*Regarding Placement

The word ‘placement‘ is a powerful word as it describes a position in both space and time relative to other events…In this post I’ll be dealing mainly with this in a musical context, but it applies to many others. Here’s a sample of a piece I wrote last week late one evening:

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I by KevinPollard

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Gravity is the force that binds physical objects together, with air being the spatial medium in which they are arranged. Time is the force that binds a piece of music together, with silence being the temporal medium in which the notes are arranged. While there is a pulse or regularity that is normally dictated by gravity or time, the mediums are flexible…so it’s how you pull against a rhythmic structure, that makes a(n) : piece of music / architectural design / interior space / oratory / fragrance / food dish : …more interesting. Eg. Spaces that ‘defy’ gravity, music that ‘pulls’ against the beat, etc

With placement comes emphasis. Micro timing and incremental changes of position or aspect hopefully mean that you start listening in high resolution, rather than the low resolution predictability of a rigid well-trodden sequence, when you tend not to really hear what is happening as you are actually waiting for that point/chord/cadence which you know is…just around the corner. If you start to stretch or manipulate expectations, it starts to be become more engaging.

Of course predictability can be comforting, the key of this piece is built around a regular A maj7 drone, but with a few twists thrown in to make it less obvious. Similar to making effective points in an essay, it aims not to wander too far away from the title and start rambling, at which point the argument starts getting lost and it becomes ineffective, or worse, irrelevant.

I remember years ago as a child when I used to play local piano competitions, normally in a church hall. There was a set piece and each kid had to play it…one after the other traipsing up to the piano, adjusting the squeaky seat before letting rip with their version, which was adjudicated by a panel of stern looking people. On paper, two hours of listening to the same piece being played over and over on the same instrument sounds like a form of torture…but it was fascinating, because every kid played it completely differently, sometimes to the point that it was unrecognisable. Faster, slower, more rigid and staccato, more languid and legato, duff notes, louder, quieter, mechanical, with flair, etc…even more so if, like me, you were one of the kids who actually had to play the piece (as you knew it inside out) so you could really hear the differences.

There are many direct parallels between creative disciplines, some direct, some more oblique, this doesn’t even scratch the surface, but I’ve started research that takes this further, to see how deeply the lessons learnt in one discipline can inform another…but suffice to say that the concept of ‘placement’, both physically (in a musical context: by way of the intervals that exist within a chord, or the pitch of a melodic note) and temporal (by way of how these chords or notes are arranged relative to each other in time) creates a specific and fragile emotion, something distinct yet not too unfamiliar. Move any of the parameters and it’s a different beast. These subtleties are what is responsible for ’swing’ in jazz and for most other types of music to ‘flow’. If you can say what you want to say with less, the message is often clearer and more powerful.

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As a crude experiment, now try reading this article again, making a few substitutions:

Substitute the word ‘listening’ for ’seeing’, the word ‘piece’ for ‘theatre’, the word ‘key’ for ’style’, the words ‘timing’ and ‘intervals’ for ‘distance between structural elements’, the word ‘play’ for ‘build’, the word ‘note’ for ‘dowel’ , the word ‘chord’ for ‘chair’ , the word ‘louder’ for ‘brighter’ , the word ‘quieter’ for ‘dimmer’, the word ‘instruments’ for ‘materials’, and the word ‘piano’ for ‘mahogany’.

Thus translating a sentence such as: ‘I am going to play a piano piece in the key of B, that starts louds and ends softly’ yields:

‘I am going to build a mahogany theatre in Baroque style, the sequence (of spaces) starts in a bright (porch) and ends (in a) dim (lounge).’

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This is but one example…try it in a culinary context, a publishing context, or a new technology context (a tablet computer called iPad in the key of Apple anyone…?)

So in the case of a temporal/spatial comparison, you can start to see how the ‘pull’ to the structure/rhythm/tempo of the piece starts to behave rather like the pull of gravity when you start to translate it to a spatial medium. For example, time stretching a piece of music or slowing down its tempo would be akin to taking a table design and starting to control relative gravity: so its structure becomes elastic and you started to have much more freedom…what would that look like? Beautiful? A mess? If you increase the scale and the complexity (orchestras and buildings), the constraints start to change. But it always needs to be relevant to the question being asked or the point being made.

These concepts informed why I did this piece, which was improvised in realtime, with one pass for each instrument. It is still a draft but I aim to expand it into an improv album…for now it would be good to hear what you experience when you hear it. Put your feet up, (hopefully) enjoy and let me know!