Introduction: an experiment takes shape…
In the scheme of things, not being able to play music together is definitely a first world problem. All the same, the events of 2020 led many artists and musicians to approach what they do with renewed perspective. This project is just one example of many. This is the story of what it became, and why.
I.
Thrown into disorientating and unprecedented circumstances, many of us musicians spent Spring 2020 trying to keep our playing ‘in shape’. Perhaps this response - which on the face of it seemed a bit irrational, given that no performances were happening - was a way of retaining a sense of purpose. Yet as the weeks went by, I and many others found that the thing we missed most was not really about playing at all: it was responding to fellow musicians.
That feeling, where you’re listening and bouncing off the people around you with absorbed intensity, and experiencing something like a loss of self, is reminiscent of what athletes call “being in the zone”. In my experience, this feeling is almost completely elusive when playing alone: it really depends on others. (I’d even go as far as to say that too much individual practice can be a serious barrier to achieving that state of mind, when you finally turn up to play with colleagues!) In any case, the search for that intoxicating, exhilarating state of mind seems to motivate musicians in practically all genres and styles of music. And recently, we all spent many weeks and months being acutely aware of its absence.
Even classical players like me felt this so viscerally that we - shock, horror - actually resorted to ***TECHNOLOGY***. Right now, you’re starting out on a project which has its origins, like many others of its kind, in an itch that needed scratching. In the first place, it was recording that provided what I was searching for. But as you’ll see, over time the concept morphed into something a bit different; and eventually I hope it will shed that technological clothing entirely, to be more plainly focused on music - and specifically on the delights of playing counterpoint.
As you’ll be aware, given that over a year has passed since the first UK lockdown, this particular response has taken a really long time to come to fruition! But I’ve had a great time working on it so far, and I hope you get something out of it too.
Chasing tails is really two metaphors in one. The first, given by the title and the logo on the homepage, is the kind of playfulness you see when a puppy “goes after itself”. There’s no point: it’s just play for the sake of play. It doesn’t need anybody else. It’s cheap. The idea of a goal is totally illusory. And if you catch it, nothing happens. Lots of fun is had in the process.
This really resonated with my experience of using recording to conjure ensemble illusions. (I’m sure you can imagine a few pleasing similarities!) It made me chuckle, too, that musically, the spinning puppy is an almost perfect analogue for canons or rounds. It really does sound as though the same animal is chasing after itself, going around and around, forever destined to remain just out of reach. During lockdown, clearly I was so desperate for a musical playmate I invented an imaginary one. A tail to chase, if you like.
After a while, I realised that it doesn’t even have to be your own tail. In freer genres of counterpoint, for instance, it’s more like a few different animals (and their personalities!) chasing each other in different configurations. This is where the second metaphor comes in: of branches intertwining. I wanted to see if it was possible to use recording to capture counterpoint’s most rewarding qualities: the simultaneous sense of independence and relation between several musical lines. It’s a bit like complex networks of roots and branches, which weave, duck and dive around each other, while remaining connected by a common origin.
Would it be possible to imitate some of this sense of give-and-take on my own? Even if it turned out to be impossible, and/or an artistically incoherent waste of time, that in itself might be interesting. Either way, it would surely reveal something about why we value playing with other people as much as we do. At the very least, it might make me better able to verbalise why I missed it so much; and finally, it’d surely prove even more of a relief when we were able to play together once more.
II.
When I embarked on this idea, I’d already done a fair bit of messing about with recording myself, and even some collaborative remote multitracking. That’s something I now do a lot, with Kay Stephen, but back in Spring 2020 we simply hadn’t spent the time working out how to replicate the subtlety of timing and detail you get in real ensembles. Again, it wasn’t just collaboration that players like me were craving, but something rather more elusive.
Recording remotely, even with musicians you know really well, can feel a bit cold. Sometimes it’s simply damage limitation, a pale, routine imitation of the real thing. However much you try, that ‘zone’ is far, far away. I suspect that’s because you’re never able to be on the front foot, creatively: you’re always reactive. In general, when playing with others you’re certainly not trying to pin things down excessively, or even really to make any decisions. Instead, you’re looking for that balance, whereby every musical gesture is totally committed, yet also leaves wiggle room within it for others to bounce off, or run with. Openness is key, because you’re usually aiming to influence your colleagues in some subtle way, while also remaining permanently (and willingly) open to the influence of others.
In the early stage of messing about with multitracking, I could feel my musical priorities moving away from this in ways I didn’t enjoy. It’s really, really hard to hang onto that open, balanced mindset, and extremely easy to gravitate towards click-tracks, prioritizing accuracy and tonal consistency above all. In my experience, frustration constitutes the route from the former to the latter.
Unsurprisingly, then, most of those early attempts were draped in the kind of drably predictable conformity that nobody wants or needs. In its way it was interesting, not least because it was the most vivid personal experience I’d ever had of what the scholar Nicholas Cook has described as a tendency to treat classical music as ‘sounded writing’.[1] Although this concept has undoubtedly been influential, especially in the past, I’ve never found it a very appealing idea. My colleagues and I have collectively spent years trying to get away from this impression when we play in person, but it’s amazing how quickly it becomes reality when confronted with a microphone, time, and your own perfectionism.
III.
Musicians layering multiple takes of their own playing has now become a real staple of the internet, and especially social media. Clearly I’m a bit late to this party, over a year on. My excuse is that what I’m attempting here necessarily involves a slow process. I focus on niche music, never use a click, work in audio only, and - most importantly - care most about the search for detail, irregularity and responsiveness between voices. As you’ll hear, efficiency, coordination and consistency were (and are) quite low down my list of priorities - but there is still plenty to be perfectionist about when recording like this.
I especially wanted to see if it was possible to capture some of the more elusive qualities in which I’ve been interested for a long time: a sense of swing, looking for different directions and ‘angles’ within notes and in turns between phrases, and broader topics like the idea of conversation, and finding vivid emotional/pictoral characterisation. Larger-scale variation in tempo and mood is an especially interesting challenge: how do you get that organic sense of coherence, when working like this? In short, I can report that it’s difficult, but really interesting. If you listen to the tracks, of course I hope such things don’t sound overly contrived. As every musician or artist knows, sometimes it’s the hardest thing to draw a line and say you’re satisfied.
This first volume is a true experiment. It’s an attempt at summoning some of the appealing qualities of ensemble playing. Of course these can’t replace real ‘in-the-room’ music-making, and not just for musical reasons. Conjuring space using audio processing is more possible than ever before, but it remains a serious challenge. Limitations aside, I don’t think there’s anything lost by exploring how aspects of that wonderful hidden language of exchange might be creatively adapted to new or adverse situations, such as the ones we encountered in 2020. It’s also very good practice, because the microphone is extremely unforgiving.
As we start to emerge from the pandemic, chasing tails will start to shift focus towards recording proper ensembles, and more decidedly onto the detail of counterpoint. We’ll explore what it’s actually like to play in a group, and look into the music in more detail. I want to get into meanings and feelings, the fascinating historical story, and get far beyond the artificiality of this recording situation.
And yet this multitracked approach has proved unexpectedly revealing. So much so, in fact, that I’'ll be following that thread plenty more, both in writings and recordings. That’s not because I prefer making music this way; on the contrary! It’s because working like this has one enormous virtue: it shows just how much is going on when musicians play together. By giving ourselves a barrier this big, we shine a spotlight on many wonderful, non-arbitrary things that ensemble players do, which might be taken for granted in normal circumstances.
In the rest of this (long!) introduction I want to explain a bit about how it feels to record like this, and just why I’ve found it so thought-provoking.
IV.
Almost as soon as I started experimenting with multitracking, it became apparent that the process was going to rely on two key things: anticipation and visualisation. In practice, the most reliable way to make it work was to play mostly with my eyes shut, and ‘watch the notes’. (What I mean by this is that you visualise the sounds as ‘physical’ trajectories, as if they were moving in space). It’s a bit like what one tends to do in the room, with colleagues, except much more intensely focused. It takes a lot more mental effort to get out of one’s own headspace, without the stimulation of other senses! But it’s not that simple. As it turns out, there are lots of possible approaches to the layering process, and that’s one of the key factors in generating that give-and-take illusion. I won’t talk any more about that just yet, other than to say I’ve changed my mind a ridiculous number of times!
There are a few things in my favour here. I’m recording on the viol, and groups (or ‘consorts’) of these instruments normally sound very unified, tonally, which is great, because it means recording multiple parts on one instrument isn’t a total, confusing disaster! That’s not to say that there aren’t challenges - there are still plenty. But as you’ll hear, the instrument has quite distinct registers and resonances, and that means it doesn’t sound quite as odd as you occasionally find with multitracked violins and cellos.
The viol’s warm tone means it’s very well suited to recording in general. This holds even with a close-mic setup, and I’ll talk more in other articles about the constantly-evolving production side of this project. Another helpful feature is frets - just old strings tied around the neck - meaning that intonation is a lot less labour intensive than on more familiar bowed string instruments. It leaves more room to concentrate on expressive detail in the bow, and for working out how to get the parts to talk to each other, which is the real goal here.
Despite these relatively favourable conditions, I don’t think I realised at first how challenging it was going to be to introduce the expressive variation I wanted, while also allowing the parts to interact coherently. There are so many gestural and shaping possibilities in this music that it’s often hard to catch the trajectory of a part that’s been laid down on its own. Even if you’re perfectly happy with a version recorded in isolation, you often find that the logic it embodies makes no sense at all when combined with the other part - which brings its own, equally stubborn, demands. What you’re often left with is a bunch of parts that do a great job of following, but a terrible job of contributing! And this means everything sounds really passive, and sometimes a bit lifeless, even if the playing is perfectly fine. This ‘one-way’ bug is probably the biggest contrast with real ensemble playing. It’s also the ultimate source of pretty much all of the conceptual hurdles that stand in the way of creating a sense of responsiveness in these kinds of recordings. I’m happy to admit that I feel a long way from getting over all of those hurdles - but the point of this project is really to find things out along the way, so that doesn’t really bother me too much.
Interestingly, having eventually alighted on a method that gave rise to something reasonably coherent, listening back to the finished tracks one part at a time turned out to be absolutely awful! Individual lines sounded horrendously, bizarrely irregular - more than I’d ever have believed. I didn’t play any differently, I don’t think, to how I would have done if working with real-life colleagues! I’ve never been so aware of how much ensemble playing seems to differ from a ‘solo’ mindset. Clearly, irregularities within each individual voice are reconciled or subsumed in some way by the larger context of the ensemble sound. The sheer extent of those irregularities, and the way they just seem to melt away, aurally, when all the parts are heard together, was a big (and fascinating) surprise for me.
V.
To finish, then. There’s undoubtedly something a bit odd about multitracks, however they’re done. It’s a very good thing that such techniques are never going to replace real, ‘in-the-flesh’ ensembles. Any responsiveness you can achieve is never quite the same as it would be in the room, for all sorts of reasons. Neither will it ever sound quite like a real space, however sophisticated the processing. But there’s an even more fundamental limitation, which is that the tone production and musical habits of any individual player are extremely hard to escape. You can certainly attempt to differentiate them, but even then, it remains tricky to get past ‘uncanny valley’ when you layer the takes. I’d always been aware of the fact that a significant portion of my playing technique operates on levels below conscious awareness, but there’s nothing like trying to change it, to make you realise how little control you can actually exert over your motions once they’re well-practiced!
To overcome these kinds of limitations properly will require a far more radical approach to my own ‘creative personality’ than I was able to attempt in the first volume. There’s an awful long way to go - but that journey is the reason I’m writing all this! After all, the flip side of strangeness is that it’s interesting, so why not embrace it? So, alongside articles about counterpoint, this project will also contain plenty of thoughts on the nature of musical instincts, decision making, and artistic conviction.
—
This project, now it’s finally coalesced, aims to do two main things. First, it’ll be your personal evangelist / enthusiast / guide for counterpoint (delete as appropriate). So I’ll be making loads of recordings, explaining why I think this music is valuable and interesting, and generally offering as immersive a perspective as I can. The recordings are intended to be listened to and enjoyed, but I don’t like to think of them as ‘products’ very much, and still less as ‘interpretations’. I see them as markers on the road, or fairly arbitrary stop-off points in an evolving process. The second thing is to use this terrific repertoire as a way in to various bigger questions - some of which I’ve raised here - about what it means to play old, niche music in the modern technological age.
Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you enjoy the ride!
[1] Cook, Nicholas. (2013). Between art and science: Music as performance. Journal of the British Academy, 2, 1–25. DOI 10.5871/jba/002.001 (Link to PDF)
