Ellen C. Covito - Composed Improvisation G (2011)

Da Milano, after Josquin
Matiegka, after Haydn III
Matiegka, after Haydn II
Cage, after Satie I
Philip Corner - La Plata (4 pieces for guitar for Claudio Calmens)
Toccatata
SuperScale (2008)
Lingering Random Chords (after William Faulkner) (2006)
‘Woody’ (guitar laugh) (2007)

Much of the music of Ellen C. Covito and Philip Corner calls to mind Duchamp’s saying that ‘art is a game between all people of all periods.’ Both composers draw freely from different eras and materials as they situate their works between score and improvisation, embracing the shades of openness at the boundaries. Their compositions defy reduction to individual realizations and instead highlight the imperfect processes of creation and performance. These aspects of their work led me to reconsider the typical approach to CD releases, where a single version of the work is presented as definitive and reproduced many times over. For this project I’ve recorded 11 unique versions of an album. One version, number 11, will be made available online for download and streaming. The remaining 10 versions exist only as single, unique, physical copies. All proceeds from these physical sales will be donated to the Flying Carpet Festival- a music festival for children along the Turkish/Syrian border founded by Sahba Aminikia, Pinar Demiral and Serdal Adam.

In Composed Improvisation G, Ellen C. Covito asks the performer to glue together the pages of any musical score, tear them apart, and play whatever remains decipherable. Despite the seemingly unambiguous instructions, there is undeniably a great deal of improvisation at the moment of performance, as the interpreter is forced to spontaneously reencounter a familiar score or face an unfamiliar score stripped of most frames of reference. Ambiguous notes and rhythms have to be decided upon in an instant, broken melodies phrased, and isolated chords sustained. I’ve found that the interrupted musical materials draw attention to acoustic phenomena emerging from these awkward harmonic and melodic dissonances. What portion of an interpretation should come from a memory or expectation of the original piece as opposed to the defaced scores in their own right? Compositions of different eras and forms tend to retain their identity in different ways; included in this realization are a Da Milano intabulation of a Josquin Pater Noster, Matiegka’s transcriptions of Haydn movements in sonata and minuet and trio forms, and the first movement of Cage’s rearrangement of Satie. The additional stage of transcription present in all four pieces adds a third degree of separation from the original musical material, further highlighting questions of authorship and musical appropriation. The unique physical scores created for each version will be included with the corresponding CDs.

Philip Corner referred to La Plata as an ‘improvisation provocation’. The score is a baffling assortment of instructions, addenda, chords, and personal correspondence, beginning with a Woody Guthrie poem to be interpreted as a musical score. It is, as Corner implies, meant to provoke rather than prescribe. Toccatata is a recipe for creating a toccata, but leaves undetermined the actual pitches and harmonies that emerge from the process. Lingering Random Chords is exactly as described, with the 192 chords suggested by the composer in the score distributed at random between the 11 recordings. SuperScale is a puzzle: how to improvise on the equally-tempered guitar in a scale where no two intervals are the same? It goes on to ask that this scale undergo a modulation over the course of the piece. The solution used here, as mentioned in Corner’s correspondence with composer Warren Burt, is to shorten the strings’ scale length with a secondary bridge that can be rotated through 4 positions while remaining non-perpendicular to the strings. Much as I utilized the same source material for all versions of Composed Improvisation G, therefore retaining certain shared characteristics from CD to CD, I based the versions of movements 1, 2, and 4 on an interpretation I had settled upon for a performance shortly before these recording sessions. While certain structural elements of these movements are maintained between versions, the connecting material is spontaneously improvised. It would be interesting to experiment with more wildly divergent interpretations, but also more difficult!

Some silences in these works suggest a music that is at its most meaningful when it reaches beyond itself- provoking, questioning, reimagining- when values of idea, process and experience in music making stand alongside sonic outcomes. Both composers share my view that their music, and music that emerges from similar concerns, is radical and more necessary than ever. I would like to thank Ellen and Philip for their openness and generosity of time and ideas. I would also like to thank Ken Hullican at Frog Peak, Frank Koonce at Soundset Recordings, Claudio Calmens, Miguel Copón, and Sahba for their support and enthusiasm during the realization of the project.

-Elliot Simpson, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid