Lee Shih-Yang

Bodies Performing Sound

I see improvisation as much more than a musical technique. While watching the performance of Joëlle Landrée, solo and with Lee Shih-Yang (November 4, Nankang Theatre, Taipei), half of my attention goes to the mimicry, body language and theatrical techniques of Landrée, who is ‘acting with’ her double bass as much as she is playing it. She talks through it, of course, but also to it. She treats it sometimes as a human being, or perhaps an animal, as she feigns anger or joy towards it. At one moment she gently kicked the lower part of her bass with her foot, as if kicking a dog bothering her.

INTERCONNECTED CIRCUITS

Joëlle Léandre responds visibly to her own music: almost as if it is not her making that music, but player and played are two; and she responds visibily to Lee Shih-Yang’s music and stage persona. In this way she sets up some sort of loops or interconnected circuits with the following elements:

  • a body performing, producing sound
  • a body responding to its own sound
  • a body playing with and for another performer in/through sound and in/through bodily gestures, facial expressions
  • a body listening and responding to that other performer in/through sound and in/through bodily gestures, facial expressions
  • and also, a body playing music and acting out the music for an audience
  • and responding to the audience (although rarely, in this case).

 

The music is the central theme of all these actions, it pervades it, surrounds it, generates it, steers it. But looking at the music alone would greatly limit our understanding of what is going on.

Joëlle Léandre’s performance was full of humor in more ways than music only can convey. Music in itself can certainly convey humor (I think of Dutch conceptual artist Wim T. Schippers playing a well-known Bach piece on piano, making all sorts of mistakes, trying to correct himself, repeating phrases, moving faster and slower, in the music-theatre piece Hoogwater voorheen Laagwater, 2016). But sometimes the musician herself becomes not just the medium of the music or sound, but something more like an actor or performer, aware of the fact that she is also playing a role onstage. She might exaggerate musical gestures in more than simply practical ways, she might use the body and facial expressions to convey messages that go far beyond what musicians express ‘as music’.

 

Léandre’s face showed some sort of running commentary to her own music and to the interaction with Lee Shih-Yang and at times made the audience laugh. By doing that, she puts the musician’s efforts between brackets, distances herself from it, provides some sort of criticism even as she is making music. It enhances the important idea in improvisation that the music itself, too, can be a running commentary on what the performers do.

 

You could say that some (in fact: many) musicians provide this commentary more discreetly, by only responding in music and not or not clearly in gesture, face, or body. Léandre on the other hand chose to enlarge her response through these means, making it less discrete, less hidden, less vague to the audience. Yet there were also moments when her playing, and her playing only, was a comment: this is one of the most common patterns in improvisation, and certainly so in jazz, where the musicians ‘comment’ on each other, ‘talk’ to each other. They build and exchange phrases, affirm and challenge each other, take the point of one musician further by moving on with it. This too was happening Saturday in Nankang theatre: rhythms, melodic patterns, noises and clusters going back and forth between Léandre and Lee, without obvious physical expression going along with it.

 

Intense music that requires concentrated listening, and where we can hardly be sure that what I hear is what the musicians intend, but where we still try to figure out what Lee is doing with Léandre’s ideas, and vice versa (of course, a perfectly valid alternative is not to care about this at all, but ‘simply enjoy’ the music, without figuring things out that you cannot know for sure anyway).

 

Music itself naturally triggers all sorts of physical, facial and other expressions, fitting to the roles of dedicated, serious musicians. We see it all the time, in video clips, classical performances, jazz: any music style has a number of ways in which the musician seeks ways to express music’s manifold qualities. Just some musicians, more than others, go way beyond the musical language itself. One can debate if this contributes to the music or distracts from it: purists might be bothered and uninterested in musicians acting out their performance too much. There are plenty of examples of exaggerated and silly theatricality in musical performance. One that comes to mind is many modern, female pipa players (a Chinese type of lute held upright in front of the player), who excessively sway their bodies and heads. I mostly prefer the old pipa practice where the music does not need all that visual display; it usually sounds better. Certain kinds of theatricality add nothing to the music but commercial value; it sometimes only serves to cover up a lack of genuine musical quality.

 

If the music still comes first, though, the expansion of the performative language can add many layers of meaning and expression to an already rich, interesting performance, instead of peeling off those layers. In rare cases, performers truly and convincingly embody multiple languages, fluently blending the musical performance mode with other ones, like dance, movement, facial expressions. In India, earlier this year, I had a chance to see a live performance if singer Venkatesh Kumar. He is an absolute master of of his raga improvisations and also of his body. In several long drawn-out pieces he used his arms, hands and facial expressions to express his journey through the dense network of musical connections that makes up a raga. Fascinating stuff!

 

So far for the non-musical gestures. I guess some of this can be gleaned also from a brand new book that I hope to read soon. It will certainly interest those who want to know more about the why’s and how’s of improvising: Marcel Cobussen’s The Field of Musical Improvisation, an e-book that is free for download since a few weeks.

 

Last night was the first concert with Makigami Koichi. Tonight is the closing concert of the TIIMF here in Taipei.

 

Saturday November 25

Zhongshan Hall, Taipei, 19:30

Closing concert of the Taiwan International Improvised Music Festival

With Porta Chiusa; and Makigami Koichi (voice, theremin, Jew’s harp, shakuhachi), Tung Chaoming (guzheng), Mark van Tongeren (voice, sruti box, Jew’s harp), and others

 

Sunday November 26

Reykjavik Lab /愛雷克雅維克實驗室, Taipei

13:30-17:00, workshop Improvise!

Details and tickets on Accupass, or send a message to 0910382749

Jaap Blonk at TIIF in Taiwan

Last night fellow Dutchman Jaap Blonk arrived in Taiwan for a couple of gigs and a workshop, as part of the first Taiwan International Improvised Music Festival. I have the honour to host him the first few days. Several local improvisers and I will share the stage with him, today in Hsinchu and Thursday in Taipei.

Holland'sBankroetDoorDada

Jaap is a composer and vocal artist, best known for his interpretation of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate, one of the founding – and lasting – classics of the Dada movement which shook the art world between 1916 and 1924. I first met Jaap in 1995, when we shared the stage at the presentation of a book about Dada in The Netherlands, Holland’s Bankroet door Dada.

Last night we discussed, among many other things, the merits of being born as a Dutch-speaker. To start with, this makes it easy to understand and correctly pronounce German texts, and texts derived from the sounds of German speech, like the Ursonate. Someone from, say, an English speaking country, would have much more trouble getting the pronunciation of all the vowels and diphtongs (two vowels combined) right, not to mention the consonants (the guttural ones are particularly notorious for foreign speakers). And growing up in a small country like The Netherlands, it is almost natural for us to learn to speak the languages of the surrounding countries, so that many Dutch speak (and know the particularities of the sounds of) German, English and French. In addition, Jaap noted, we have all the varieties of the ‘r’ sound (we have a guttural r, a softer and a harder ‘velar’ r, and an r with a flapping tongue). Jaap has incorporated many of these speech elements in his sound poetry, which is sometimes based on actual spoken language, sometimes on his own imaginary language, and also on abstract procedures based on or derived from speech, extending, finally, into various musical/sonic dimensions such as breath, shrieks, groans, etcetera. Besides composing and performing with these elements and developing a sizable body of original works, Jaap’s stage presence and inimitable mimicry has brought him world fame. His current tour in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, The Phillipines and Taiwan is the second one in Asia, after another tour he did in Japan last Summer.

ursonate_2003

He told me he had performed in Shanghai years ago at a poetry festival, where he was asked by the organisers to do something with a Chinese text. He studied the text with someone speaking Chinese, to get the sounds right. But then, when turning it into sound poetry and given the difficulties of the Chinese tone system for a speaker not used to a tonal language, the poem’s meaning came out completely different, possibly, Jaap explained, including many strange messages he was not aware of.

Besides, it is a different thing to deconstruct the elements of speech for a Westerner, whose understanding of speech sound is based on more or less phonetic writing, and for a Mandarin speaker, whose understanding of speech sound is based on Chinese character forming complete syllables – in fact, complete words. To create sound poetry à la Schwitters poses even bigger challenges for from Mandarin speakers than English speakers.

 

December 1, 19:30, concert of Jaap Blonk, with guest appearances of Lee Shih-Yang and Mark van Tongeren, National Chiao Tung University (Hsinchu),

December 2, 19:30-21:30. lecture/workshop with Jaap Blonk, Nanhai Gallery, No.3, Lane 19, Sec. 2, Chongcing S. Rd., Zhongzheng District, Taipei

December 3, 19:30-21:30, concert Jaap Blonk with Tung Chaoming, Lee Shih-Yang, Lin Hsiaofeng, Lin Huikuan, Liu Fangyi, Chang Yousheng, Terry, Mark van Tongeren. Nanhai Theater, No.47, Nanhai Rd., Zhongzheng Distict, Taipei

Tickets for the festival are here.

More information about the full program of the Taiwan International Improvised Music Festival is here.

TIIMF2015line-up

 

Sainkho Namtchylak returns to Taipei

sainkho- DOM Moscow 2005-
Tuvan folksong / extended vocal techniques / throat singing-diva Sainkho performs once again in Taiwan. Sainkho was born in Soviet-era Tuva, in a Siberian outpost within eyesight of Mongolia. She developed more than average singing skills and during the late 1980s she took advantage of the political/cultural reformations (perestroika) to set out on an innovative career that soon put her in the international ranks of outstanding, progressive singers.

She moved to Austria in 1994, and was begged to come back to Tuva by president Sholban Kara-ool this month, while she visited Tuva.

She established her name with sweat and original interpretations of Tuvan songs in the early 1990s and experimental work. Nowadays much of Sainkho’s output is ecclectic, avant-garde, with an electrifying, ear-catching aura to it. She is an amazingly busy and energetic performer, who constantly travels the world to collaborate with ever new musicians, pouring out CD after CD, and re-inventing herself every year.

Exactly ten years ago, she gave a memorable concert in Zhongshan Hall, and a throat singing workshop in TNUA (reported in Chung Mingder’s book OM. Overtone singing as meditation). At that time she brought with her German Popov, an old friend of mine from Amsterdam (born in the Ukraine), and singer/guitarist Caspar David Sacker from Austria. I am happy to see that this time she works with a local musician (and again a friend of mine), the Taipei-based pianist Lee Shih-Yang. Also taking part will be Dickson Dee, a Hong Kong sound artist.

This concert is highly recommended for all people interested in Tuvan/Mongolian music, throat singing and new vocal techniques. When I spread this message through my Fusica newsletter there were still tickets left. Now there aren’t…  But I had reserved a bunch of tickets for the students of my R E S O N A N C E  course through Lee Shih-Yang. If you are interested respond quick (reply below) and I can see if he still has a ticket for the October 5 show for you . Tickets are 500 NT$ minus a little discount. Hope to see you there!

2014新點子樂展Innovation Series – 人聲風景「即興篇」
SoundScape-Improvisation Across the Horizon

Videolink Youku
Taipei,

Experimental Theatre

October 4 19:00

October 5, 14:30