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Performance
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PLAYING SCORES
After I graduated from studying composition I went overseas for a few months to undertake a few intensive periods of study. One of those was a European New Music summer school where I found the macho posturing of staff and students writing overcomplicated & intimidating scores extremely alienating. Whilst I respect that there is a lot of great music with notation that might be read as complicated and intimidating - like the music of Liza Lim, which I like a lot - the atmosphere of that festival was a real deterrent and amplified my then-skepticism of scores that do too much to control and dominate their performers & audience through the facade of "complexity"[1]. I felt that the kind of sonic novelty these scores were putatively exploring paled in comparison to that of folks with a deep engagement with their instrument and listening through a lived practice of performing, rather than navigating that relationship through the abstraction of notation and theory. Immediately following this summer school I studied with the wonderful person/composer Antoine Beuger. There could be few stronger polar opposites to the intimidating atmosphere of that summer school than Antoine's emphasis on generosity, humility and vulnerability, and Antoine's affirmation of these as values a composer/musician can hold was and remains extremely validating for me. Antoine made me realise that there was a lot to know about the experimental music performance tradition, that this could be conceived of as something somehow distinct from "New Music" or "contemporary classical", and that that tradition would have a place for me as a performer. In this tradition, it seemed that the performer's idiosyncrasies and unique experience of being a human was more valued than their ability to excel in a commonly understood practice. It had space for non- or even anti-virtuosic performance, which resonated with my own background as a listener to punk and other musics which managed to be atmospheric and brilliantly intense without the need for a rigorous theoretical basis - as well as improvisation, which also encompasses these perspectives and more. I think I now understand all scores through the lens of experimental scores: they are departure points to arrive at a vast field of different possibilities. It is the culture around the scores, not the scores themselves, that seem to restrict possibilities or ordain a 'desirable' or 'ideal' realisation. This can and does happen in certain experimental scenes, and certainly happens in more institutionally dominant scenes. This has clarified my frustration with the aforementioned summer school whilst also allowing me to accept that there is interesting music from that world and from that approach to writing. I do not really have any desire to mute or negate any way of making music. But I do love how experimental music often seems to validate and extend who you are, rather than ask you to be someone else, so I feel relatively more drawn to it. When we live in times where we are called to fundamentally question so many of our assumptions about how we live and think, it seems more pertinent to find our own "virtuosity", our own worlds and practices to deepen and enrich our engagement with, than to follow ordained and existing frameworks for this kind of achievement. In a world where normative structures are driving us and the other lifeforms, spirits and ideas we share the planet with rapidly towards extinction it is much more interesting to me to challenge myself to work at a very deep level musically without having a model for what this would look like, than follow a path which demonstrates to me where I ought to be going and why. All that to say that I really enjoy the learning experience of playing scores where the music does not really "exist" until its played (Antoine always emphasis that performers make the music, not the composer). As such I do not really have a "career" practice as a "performer" of "New music", but I am extremely interested in the performance of composed music being part of my musical life. This page shares some of what I have done in that world. Thanks for reading this long introduction to it! [1] Actually I would sardonically call this "complicatedness" - I think perception of sound is inherently complex and music, too, more complex when it deals with this reality in detailed ways. On this topic I find Antoine Beuger's interview here with James Saunders is incredibly clarifying. |
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Duo with Jameson Feakes
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Jameson Feakes & Josten Myburgh are Perth-based musicians active in contemporary, experimental and improvised music fields. As a duo, their focus is on the composition & performance of music that explores conceptual, open-ended approaches with minimal material. They have performed at KLEX Festival (Kuala Lumpur), Inland (Perth and Melbourne) and Tilde Festival (Melbourne), and concert series in Singapore, New Zealand, Perth and Adelaide, as well as in unorthodox contexts, such as onboard the installation 'RAFT' afloat on Perth's Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River). They have commissioned works by Jon Heilbron, Sage Pbbbt, Simon Charles, Alissa Cheung and Olivia Davies, and performed pieces by Antoine Beuger, Michael Pisaro, Eva Maria Houben and more.
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