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THE EUROPEAN IMPROVISERS ENSEMBLE This
ensemble,
originally put together in 2004 by Jean-Marc Montera -
guitarist and eminence gris behind the
Montevideo arts centre in Marseille - was formed to
interpret graphic scores, starting with the mammoth Treatise by Cornelius Cardew. Completed in 1967, Treatise takes the
form of a fat 193pp book of graphic notations. Cardew
himself, and most of those after him who have approached
this score, have usually concentrated on interpreting
just a few pages. Attempts to perform the whole thing
are rare, not least because, realistically, it would
take about a week. That’s certainly how long we grappled
with it over the course of our rehearsals, undertaken in
a very agreeable small Corsican town. We approached the
score from all sides, and threw every imaginable
interpretative strategy at it. And most of the time not
spent eating or sleeping was occupied with discussions
about the validity of the score as
a score, and how to reconcile Cardew’s earlier
(interpretative) and later (dismissive) writings about
it. By the end of all this, the ensemble was
good-naturedly divided between those who wished to take
a more intuitive, spontaneous approach and those who
thought strict annotation, a conductor and a set of
agreed rules would produce more plausible results. We
tried it all ways. And gradually, over the next run of
concerts came, like most of our predecessors, to the
established conclusion: so three of us - Daan
Vandewalle, Jean-Marc Montera and myself - chose several
pages, annotated them, suggested rules for
interpretation and then conducted them, using a
stopwatch. This did seem to work. Then we moved to other
graphic scores, and even commissioned a handful of young
French and German composers to produce new works for the
ensemble. My contribution was Life
on Earth – a game piece rather than a graphic
score, but fun to do because very unpredictable. The
band was the same for all the projects: Helene Breschand
(acoustic and processed harp), Jean-Marc
Montera (guitar, table, objects, processing), Daan
Wandewalle (piano), Hans Koch (bassclarinet,
soprano), Lelio Gianetto (contrabass), Thomas Lehn
(analogue synthesiser) and myself.
DAAN
VANDEWALLE. THE BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE. NIMMERSATT Best known as a concert pianist, specialising in contemporary repertoire, Daan is also an accomplished improviser, which is how I first met him – we were both part of Fred Frith’s Graphic Scores Ensemble. We met again in a quartet Fred put together - with clarinettist Claudio Puntin - in Koln, a project that prefigured Fred’s Tense Serenity (the same line-up plus trumpeter Lesli Dalaba). A couple of years down the road, after a trio concert with Daan and Jacques Palinckx, Daan and I were both seconded into an enlarged Palinckx project with the regular group and DJ Donotask. This lasted maybe a year. Then, in 2007, to mark Stockhausen’s lamented passing, I organised a re-working of his Stockhoven/Beethausen piece, which Daan and I performed in London, with Robin Rimbaud on guitar. And of course we were both in Jean-Marc Montera’s European Improvisers Ensemble. We were soloists on a double performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte and - as a trio with Jean-Marc Montera - performed Christan Wolff’s For 1, 2, 3 players. This trio with the addition of contemporary cellist Arne Deforce soon became the Bad Boys Collective – a festival ensemble – that first appeared at the Flanders Festival, in Ghent - playing Cage classics, and then as a more generalized ensemble trying to interpret a range of non-standard notational scores, in new way. We even took on Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen, using one the master’s original giant tam-tams – and discovered that the short wave environment has been drastically depleted in the internet age. Today Daan and I are still in The Bad Boys Collective, and also the Ligeti/free-noise ensemble Nimmersatt - along with John Greaves and Jon Rose; though, unaccountably, our jazz standards trio with 7 contrabassists is still waiting for a commission. What’s wrong with everybody? THE
BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE.
NIMMERSATT 
ON RECORD THE
BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE. Out of their
Heads./Graphic Process Instruction. on ReRdownloads.com |