Bodies
written by Anya Yermakova
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 14 Fellow
Bodies. My encounters with trained, virtuosic, sensitive musicking bodies leave me again and again with: what can I do as a composer to give them permission to really play? As in, be playful, play around, center the interpretation on jugar más que tocar. Center the interpretación – performance – in the interpretation, even in a reading. Notation so boring that they might have to invent ways to entertain themselves? Indications filled with absurdities or paradoxes so they find joy in the impossibility of their execution? Scores with color? Scores that ask for interactivity? Scores that ask the players to listen with touch, or with smell, or…?
While my language is an ongoing experiment, the driving force is consistent. To the question, “is that what you had in mind here, Anya?” I most often want to say, “My state of mind has been updated by what I just heard!” I’m not avoiding the question. I want to create ecologies, in which sound-worlds emanate from body-worlds, in which music is the result of bodies playing playfully, and in which the composer is not an external mastermind but is a part of the ecology, too.
Bodies in time. It’s extraordinary how many different renditions of the “human sculpture” happened in just one rehearsal in Boonville. With each take, I saw the bodies transform into ways-of-playing less and less defined by the things they are good at – replacing patterns with curiosities. With each take, I heard sounds that were new, in part because the relationships between the human bodies and the instrument bodies were new. And the coalescing of orbiting bodies into a “human sculpture” – sounding, in touch – with each take grew more and more “logical,” it seemed, even for the players.
By the end, I was day-dreaming of another movement in which I isolate this section and ask to repeat it twenty-five times, with the indication that the repetition is intended to encourage divergence and difference, not a rehearsal towards the “perfect take.” And still I wonder, how to notate that best, how to indicate just enough intention without overprescribing outcome, or perhaps to not include any indications at all? How to be legible rather than simply perplexing at “why in the world are we doing this twenty-five times…?” In other words, how to think of a score as a tool for trust?
I trust that, if these musicking bodies are in a state of playfulness and listening, then the music will be filled with curiosities, peculiarities and even novelties. Repetition of the score will sculpt the music, but the score must be ecological – dynamic, contextual, mediating trust.
Trust – the non-trivial pre-condition to playfulness.
Sense-scape – the toolbox of playing.
Bouncing off – the interpretation/interpretación.
Elasticity – the listening.
My work continues in asking: can I provide a journey so paradoxically unfamiliar-yet-safe that in order to hold on, one has no choice but to channel all their training into playfulness? Which, it seems, turns back on me: how much permission can I give myself – to play – with all my multiple selves, yet with enough neuroplasticity to let go of ambitious, trained worlds in favor of ones that center playfulness for me, too?
;)
Anya Yermakova is a composer, sound artist, and a historian/philosopher of logic. Trained originally in classical piano performance, her compositions work with somatic awareness and scientific embodied knowledge. Her recent works include a Concerto for Charango and Orchestra and an electro-acoustic album mytho-logicking. Anya holds a PhD from Harvard University in History of Science and in Critical Media Practice, was previously a professor of sound at Oberlin College, has held artist residencies at Djerassi, UCross and with the Ocean Memory Project, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St Louis.
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