Bailey's Flamenco, Loss Consecration, Therapeutic Humming
Hello and thank you for joining us for our fourteenth Issue. Today, as on all other days, we offer a few recommendations: a master improvisor’s perspective on Flamenco, a forlorn description of contemporary liturgical avant-garde music, and a therapeutic reflection on resonance.
Recommendation: Derek Bailey on Flamenco in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music
A lot of my recent music listening is aspirational—trying to elevate moods or reach toward ideas, searching, escaping, rising up. Or reaching back, in memory, to find some previous strength. This past week though, it’s been more about survival and sustenance, protecting peace. I’ve been revisiting the music of guitarist Derek Bailey, specifically Pieces for Guitar (2002), Solo Guitar (1971), and Music and Dance (1980), the last of which is a recording of his accompaniment collaboration with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka on a Parisian rooftop. Although Bailey’s free playing covers a lot of ground, the records I’ve been listening to contain a lot of vulnerable, at times harrowing music. Guitar notes are picked tautly, with faint resonance drifting in miniature pulses before withering away. I’ve caught myself laughing at the mood of desperation the music provides, Bailey’s playing privately soundtracking the most merciless MTA commute possible. Beneath the brutal ice flow of its mood, and within the space afforded in Bailey’s playing, I feel rigor and warmth. I feel free through the music’s freedom.
I picked up a copy of Bailey’s book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music years ago, and have been reading it while also revisiting Bailey’s music. It’s a concise but also deep text, examining the nature of improvisation spanning Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and “free” music. This week, I’m honing in specifically on his writing on flamenco music—although maybe in some future issues I’d love to write more on the chapters on baroque and organ music, specifically. Within flamenco, Bailey insists on his surprise by “an almost total absence of any literature, reliable or otherwise, concerning [the documentary material] of flamenco,” instead relying on his conversations with Spanish composer and guitarist Paco Peña. To him, even the small amount of documentary evidence he could uncover resembled very little to what he could accurately recognize from his experiences of and conversations about the music of flamenco.
Peña, born in Cordoba, accompanied numerous dance troupes before starting his own Flamenco Puro group in 1972. He also gave accounts to Bailey of the ethnographic origins of flamenco in Andalucia and Catalonia—and how nomadic groups in the 1400s mingled in Cordoba (the then capital of the Western Islamic world) with Andalucian folklore. It wasn’t until a period between 1860 and 1910 where an era of “Cafe Cantantes” emerged—special “tablaos” were dedicated wholly to flamenco music, while many participants “kept the music for themselves and never performed outside their communities.” For Peña, a complete flamenco performance is a group performance with singing, dancing, and instrumental music, containing possibilities for improvisation by all participants. The role of the guitarist is to help the singer or dancer to bring out the best of their talent. However, when the guitarist performs solo, they must also convey the whole atmosphere of flamenco.
Bailey then goes into an analysis of the rhythmic and harmonic structure of flamenco, and how improvisation is interwoven into its form. I’m almost tempted to just transcribe the entirety of that here, but I suppose that’s the point of a recommendation; I recommend reading Bailey’s analysis of the rhythmic unit of the compas, the variability of harmony, its construction of basic chords, tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant, the Phrygian mode used as “passing chords,” as well as falsetas, or melodic fragments which constitute the only predetermined melodic material used. It all makes me want to pick up the guitar once again and try to find a flamenco master to study with.
Bailey asks Peña if he would ever play something that interested him but was not characteristically flamenco. Peña responded:
“It would be a failure, but not a very unhappy failure. You see it as a failure because I should really be able to resolve what I want to do within the idiom of flamenco.”
Bailey then writes:
“No idiomatic improviser is concerned with improvisation as some sort of separate, isolated activity. What they are absolutely concerned about is the idiom; for them improvisation serves the idiom and is the expression of that idiom. But it still remains that one of the main effects of improvisation is on the performer, providing them with a creative involvement and maintenance of their commitment. So, in these two functions, improvisation supplies a way of guaranteeing the authenticity of the idiom, which also, avoiding the stranglehold of academic authority, provides the motor for change and continuous development.”
I’m struck by Bailey’s dialogue with flamenco within the context of how “out” his own guitar playing is. Here, wrapped in the idiomatic austerity of Bailey’s improvisations alongside the abstract movement of Min Tanaka’s “Body Weather” practice, I also hear a bit of Peña—the pulse of flamenco rousing behind Bailey’s gnarled notes—an utterly committed zapateado footwork, stomping toward its absolute limit.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: “Hören...Verstummen” - Messe basse für Sopran, Orgel und Schlagzeug (ad lib.), Dominik Susteck
This week I’m looking at another strange piece of music that came across the desk. The instagram account @CatholicCheck posted a clip of an Ash Wednesday service in Cologne, Germany of a performance for vocalist and organ with the heading: “Worst Catholic Liturgical Music Ever Heard.” The excerpt is hilariously “out,” with a jazzed-up, atonal vocal cadenza floating across a cacophony of improvised organ playing. It’s pretty striking in juxtaposition to the clip’s panning shots of a beautiful gothic cathedral - the priest’s eyes shut tight, hands gripping at his vestments in a contemplative grimace, sitting in a sort of a priestly cuck chair behind the vocalist at the pulpit, who presides over an elderly German congregation (we can’t see their faces, but it’s not hard to imagine that they may prefer something nicer on the ears). Amidst a dogpile in the comments, some defenders of the avant-garde suggested one source of the clip, attributing it in part to organist/composer Dominik Susteck. It appears this particular excerpt may in fact be an improvisation between the vocalist and Susteck, and I have not been able to confirm this, so I’ve chosen to explore here an available work by Susteck “Hören...Verstummen” - Messe basse für Sopran, Orgel und Schlagzeug (ad lib.), to pry a bit into the world behind the reel. While I am going to both describe and razz this composition on a musical level, I’m fascinated by the persistence of a relationship like this between the church, its presumed musical audience, and the old postures of a European avant-garde.
While the title of the piece (translating to “Hearing… Falling Silent”) is an allusion to a phrase often found in post-war literary reckonings with the Holocaust, the composition is, at least formally, structured around an abridged, traditional latin Mass: Introitus, Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. It begins with a George Crumb-like atmosphere of mystery - lovely dissonant chords in the organ and soft, dynamic syllabic hissing from the Soprano. All was well for me until the percussion began a periodic rattling of papers - first in piano and then finally in forte: ultimately announcing a quintuple-forte (fortississississimo, for the Italian speakers) tritone chord in the organ. This wouldn’t strike me as so distracting in its compulsive, extended technique if it felt like the composer’s introduction of the sonic world was a little bit deserving of this type of expedient textural complication. The Kyrie proceeded in a harmless fashion, chewing on little atonal motifs that were traded between the vocalist and the organ (Lord, have mercy). The performances are expressive and expert and certain moments of striking dynamic and harmonic convergence transcend what feels like a syntactical pointlessness in the composition. The Sanctus is maybe my favorite of these movements as it ventures beyond the anchorage of tritone harmony and simplistic “very soft, now very loud” types of gestures. There’s a core strength to the musical ideas which emerges, however for no apparent reason, except maybe the necessity to account for the Sanctus’ longer textual passage. The Agnus Dei returns to the mysterioso of the Introitus - this time with vocal glissandi (no more rattling papers, but there is a direction to “scratch with shoes”). For the first and only time, the composition settles in itself and allows space for the absorption of its quite beautiful sonority here. A compelling and ominous call and response takes place between a soft staccato organ and the vocalist’s return to articulated “S” sounds, before a bit of Messianic foolishness ensues: a whistle, a cluster chord and that’s the Lamb of God, volks.
I’m not going to contextualize the history of this kind of avant-garde musical rhetoric here, except to note the long institutional history that is shared between the church and the European musical elite (Krzysztof Penderecki, Olivier Messiaen, and so on back to J.S. Bach et al). Coming across this contemporary German catholic work has brought up an earnest and non-rhetorical question for me: why is this still happening?
Throughout the 20th century, transgressive, modernist christian music felt poetically mirrored within a challenged, but still-sacredly grounded cultural paradigm - where the disruption and redeployment of christian symbolism in avant-grade forms resonated alongside post-war disruptions of European political idealism. Mid-century philosophical questions about the social and psychological structures of modernity sought to complete the erosion of those presumed certitudes as they perpetuated the long story of atrocities and political implosion in the western old world, replacing them with exercises in revolution and poetics seeking an account of contingent, rather than necessary truths. It’s easy to follow this short-hand into a plain inquiry about the decline of both elite religious and musical institutions, but my query is focused on the persistence in the 21st century of some aesthetic alliance between the stunting of avant-garde gesture and some version of Catholicism. It feels clear that christian religious orthodoxy has lost a lot of its purchase on the aesthetics of the profound, and the old avant-grade has become fairly toothless from gnawing on an ancient bone. Despite the sense of humor around this music recommendation, my close reading of Susteck’s work here is compelled by a concern with what this deeper misalignment of art and ritual may suggest about the basic dignity of interpreting and consecrating a story, a belief, or a musical gesture with meaning.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Therapeutic humming
I’m supposed to be humming an hour a day. I like being supposed to do this. My friend recommended it when I complained about stubborn and persistent sinus issues. She researches the subject intensively and keeps a comprehensive spreadsheet of remediation strategies, both anecdotal and scientific.
I thought I was better this past weekend so I went to pilates and the amazing core workout ended up prompting a rebound. So it is more important than ever that I hum.
I sit and wonder: What should I hum? I try to remember melodies from Russian orthodox choral music. I can’t, so I try the Halo theme song but forget how it goes, though I remember how it makes me feel, vividly.
I am also meant to sit in shower steam for 10-15 minutes, twice a day, so I combine the practices. I find my shower’s resonant frequency, or room tone. I guess that means a shower is a room. I settle on a portentous glissando refrain, landing a perfect forth below the tone. My skull and nasal passages vibrate. Humming causes the airflow to oscillate, significantly increasing nasal nitric oxide.
In different rooms in different places with different HVAC infrastructures, my sinuses morph and retaliate. The cavities expand and contract. The two rooms in my face. I cannot see them but they are right there. What are their resonant frequencies. I think about the millions of cilia performing coordinated mucociliary clearance.
An article in the American Journal of Rhinology & Allergy describes their bending and beating beautifully:
In a manner that is incompletely understood, normal cilia remarkably coordinate this bending motion synchronously with surrounding cilia on nearby cells and metachronously with progressively more distant groups of cilia, to generate an elegant and unified fluent motion that transports the mucus blanket out of each paranasal sinus in a reproducible pattern.
—Alexander Iadarola