Helen Bledsoe

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  • Right or Wrong? Extended or Not?

    Every community has its own lingo, subject to the winds of its own political climate. The community of Contemporary Western Art Music is no exception. Flutists and flutist/composers form a micro-climate within this community, and we certainly like to make our voices heard. There has been a call from our corner to scorn the term “extended techniques”. How did this come about?

    Well, the term implies exclusion, according to the flwoke (a word I just made up for the flute-playing woke). Calling a flute sound an “extended technique” implies it is “other”, not included in the corpus of sounds that the flute can make. You can’t extend something that is complete unto itself.

    I have to say, though, that the pioneer spirit in me is disappointed. The Western, Classical flute tradition does have a particular sound that is suited to the repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries (as the “early” flutes have theirs that fits the repertoire and acoustical environments of their eras). I like to imagine I live in a world that extends beyond that.

    Another aspect, though, is the knee-jerk reactions of some flutists to these sounds. There are some teachers alive today who insist there is a right way and a wrong way to play the flute (non-classical flute sounds being, by default, wrong). Instead of getting angry about this, I translate and paraphrase that: there are sounds that work for certain repertoire, instrumentation and acoustical environments. Soloists and orchestral musicians need an air-to-tone ratio that will project in traditional concert halls, a vocal-style vibrato that will carry the sound and doesn’t offend modern sensibilities, a harmonic structure that blends with other woodwinds, is in tune with itself, and an ear attuned to 12-ET (and the minor adjustments needed to play chords within a wind section).

    It is worth noting that the boundaries of what is considered “right” are in flux. Think of vibrato styles of past generations, or what was considered acceptably “in-tune” in early recordings. Although in flux, the methodology of teaching these “right” combinations is rather codified, although each generation produces its own pedagogical literature.

    My theory is that before amplification became a thing, this “right” way of playing was crucial to acoustical survival, it wasn’t only a question of taste, much less right or wrong. Flute sounds evolved according to the acoustic realities of the time. Any technique that made the flute sound more present was encouraged, be it a faster vibrato or more harmonics in the sound. Whatever helps the instrument to project in its environment is right. Instrument makers responded to these demands with larger, partially cylindrical bores, “better” scales, and larger tone holes.

    Techniques like harmonics, multiphonics, percussive effects, air sounds, and circular breathing have a history that goes back before the 20th century, but their presence on stage has proliferated since the mid 20th century. There are multiple reasons for this, but one aspect pertinent to my point is that these sounds are no longer under pressure to acoustically conform to man-made architecture* and can achieve presence through amplification. Thus they have not been subjected to such strict methodology and ideals of right and wrong.

    But are these techniques extended? I will leave the question open. The need for a catch-all term that grabs a search-engine’s hit does impose a level of conservatism. For me, the important point is that contemporary music is an emerging tradition – you could say that it is still being extended. Perhaps “extending” techniques would be a compromise? Using the term extended implies that it still has somewhere to go, that there are still sounds to be discovered and ways to approach known sounds that have yet to be discovered. This is what gives me motivation and hope. When students ask me, “how do I make that sound?”, or, “what is the fingering for that?”, I tend to get a fanatical gleam in my eye. The answer is often, there is no “right” way, because you are lucky to be participating in an emerging tradition. I do it this way, someone else approaches it differently, and if you can think of a better way, I will come to you for lessons!

    *Ignoring the fact that microphones and digital environments are man-made, at least until the robot revolution.

  • Multiphonics: Tips for Study

    Actually, this is a “notes-to-self” entry disguised as “Tips”. There are good sources for learning and practicing multiphonics such as Robert Dick’s “Tone Development through Extended Techniques” (although I know the term “extended techniques” has gone out of fashion, but the practice in the book is solid). I also have a detailed presentation where I approach learning multiphonics through the study of flute harmonics and spectral hearing. If you know of any other learning materials, please share them in the comments.

    Now to the notes-to-self. It is well and good enough just to learn and practice multiphonics, but time has shown that one is often asked to perform multiphonics under less-than-ideal conditions. This goes especially for ensemble pieces when there are others playing, and it is difficult to get aural feedback from your own playing in order to make the minute adjustments necessary to play a multiphonic. However, in solo works there are also challenges, where a multiphonic might be difficult to approach in context (in a series of them, or after a particularly tiring passage, for example). So how do I prepare for that? Part of the answer is simply training in-context, as well as the reassurance that experience will bring. At times it is helpful to ask yourself, or the composer, conductor, or chamber-music colleagues which note in the multiphonic is of most importance? What voice should I bring out? Perhaps most important of all: can I find a better fingering?

    And sometimes the composer thinks that he/she is helping by saying “oh that’s ok, I want an unstable sound, you can vacillate between the notes”. OK. That is something that has to be practiced too, because often a vacillation comes with a sudden jump in dynamic. In most cases, this is not the effect the composer is going for. This led me to a practice that I think is very helpful for close multiphonics such as this one (taken here in context from Joseph Lake’s Concerto for Prepared Piano):

    I should emphasize that the basic way to approach a multiphonic is to take it apart, get to know the dynamic range of all the notes, do the throat tuning to the weakest, etc. etc. These steps have been covered in tutorials by myself and others. But once this has been done, we often get caught up in trying to get both notes equally, and then still failing. In past tutorials, I talk about using fluttertongue to help find the position of the tongue that will work, and listening and aiming for the difference tone or beatings of the notes rather than the two notes themselves (logically, aiming for one thing is easier than aiming for two, right?). Another trick to throw out is to practice this vacillation that composers are so fond of – slowly. If you can control going between the notes slowly, and minimize the jump in dynamics that sometimes accompany the movement, I find that the actual multiphonic sounds more than you expect.

    So those are my thoughts from today’s practice, if you have anything to add I would be curious to know.

  • New Tutorial Series for Composers

    I have done quite a few tutorials, thanks to the Musikfabrik and our youth ensemble Studio Musifabrik. However, in the course of our Adventure project with composition students from the Hochschule here in Cologne, there are several topics that keep coming up. I have been asked to make short explanatory videos about these topics, and now it is time to deliver. I decided to do it in a very casual setting (a bar/pub at closing time) and with a deliberate DIY look.

    There are four topics I will be covering: unpitched air sounds, pizzicati, pitched air sounds, and notating multiphonics.

    Here are the links:

    unpitched air sounds

    pizzicato for flute

    pitched air sounds

    notating multiphonics

  • Sixth-Tone Exercise Audio

    This is a very simple exercise for playing sixth-tones The audio file has undulations on three notes: (I picked these because they appear in a piece I am coaching.)

    • Bb3 – Bb3 sixth-tone lower
    • Db4 – Db4 sixth-tone lower
    • C3 – C3 sixth-tone higher

    All you have to do is practice at first playing with the undulations, then against them so when the audio plays Bb – you try to play Bb sixth-tone lower, and check yourself as the tone moves. Here is a crude display, you can imagine the audio as the black line, your sound as the blue line.

    Tuning is A=441

    Here is the audio file

  • Postlude to a Premiere

    This is more of a public diary entry and notes-to-self than any sort of attempt to give tips or tools. Also, I attempt to sort out my thoughts of how things have changed in Darmstadt since the late 90s.

    It’s been a few days since I premiered Georges Aperghis’ fascinating and wonderful The Dong with the Luminous Nose, and I am tired of mental postmortem self-criticisms that keep bubbling up into my consciousness. I need head-space for my next projects!

    This piece really should be played from memory. The fact that my main achievement of the evening is I didn’t f-up the page turns with my page flipper is a testimony to that. And that the batteries didn’t run out. The list of why I didn’t play from memory is a long one – the final version of the piece was set 3 weeks before, and in that time period I had an opera to play, a family to have a kind of summer vacation with, and very time-consuming hobbies.

    I was glad that there was a quality video recording, but am also happy that the recording is being removed from YouTube today, because although as a performance it was ok, I don’t want it to be the “definitive” version of the piece. Although that is a kind of joke. Little of the dramatic actions, voices, costume, that I did is actually in the score, so there never was and never will be a “definitive” version. There are no indications of how gestures are to be performed, the piece also has only two dynamic indications. For me, this is poses a very interesting interpretive situation, and has many parallels to my study and engagement with electronic music composition. Like electronic music, music that involves declamation of spoken text, a mixture of spoken text with instrumental sounds and dramatic gestures, cannot be prescribed with conventional musical notation. It puts performance, and not the written score, at its center. (Watch this documentary about Aperghis and musical theater if you want to know more about his esthetic.)

    This situation for me was interesting because I gave the premiere in Darmstadt, where composition, composers and the “text” of music, i.e., the score, have historically been the focus of attention and resources. When I first attended in the 90s, I was struck by the hegemony of composers there, and their dominance, along with big-name festival organizers, in the whole contemporary music scene. There were very few composer-performers as role models in Darmstadt at that time (Markus Stockhausen was one exception), and the concept of composer-performer or improviser was neither thematized, promoted, nor rewarded. I was even advised there by a local composer to “stay away from the improv scene”, those players were really considered lame. This has changed, and I think this normalization is due to rapidly evolving technology and the emerging inclusiveness that is the result of successful activism and increased “woke-ness” by our cultural power structures.

    As pointed out in Live Electronic Music, Composition, Performance, Study, our music history is written “from the perspective of the composer and rarely from that of the performer. Compositional outcomes have been the backbone of music historiography since it began in the 19th century”. This book examines questions of musical texts that are “nonexistent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format” from many perspectives (that of composer, performer, audio engineer to name a few). Historically, it makes sense that anything that leaves a paper trail (a score) will become a source for academics to pour over. We love artifacts. They provide a basis for taxonomies, give credibility, establish lineages, give credence to ideas. Since recording technology has developed, we have now another fixed source, that of recorded performances, over which to pour. This has “…opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalization of the performer’s role and the concept of music as performance.” I love this book!

    Now is the time for composer/performers, improvisers, and those who work with media whose sounds cannot be codified/”textified” by a score, to assume more prominence in our Western music history and the power structures that determine our cultural life.

  • What is your Superpower?

    Having a kid and playing modern board games where it is teamwork against the forces of chance or evil (not everyone for him/herself like in my day), it is easy to fall into this kind of thinking.

    Because these days, everyone is special, right? No one is supposed to get left behind. Everybody has their own, special superpower. So what is my, personal, superpower? I am hoping I don’t have just one. However, for the time being, since I am spending a good amount of time each day on the piccolo, it is easy to imagine my superpower is that of playing high B’s and C’s. This is my special weapon, to produce blasts that measure over 100 decibels. Do I use it to combat evil? Well, maybe in my imagination only. But since this is not a game, it is my actual job to produce these notes, I have to deal with the situation in my own way. If I delude myself in order to produce what a composer writes, well, we all have to do whatever it takes, right?

    The thing with superpowers is that they do not happen automatically, you have to train them, refine them and learn to engage them exactly when needed. ZAAP!! Bullseye!

    In “The Dong with a Luminous Nose” by Georges Aperghis, on page 18 (of 21), after playing loads of low, airy sounds, singing and speaking, there are suddenly a few high C’s that pop up. And to boot, the piece ends on a high C. Now, high C’s are supposed to be my superpower, but they often fail me here in this context. Among the Jumbly Girls, the wail of the chimp and snipe, I forget that I have a lethal weapon in my hands. So my practice has to involve a lot of psychology. I have to remember to engage this power, to never lose sight of it. For this, microseconds help. Taking that microsecond in the leap to high C from the D below, not to say “Oh $§&”*”, but to say “Engage!” This takes practice (for me).

    So I share this so you all can think about your own superpowers, hone them, and practice engaging them. See if it works for you.

  • The Dong

    I have been meaning to keep an online account of my adventures with Georges Aperghis’ piccolo solo “The Dong with a Luminous Nose”, but it’s already three weeks before the performance and I haven’t written much. There are practical reasons for this – one is we ironed out the final version with cuts and tempo changes a few days ago. Only now do I have a sense of the piece as a whole and feel that I can do the real work.

    Since he has heard and approved my recent draft recording, only now am I confident that my strategy for playing all the quarter tones, the types of vocalizations and interpretation of timings are ok. I find it really difficult to invest in the technical details of a piece unless I know the overall musical and compositional approach, because only by knowing this, do I know how to technically approach the piece.

    Although I have heard and performed a number of Aperghis’ pieces before, the ARTE documentary from 2006 “the composer who reinvented musical theatre” gave me more insight.* Here is a quote that I like:

    “…observing a performer in their day-to-day life, during rehearsals, over coffee, in their usual behavior, one sees their inner charm and from that point on, writing for them, to my mind, means believing them to be much stronger than they are, musically, I mean. So often, when the score arrives, they are happy yet anxious due to its difficulty. Because I feel they are capable of it, that’s the fault of love. I feel they can do anything, and they can, because they do, but at a price. “

    Aperghis and I got to know each other personally while he was preparing to compose Intermezzi for Ensemble Musikfabrik. In our conversations, I mentioned that I enjoyed the nonsense texts of Edward Lear. “The Dong” is a text by Lear (his choice), and to my knowledge, this is the only work of Aperghis that really has a narrative. His other works seem much more abstract and cathartic.

    I have also been thinking about music and text. A lot of text that goes into music these days is political or makes some kind of statement. Although I support this wave of awareness and wokeness, I still think there is a place for words in music as phonetic material with artistic, or dare I say it, entertainment value. If the text of this piece included the words “damn the patriarchy” or “Frauenpower forever” it would perhaps make me feel better about myself, giving me that warm, fuzzy feeling you get with acts of solidarity and “doing one’s bit”. But in the end, what bit is that? My performance would change no one’s social perspective. (And in Darmstadt, where the premiere is to be held, I would be preaching to the choir.) My bit would be better played out by volunteering in a homeless or refugee shelter, or helping people safely vote. This is not to say I don’t believe that certain forms of art are capable of promoting and instigating social change.

    So I will perform and narrate Edward Lear’s text, with all its humor, overtly phallic symbolism** and allusions to interracial love. Why not? I might even perform it from the perspective of a Jumbly Girl.

    Illustration by Edward Gorey

    *I would share the link, but my automatic embedder is giving me grief.

    **Ok maybe my mind is in the gutter.

  • Special Sounds: Describe rather than Prescribe

    I tend to get caught up in issues of notation, so it’s time for me to step back. Keep it simple.

    If you are a composer looking for a special kind of sound, but aren’t sure how to notate it, your solution may be as easy as adding a bit of text describing what you want.

    This seems like a no-brainer, but many composers feel compelled to add prescriptions rather than descriptions. A prescriptive direction tells the player how to execute the effect and does not describe the intended result. Unless you are a player of the instrument in question, avoid prescriptive indications like the plague. Here is an example: a prescriptive indication might say “use lots of air”, or “tight embouchure”.

    A more useful, descriptive indication for “use lots of air” might be “match the sound of the string harmonics” or “imitate a bamboo flute”. Matching string sounds and producing bamboo sounds are two very different techniques, but both using an airy type of sound, so it is helpful to have a descriptive indication to know which of these types of airy sound the composer might have in mind.

    The prescription “tight embouchure” might be “thin, reedy sound” or “like a buzz saw”. Again, very different means of production, so a description is helpful.

    I hope this has made your composing day a bit easier 🙂