(e)-(i) s(u)-(o)-(a)-(e)-(i) These explorations push forward the over-used wind technique of “air noise”: a technique that some composers acknowledge to hate already due to its ubiquity in the contemporary music of the last decades; a technique mostly used in its most anodyne and flattest way; whose sonic output was ultimately defined by the construction of the instrument… With this approach, such a technique gains flexibility, potential expansion, and thus poetic refinement7. Application of this perspective was made for the first time in Ductus (2013), and more extensively in Haizea-Lurra for solo flute (2014, example below). Extensively using simple vocalic glissandi under the established consonant, it is possible in this way to imitate calligraphic noise in a very detailed fashion.

7

I am not as naïve as to say that I might have invented this refinement of air-sound by vowel and consonant exploration. The calligraphic approach, however, offers a tool set of ready-made flexible configurations resulting familiar and easily understandable to any performer.

56

Figure 7

Let’s take another example: the bowing technique has been evolving in the last century as one main concern of the avant-garde composers. From conquering sul ponticello at the late Romantic era, the bow position, touching material and bow strokes were highly explored. I will recall here to have for a moment the focus on “bow direction”. Bowing along the string (as opposed to the traditional perpendicular-to-the-string bowing) was a means to obtain a rather noisy pitch. The next step was to add some flexibility to that noisy pitch by means of circular bowing (as greatly shown in a youtube video by the violist Garth Knox, performing his Viola Spaces n.8 and that is quite common nowadays. As with the tonloss sound in wind instruments, we find here an over-simplified technique. Circular bowing has a quite static and limited output, as one can imagine by acknowledging all the strokes that can be “drawn” over the strings with the bow, besides the perfect but quite naïve “o”. Once we have already made analogy of the circular bowing with a letter “o”, is relatively simple imagine how would be to “write” any other strokes on our string instrument. This mapping procedure uses a special kind of clef that became common, or at least most known, after Lachenmann’s Pression for solo cello – a clef resembling the instruments neck and strings from the top nut to the bridge. The first application I made of this calligraphic language for strings appeared in Ductus (2013, see figure 8 below, violin and contrabass parts). Being this a concern only for the right hand of the performer, it’s left to the composer’s choice to leave the string damped, to finger some chord, or to use any other left-hand motion simultaneously with the calligraphic bowing.

57

I have come to know how Alistair Zaldua uses a similar approach when encoding alchemical operations into symbolic graphics to be written onto the strings of the doublebass8.

Figure 8

For harp-like instruments, the procedure is similar to the one applied to the percussion instruments, taking into account the choice of leaving the strings damped (muted) or open to free ringing. Besides this choice, there is a practical issue concerning the possibility of any used “writing tool” (namely mallet, brush, fingers, etc.) getting stuck between the strings. Soft brushes and wooden spheres are a good solution, offering the gestural freedom needed and, with clever usage, won’t get dully stopped by the strings. All these matters have been, in my case subject only to speculation, since they haven’t been applied in any piece so far.

As we considered at the beginning of the chapter, some instrumental families present serious problems regarding the translation or mapping of calligraphic gestures or sonic outcomes in their mechanic architecture. In keyboards, to take the hardest example, the limitations of the interface (a narrow set of keys organized in two close levels of height) allow not much space for calligraphic gesture, nor the possibility of replicating calligraphic noise in terms of soundimitation. In Ductus, the approach taken was that one of Lachenmann’s Guero, consisting in using the physical surface of the keyboard as a sounding surface to glide the fingers and fingernails on. A similar approach would be taken, as a first step, in working with fretted plucked string instruments, although, in this other case, the possibility of rubbing the surface

8

rd

His project can be reviewed at http://alistairzaldua.tumblr.com/ (online the 3 of December 2014))

58

of the strings allows the application of some procedures similar to those applied to the bowed string instruments.

A crucial point is, in any case, the communication with the performers regarding the idea of using the gesture. Some of them are often confused by the new way that we ask them to move their bows on their instruments, or blow in this or that unexpected way. It is advisable to let them know that our request goes beyond the mere quest of new sounds and definitely beyond instrumental music theatre. Explaining the origin of this thinking often enables the ideas to flow better, to be really interpreted and enjoyed by all of us.

59

Chapter 9: The challenge of notating calligraphy for musical purposes

As composers educated in the so-called Western classical tradition, we depart from a very strict functional system of notation. This system has been refined for centuries to serve the main values of this tradition, and it deals, mostly, with pitch organization, binary-conceived rhythmic figurations and roughly-defined dynamics. In the last hundred years, approximately, some attempts have been made, either to include some extra information in this codification system, while, generally, respecting its rules, or to problematize the system and propose new systems that serve the purposes the composer (or the proposer, to be accurate in this case) is after.

When having to notate the object of our study (calligraphic gestures) we already depart from some advantageous and disadvantageous positions. On one hand, we will be dealing partly with already familiar graphic shapes (letters) and therefore many players will be able to recognize them, not being a totally strange feature to approach. On the other hand, however, it is indeed hard to specify many of the variables we saw in chapter 5 without blurring the clarity of the letter to a big extent. In a time-oriented score, where the horizontal space is generally equated with time, the strokes that require right-to-left movement are definitely hard to notate within the constraints of the system. The solutions to all of this have to be defined, for the moment, by the particular characteristics and aims of each musical work, to answer the question of “what is to be notated in this piece�. The first two-fold decision to be made is whether to notate text or to notate gestures (taking into account the already

60

mentioned advantages and disadvantages). A further choice is how rhythmically accurate do we want them to be notated.

The first option of all (notating a text) is, without any doubt, the easiest way to get some “calligraphic noise” into our music. Having stated the rules for each player to perform the “writing” on their instruments, then simple chains of text are easy to be read and translated into sound. The score resembles then a text page, with the additional option of having as much marginalia or external annotations as we need to make the discourse more flexible. Marks concerning speed, pressure, temporal interaction between performers, pauses and other instructions are very well suited to be placed in the (the wider the better) space between lines, just as any other score accepts tempo or expression marking. The result is that of a very fluent and weird sounding musical world. Having this into account, it must be said that this approach requires from composers and performers to think in a different way than the one we have been traditionally educated in. This approach, as it is, doesn’t naturally fit within the conventional notation rules, besides the organization of signifiers in a time-inspired horizontal line. It’s very easy, though, to combine both systems by means of cueing.

When we deal with characters outside the most know alphabets to the players, or when we just want a particular gesture to be “written”, perhaps because we’re after its particular sonic properties, the text-score is not that useful. The easiest way to deal with this is simply to indicate to the players the gestures to be “written”, so to say, in campo aperto, without dealing with the time factor, as we will discuss later. This was the approach particularly used when the string instruments in Ductus were asked to write short words in a shorthand script (Tironian notes, see Figure 8 in the previous chapter).

While all the above mentioned is definitely the most effective approach when dealing with fluent streams of calligraphic noise, it doesn’t allow to accurately and easily specifying notions such as writing speed, rhythm or gradient pressure, which may be of major importance to convey expression in certain musical environments. For that reason, and in order to be able to 61

combine and articulate these techniques together with traditional and modern musical performance, I have tried some different ways to notate the concrete gesture in a more or less traditional score setting. This pursues the possibility to have accurately performed spatial gestures that are normally left ad libitum to the players (such as the scratch techniques in percussion).

This approach, for me, would have to be inspired in the already existing notations for calligraphy students or practitioners to learn a new script. This notation de-composes each letter in its basic strokes, and gives the order and direction to write each of them, conforming what is called the ductus (see figure 9). This system disregards the time factor when practicing calligraphy, an activity part of whose mastery lies in mastering the rhythm, the momentum when writing. How to include the time factor in the notation? Having the “ductus” diagrams already present, the next step for was to include them in a temporal (musical) context. Being the score a description of a sequence of “events” in time, the letters have to be de-composed in their conforming strokes. And, therefore, the main concern is how to “time” each of these basic strokes on the score. Timing them would allow us to put them in the same context and possibilities than any of the other possible performers at play, concerning contrapuntal relationships, synchronization, and so on. How to express this timing in an efficient and understandable way? My first attempt to achieve this took place in the founding piece of my calligraphic-compositional thinking: Ductus. In this piece from 2013, I put together an amplified and video-streamed calligrapher in the middle of an ensemble of seven musicians. My idea wasn’t to give the calligrapher a soloist role, but, having into account the already present conspicuousness factor of having a non-musician onstage, include his material in the most organic way possible as any other component part of the ensemble. In the opening of the piece (shown in figure 9) we can see how I notated the way he or her (in fact, I, for the premiere) should perform the strokes of the word “Ductus” in time (only the bottom part, and not the actual calligraphic strokes, is shown on the score). In the image, showing only the 62

calligrapher part from the manuscript, we see that I notated some sort of “rhythm” for each stroke (numbered underneath) of each letter (showed in a square, before each set of strokes).

Well, when I wrote this I already knew I would be the calligrapher in the premiere. What I have notated as rhythm are the “energy components” of each stroke. I know it is hard to understand, but each stroke, when being performed, has some own rhythm that relates very much to the way it is written, the “attractors” present in its shape. In that way, the first stroke of the “D”, with its curved form, has three subordinate “movements” inside. Going on with the example, we can see that the second stroke of the “D” takes much less “time” to be written.

This interplay of how big a stroke is and how fast or slow is written provides many possibilities to express energy levels related to the physicality of the movement of the performer.

Figure 9

Related to this last point, a second example might be apparent. This is taken from the climatic section of an otherwise very little climax-oriented piece of mine: Presence-level Étude (2013, Figure 10). This section, taken from the writing-percussion part, shows how a crescendo in energy is achieved by having one only shape growing and growing in size while keeping the same duration. This implies an increase of the needed energy to keep the same rhythm and keep the size of the letter growing. Here we can also see how I had already refined my

63

approach to the “gesture notation” by specifying the points of the shape that relate to the notated rhythm.

Figure 10

Basically, then, this approach is made up by a double layer of graphical information: a spacerelated graphic of the stroke or gesture to be made, with some points to define the rhythms of the second, time-related layer; the intended rhythm. This can be expanded by choosing means to codify notions such as pressure (by thickening the line in the spatial-related layer) angle, touching point, size of the writing tool, etc. It keeps being, though, a much difficult approach to be understood, compared with the simpler chains of text.

Both of the mainly discussed approaches are combinable in a single piece, as it has happened already in pieces of mine such as the already mentioned Ductus and Presence-level Étude. A special mixed way, and, for me, a very attractive one, would need the performers to be versed in the foundations of calligraphic practice, even in a very basic way. This would allow that, with some little marks concerning calligraphic style, one same text could lead to many different sonic outcomes (already from having one version in a cursive script and another one in a stroke-by-stroke script). This would allow us to specify the rhythm of the writing in a more organic way and, to some extent (given that we know how many strokes takes to complete some given character), to estimate the timing of a certain fragment and its textural possibilities regarding the rest of the “scribe-performers”. In any case, the notation system chosen will have to adapt to the set of preferences that the composer wants to play with, regarding the desired sound, ensemble interplay, variables to be played, etc. Each of the systems may, then,

64

be pushed in one or another direction, and be mutated then as the aims and vision of artists using it goes changing. No fixation is desired as long as we keep being a relatively small group of free artists playing together with both calligraphy and music, with no institution or tradition asking for standards of our practice. Again, communication is the key for a good understanding and for the possibility of a good transmission.

65

Chapter 10: collaborations derived from this research

Dealing with new and cross-disciplinary languages, a number of possibilities suddenly appear for interesting artistic collaborations. In my case, the first opportunity came thanks to a project involving two different departments of the Amsterdam School of the Arts, those devoted to Composition and Scenography. Thanks to this project developed along two months of work I could present, together with the German scenography student Martina Bauer, the piece Rhythms, traces, foliation, for three moving doublebasses onstage (see a picture of the general rehearsal in figure 11). In this piece, the idea was to explore, inside a very minimalistic aesthetic, the cyclic nature of different processes in life and nature, having the rhythmic element as a unifying one for both the spatial and temporal-sonic arts.

Figure 11

66

The piece included the invention of a device that could be placed instead of the contrabass pike to hold a small wheel that would allow the contrabasses to move on a paper stage leaving some ink traces along the way. The sound coming from these gigantic pens was captured and amplified. The performers developed a cyclic sequence of events conceived as a variation in seven iterations of seven basic sonic or choreographic materials. They were cued from outside the stage by me, triggering some subtle sonic cues that were derived from the material of the basses in such a way that it wouldn’t disturb the performance and the audience experience.

The paper stage appeared at first as a crumpled paper ball at the center of the stage. Before the basses started to move on it, it magically opened to be transformed into a flat surface that was torn apart after the instrumental performance. It supposed a very interesting experience at many levels, including the challenging aspects of collaborating in a personal project without either imposing an idea or be too shy to propose any. To take away some pressure we ended up considering the project as an experimental one. From the two performances, the first one ended up being a piece of about 40’, while the second one, a little rushed, ended up after 15’ or so.

Encounters yet to happen are those with, for example, the Dutch flutist living in Grenade Wil Offermans, to whom I got to be introduce thanks to the also Dutch flutist Albert Manders. Wil teaches flutes by comparing its performance with the activity of a calligrapher. Needless to say, I’m very looking forward to discuss with him about the topic, and see what he thinks about my approaches to the topic. The strange situation of each one of us living in each other’s country and swapping for holidays has made the attempt to meet a little bit hard, so far. I’m sure we will both keep trying, though9. The Argentinian, Amsterdam-based paper artist Miriam Londoño is other of my possible collaborations-to-happen (the same than with Wil, we have already email contact). Miriam is very interested in language, and so she works with text. Her 9

For more information, visit http://www.wiloffermans.com/en/news.html (online the 3rd of December 2014)

67

artistic approach, though, is a very interesting one, since she doesn’t write on paper, but with paper (see figure 12). Her pieces are usually hanging in the middle of the room, or close to one wall. They are composed of paper-made letters floating together in the air (what she calls “paper calligraphy”). The support becomes the material (paper made into ink), and the air becomes the support. This idea of calligraphing the air is very attractive to me10. In more practical matters, I expect to visit in the future the Icelandic, Belgium based artist Hallveig Ágústsdóttir. She has developed with her artistic practice a set of technical solutions to hear graphic noise that I know will be of major help to me11.

Figure 12

Last, but not least, my colleague Amit Gur has brought to my knowledge the work of the painter Amos van Gelder. He is a Dutch artist that has placed text, in an almost calligraphic way, at the center of his work. He works with Hebrew texts, whose alphabet has always attracted to me in a very deep way, for reasons I can’t bur guess. Amit has assured me that his approach to letters and text is something I should discuss with him12. Interestingly enough, and for some reason that escapes my understanding, I have yet to talk about my projects with real calligraphers. I suppose it’s partially due to a certain embarrassment to propose my strange 10

http://www.miriamlondono.com/ (online the 3 of December 2014)

rd

11

http://hallveigagustsdottir.com/ (online the 3 of December 2014)

12

http://moskiart.nl/ (online the 3 of December 2014)

rd

rd

68

reflections to any professional worker on the field. I hope I will be able to surpass that embarrassment barrier and share my thoughts with some of them. Hopefully that will lead to some collaborative situation as well. I have, particularly, the idea of a big installation-like piece with two or three calligraphers being amplified and broadcasted in a room where an audience can get in and out, interact with the materials, appreciate the work of the scribes and try themselves the plastic and sonic possibilities of calligraphy. In any way, I’m eager to go on and complete a cycle of calligraphic pieces to be presented all together in a concert-exhibition-like situation. The stress on gesture might even lead to a ballet-like work where the players will be just writing on the air… The number of possibilities certainly explodes up. And, in any case, the idea of collaboration is always attractive when it is about making new experiences to be appreciated by an audience.

Every one of these approaches, including my own, might be seen as the last expansion of calligraphy into the other arts, rather than the arts into calligraphy. As Michiel Schuijer recalled in one of our revision meetings, we might be making history not in our own “main” disciplines, but rather in the history of calligraphy, in a very logical way. Personally, I don’t consider such a perspective to be more appropriate than the other. Either way is valid, I guess, when it is about crossing boundaries.

69

Conclusions

In our days, it seems that the very act of writing by hand tends to disappear slowly. Even so, the activity of handwriting keeps providing moments of privacy, intimacy and deep humanity.

Whilst electronic certificates are threatening something so valuable in other times as the personal (handwritten) signature, really important agreements keep being signed by hand.

Sometimes, even with a special pen dedicated to the occasion. In applying such a personal and intimate act, as handwriting is, to noise-related sonic art and music, we’re tending bridges that join together tradition and progress, chaos and order; the cold noise-stream with the warm poetics of humanity and handwriting.

Doing so by means of calligraphic-gesture management provides a reliable way to control to certain extents this special way of noise production. At the same time, it enables interesting options for inter/multi-disciplinary forms of art, in which the visual and gestural element may have a role as important as the music itself, or, to express it better, would broaden the meaning of what music is and could be.

In the course of this year and a half, I have shared with many of my colleagues my enthusiasm for this source of inspiration and work, keeping it together in my mind with other means of expression and fields of study such as harmony, or to the deeper research of psychological mechanisms of music perception and the mental responses to it; many realms in my imagination and in my future study scope to be, again, further developed and merged.

Anyway, one of the clear objectives (both expected from and intended for) of this work was to transcend the mere self-study and provide some tools and insight that might inspire other 70

artists to keep going in similar directions with, possibly, a different, personal and fresh perspective. I believe that this research could inspire not just musicians, composers or sound artists, but even calligraphers and graphic artists and designers, who may gain a little of insight to their fields from this humble and still to grow perspective. A very promising path opens in front of me regarding the artistic marriage of calligraphy and sonic arts, and its study has undoubtedly helped me in finding my own way and my own voice by discovering new resonances within myself and towards the outer world.

71

Reference list:: Bolzoni, Lina. The Gallery of Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Casidy, Aaron, and Aaron Einbond. Noise in and as music. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield, 2013.

Fitch, Lois. "Brian Ferneyhough: the logic of the figure (e-thesis)." Durham University, 2005.

Iliescu, Mihu. "Glissando and traces, a study of the relationships between musical and extramusical fields." Definitive Proceedings of the “International Symposium Ianis Xenakis".

Athens, 2005. 49-54.

Mediavilla, Claude. Caligrafía. Barcelona: Campgrafic Editors, 2005.

Noordzij, Gerrit. El trazo: teoría de la escritura. Valencia: Campgrafic Editors, 2009.

Porras García, Carlos. «Posibilidad y realidad en la obra de Dmitri Kourliandski.» Espacio Sonoro, nº 34 (Septiembre 2014): (online).

Sánchez García, Manuel J. "Ductus: Análisis." Sevilla, Junio 10, 2013.

Santiso, Óscar. "Body Movements in music performance." Amsterdam, 2014. van Maas, Sander. "The Xenakian Fold." Definitive Proceedings of the “International Symposium Ianis Xenakis". Athens, 2005. 67-71.

Wishart, Trevor. On Sonic Art. New York - London: Routledge, 1996.

72

Appendix I: Here I make a list of pieces worked out during my first year as student in Amsterdam, with a level indicator of calligraphic inspiration13. Aspects of the most important of them have been discussed along this monograph. Further information may be asked through my email.

Title, duration

Setting

Calligraphy level

Ductus14 (ca.12’)

Calligrapher, Ensemble, live electronics and live video.

Very high

minimum (30’’)

Ensemble

High

Presence-level etude (ca.8’)

Ensemble

High

The Constant: out of a bell pattern (ca.9’)

Ensemble

Very low

El mundo era tan reciente (5’)

Calligrapher and cello

Very high

Haizea-Lurra (ca.7’)

Solo flute

High

Hommage-Pottage (ca.10’)

Clarinet, Viola, Piano

Null

Rhythm, traces, folliation (15- Three doublebasses, 35’) electronics, stage design

High

Baptista, vel solis cedens (49’)

Very low

13

Actor, actress, two choirs, ensemble, electronics, light design.

The calligraphic-inspiration level will be defined by a gradation: null, very low, low, high, very high.

14

Ductus was actually composed as final work for my Bachelor Degree, in Seville (Spain). The piece was, though, the foundation stone of all my calligraphic research, and had a major role in my acceptance by the department as student at the CvA.

73