MAB, research in and theory of composition in Bahia

Paulo Rios Filho – [email protected]
  Universidade Federal da Bahia

A theory made together with practice... and where it is made.

I am talking about a theory of composition that isn’t made apart from practice, apart from the creation itself, from the “hands-on”. And, for that, I weave this text from the perspectives proposed by the concepts of compositionality, by Paulo Costa Lima (2012); Fernando Cerqueira’s system-work¹ (2007, 2014); and even the ideas about the composer’s role in music education, by Ernst Widmer (2013). The references come then, not by chance, from three generations of composition professors of the School of Music of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). My words, therefore, are not only about the theory of composition, but about the theory of composition in Bahia; moreover, not exactly about the theory of composition, but about a theory made with a composing and a composing²³ made with the world.

Inseparability, indiscernibility...

A composing is a place of complex texture, populated by bodies and information in constant movement, responding and reacting to each other. An entanglement of lines drawn along the communication processes between actions and thoughts, from which clots of a musical work eventually sprout, under the more or less stable image of a score, a rehearsal session, a performance, or from a critique or analysis. Clots (score, performance, analysis) are not the core of a composing. They are only photographs of the lines that trace this complex texture crossing areas, tentatively frozen frames, knots that are formed from the meetings between these diverse bodies and multiple informations.

To consider composing only from the work’s perspective, or even from the compositional procedures employed in its construction, is a scholastic reduction, too analytical, that serves only as part of a possible method within research in musical creation. That is why research in composition should not be confused with the analysis of the works and procedures of composer X or Y. Rather than focusing almost exclusively on this line of traditionally musicological concern, research in composition would be one that turns its attention primarily to its own place of creation. Focusing on the process, rather than on the procedure; on the gestures, rather than on the work; on forces, rather than on logics.

Therefore, the concept of compositionality, by Paulo Costa Lima (2012), is one of strategic interest. The implosion of a certain sacred maintenance of the theory’s order of analytical/interpretative purity combined with the deconstruction of an allegedly naive practice gift (the “untouched” inspiration) are the main reason of my interest in this concept.

Compositionality is the theorizing effort of composing, made together with composing. And Paulo Costa Lima achieves this attempt precisely because he does not focus either on work, analysis or procedures, but on the frenzied incision and excision of creative forces involved in a composing (in a very specific composing, in any composing, as explained in the last footnote). Now, let’s see, compositionality, this cunning neologism, brings back the field of composition to the pure capacity of creation. Compositionality as the ability of being compositional: the arrangement of forces, bodies, information, affections, characters and rhythms that allows and triggers the composing and its incompossibles, before and throughout whatever is composed.

Paulo names some of these arrangements and calls them vectors. The main one, in my point and view: theory/practice inseparability. The other four vectors of compositionality, described by Lima (2012), always respond, in one aspect or another, to this inseparability vector. For the author, composing involves creating a world (of meanings, forces, characters and rhythms) that interprets—-and is, at the same time, the extension of—-the World (broad field of practical experience); it also involves “criticity”, power of reflection and self-criticism to choose paths and make decisions—-which also has to do with another vector’s zigzag, the field of choices and its cyclical texture of ideas and steps in constant communication; involves, finally, reciprocity between the author and the work, the current author and his virtual image that goes along with the invented world, conquering its plagues. There is always this Ping-Pong game between a field of compositional practice and a theory, or theorizing, one.

From the inseparability point of view, just as the composition practice does not exist without its theory, a theory of composition can’t exist apart from practice. By extending this argument we have that a theory making, lato sensu, doesn’t differ from music making. They are two modes of the same process, one that I call implicitation mode, which transposes thoughts, speeches and theories into a music-making, and the explicitation mode, that transposes a music making into thoughts, speeches and theories. And it is not only a matter of modes of translation, but much more of modes of transduction: they deal not only with informational energy, with signs and representations, but with the material flow of things, with the immanent facet of information and signs and ideas, and with several bodies. As Deleuze and Guattari argue: “... transduction is the way in which a medium serves as the basis for another [...] it is established on another, dissipates or constitutes itself on the other.” (DELEUZE, GUATTARI, 1995d, 118) Under such an understanding, it is then important to note that the difference between thought, speech and theory would be one of degree and not of nature: thought is actualized into speech that, systematically expressed and historically accumulated, can be formulated as theory.

All of this game between unicity (of the process) and binarity (of modes of translation/transduction) throughout a composing is what opens room to take my speech from the topic of inseparability to that one of indiscernibility. I claim that the inseparability between practice and theory is related, in multiple instances, to the indiscernibility between thought and action, idea and implementation, invented-world and World. Indiscernibility that, despite its boundaries between one field and another, does have them functioning as mutual extensions and not as enclosed areas themselves, connecting with each other. Indiscernibility is important for accomplishing the radical opening of the process. The invented world not only copies, represents or interprets the World; it is its extension, it welcomes and connects itself to its (World) lines and transforms them into its own. A medium (or a body) establishes, forms and dissipates itself over the other. There is no better example of the indiscernibility between work and world than musical performance—-the total entanglement of lines that make up and are triggered by one, connected, embraced, interlaced them all with the lines that integrate and are triggered by the other. Composing is a composing with the world.

System-work and a composing

This complex textured meshwork that integrates a composing is, on another aspect, the set of tracks drawn along a repeated movement of (in)formation, de(disin)formation and re(in)formation, result of a zigzag of varying speeds between thought and action, theory and practice, that is, between the effects of the process’ implicitation and explicitation modes of a certain music making, as discussed above.

This entanglement gets close enough to Fernando Cerqueira’s system-work idea (2007, 2014), a concept that, while still focusing on the idea of the art work, so very different from the concept of compositionality, precisely provides a flexibility over the teleological idea of work as mere “concrete result [...] of a complex choice” (CERQUEIRA, 2014, p.4) towards its maximum power (or even its implosion). In fact, the work itself is already a complex system that involves, attracts, and seizes including those music-creating-machines, system-style, system-culture, or system-of-choice, among others, that may eventually take part in the crystallization of the work.

In Cerqueira’s own terms, the work is:

A “system of musical ideas” (relations between content-form, gender-style, poetic or non-poetic text) that aggregates subsystems (tempered or non-tempered system and acoustics, instrumentation, textures) combined for the task of methodological solution of “problems" (sound elements structuring for the creation of linearities-verticalities within the grammars’ scope), by someone (composer) who, at some point in that process, got his “hands dirty.” (CERQUEIRA, 2014, p. 4)

The composer as part⁴ of the system-work (“someone who at some point in that process got his ‘hands dirty’”), which is greater than the work itself and greater than the composer himself, which pulls anything toward itself, which potentially opens itself and swallows anything and everything with its tentacles, and which swallows even its own tentacles, devouring themselves mutually. This autophagous system that the work is, this musical work outer expansion is the work’s expression of life and is also a strategic idea to talk about a composing as that entangled texture of lines and forces, of bodies and information that respond, communicate and move among themselves—-despite this jammed flow, of which touchy junction sometimes creates the illusion of a stable body, closed in on itself.

The work is, at the same time, this ability to freeze the continuous flow of its lines in a determined arrangement of bodies and forces—-and the radical opening of its system, the dissolution of that clot, the hunger of its viscera swallowing other systems, a system-performance, a system-analysis, a system-fruition. As Cerqueira points out: “the artistic work [...] will always be a denounciating metalanguage of ‘something’ different, bigger (or smaller) than the sum of its parts” (CERQUEIRA, 2007, p 157). The system-work is that denunciation of a radical reciprocity (and here we come back to compositionality) between “its” elements—-one element swallowing the other and transforming itself into another, the auto/allophagy, indiscernibility between body and information, action and thought, practice and theory, the ‘other’ and the ‘self’.

The composer’s role

Since his doctoral research, analyzing and seeking parallels between the musical work and the pedagogy of Ernst Widmer, Paulo Costa Lima has sought to find, in several generations of teachers-composers of the School of Music of the Federal University of Bahia, a thread that connect three distinct areas of action of each of these subjects: composition, teaching and academic/intellectual production. (LIMA, 1999; 2012; 2014)

Well, Paulo himself has a very diverse history of acting as a composer: inventor of music, composition teacher, researcher, and public manager in the cultural area. I say ‘as a composer’, because, despite the multiple activities, the recurrent self-identification—-even while performing these other functions—-is that of inventor of music.

“As a composer, I feel co-responsible.” That’s what Ernst Widmer (2013, p. 5) says in his essay entitled A formação dos compositores contemporâneos... E seu papel na Educação Musical (typewritten in 1988). That says a lot about the composer, considering that logic of theory/practice inseparability, of thought/action indiscernibility, of the ideas of system-work and reciprocity between invented-world and World. ‘As someone who puts together things that would not be put together without his intervention, the composer must put himself together with the composed things themselves.’⁵

Although his text apparently deals only with pedagogical aspects of composition teaching, Widmer’s path in the text, as well signaled by Lima (2013), touches on at least four aspects of a composing: the artistic one, the pedagogical one in both strict and broad sense, and the political one. With a single shot, Widmer points towards the composing act, the composition teaching, the composer’s acting in educational media in a broad sense (schools, radio, TV, nowadays, Internet) and to a certain political-compositional activism:

[…] It is not enough for the composer to compose; in addition, he has to captivate fellow music performers, conductors, singers; he has to convince those in power that it is necessary to invest in musical activities—-as necessary as the sporting and scientific ones are; and also that singing is not enough: playing {instruments} is needed, establishing a true life cycle. (WIDMER, 2013, p. 5)

“Composing and educating are the same”, Widmer would say. With the A formação dos compositores contemporâneos... text, a powerfully summed up kind of pocket treatise (only five pages), it becomes quite clear what he meant...

MAB and its uncontainable lines of a composing

MAB — Música de Agora na Bahia was born in 2010, as a double concert at the Rectory of UFBA in Salvador, performed by GNU, a contemporary music group from UNIRIO, Rio de Janeiro, directed by the carioca composer Marcos Lucas. On the occasion, works by composers from Rio de Janeiro that were already part of the repertoire were presented (first concert) together with premiered musical works (second concert) by young Bahian composers, among them Alexandre Espinheira, Guilherme Bertissolo, Joélio Santos, myself, Cristiano Figueiró, Estevam Dantas and Vitor Rios, all linked to the holding, two years before, of the eighth edition of the Encontro Nacional de Compositores Universitários — ENCUN.

In 2012, sponsored by the Bahia State Cultural Foundation, the initiative took the form of an one year-long project with a series of concerts, electroacoustic music sound projections, lectures, workshops and performances in the city of Salvador. The second edition of the project, which lasted two years, expanded its activities through the countryside of the State of Bahia and was sponsored by Petrobras. There were dozens of concerts, sound projections, composition seminars, dozens of national and international guests, recitals in public schools, and a series of other activities held between mid-2014 and the end of 2015.

This was a period of incredible movement and liveliness of the contemporary concert music scene in Bahia. Many people from abroad participated, like ICE, MIVOS Quartet (USA), Daan Vandewalle (BE), Ensemble DME (Portugal), among others, most of the times presenting Bahian composers’ pieces of music—-many of them new works commissioned by MAB—-in the midst of a repertoire of works by composers from various generations and from all continents. All the concerts were recorded and there is an incredible collection of that production.

Now: what is behind that project? What is the context of its achievement? The MAB Project is one of the initiatives of OCA — Oficina de Composição Agora, an arts association that has legal personality since its foundation in 2006. Before that, the group of composers and artists from Bahia that got together sometime between mid-2003 and 2004, also held seminars, recorded and released two albums, performed and produced other concerts. But MAB Project is the largest and most enduring project of the group.

In order to understand the relation between the collective of composers and the idea of a theory with a composing (and of a composing with the world), it is required to understand the context of its emergence, its creation.

OCA has began, in fact, as a teaching (and composing) strategy. It was Paulo Costa Lima who in 2003 decided to implement the idea, present in Widmer's writings, of teaching composition while creating a propitious and stimulating environment for creation, as a laboratory for political acting, in order to create situations that enhance, amplify the life of that ‘composing’. Parallel to the analysis, appreciation and composition for solo instruments and string quartet activities, we’ve had a routine of collective creation, where, in a very strong way, I, myself, my other fifteen fellow-disciples and our master, we were no longer a class, nor were we in a class itself anymore. We were a group and we were creating a performance, which would be presented at the end of the semester, together and mediated by Paul—-who performed here a kind of referee’s role, organizing the footy, much more than a teacher. We used to get together, often out of class time, to try out musical sketches that would make use of the voice—-spoken, sung, yelled, whistled, whispered—-and musical instruments that we’d be able to play ourselves.⁶

In short, there was all the building of a place along which we students could progressively feel ourselves, looking at ourselves as composers.⁷ And, in order to look at ourselves as composers, we have learned to go beyond the closing of the score, to continue composing beyond-work, composing the situations and the arrangements of ideas and actions that guarantee the health of the system-work, the performance, its presentation, disclosure, record—-the life of those invented worlds. That is, we’ve learned to feel co-responsible—-using Widmer's expression—-to be able to look at ourselves as composers. This is the essence of a movement and a scene creation, a medium along which we drag ourselves and continue creating and composing works, ourselves and that same scene which, in the end, is not distinguished from the created works nor from its creators (radical compositionality and reciprocity…).⁸

Teaching composition is therefore mainly about stimulating the creation of a scene and a movement; is to foster the co-participatory maintenance of the health of this invented-worlds/World continuum, and then making this same continuum the very medium along which the organism-composer acts: bodies co-tracing their paths with other bodies of other dimensions. And in this entanglement of paths, there is in fact no separation between composing and teaching composition, there is neither a separation between theory and practice, nor between composing and provoking performance situations, fruition situations and the dissemination of such a composing.

And it is in this sense that I understand MAB as a research laboratory in composition. A place of inseparability and indiscernibility between theory and practice (compositionality), which involves the creation of musical works and the design and administration of the imbricated connection towards the open plane of their systems (of the systems-works), and that launches a composing into the frontispiece of its flows along with the world (its role in music education, lato sensu). I'm not exactly saying that making or participating in a project like MAB is necessarily research making—-this would lead us to another discussion. But yes, I'm positive that there is a zone of confluence (and healthy confusion) between the two that raises and gives rise to their incompossible issues: what of a research making is there in a composing (a composing with the world, an “extended-composing”), such as MAB? And, on the other hand, what of an “extended-composing” is there in a research making?

In response to our pacifying need to name things, this 'confluence zone' could also be given a name. And I believe, inspired by Widmer, that the best name for that would be, perhaps, ‘co-responsibility’.

References

ARAÚJO, João Paulo de. Laboratório de composição para clarineta solo: uma experiência entre intérprete e estudantes de composição. Dissertação de Mestrado. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Música da UFBA. Salvador: 2006.

BRUN, H. When music resists meaning: the major writings of Herbert Brün. [S.l.]: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

CERQUEIRA, F. Artimanhas do compor e do pensar: percurso criativo atrave´s de textos. Salvador: Quarteto, 2007. 228 p.

________. A obra musical enquanto sistema. Salvador: I Congresso da Associac¸a~o Brasileira de Teoria e Ana´lise Musical - TeMA, 2014.

DELEUZE, G. A imanência: uma Vida. Revista de Educação & Realidade, v. 27, n. 2, 2002.

__________. Mil platôs. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1995d. v. 4.

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LIMA, Paulo Costa. Teoria e prática do compor I: diálogos de intervenção e ensino. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2012.

_______. Teoria e prática do compor II: diálogos de intervenção e ensino. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2014.

_______. Tudo azul. 2008. Disponi´vel em: \<http://entretenimientoar.terra.com.ar/oscar/ 2009/interna/0,,OI2735940-EI8214,00.html>. Acesso em: 13/01/2015 às 04:12.

_______. Ernst Widmer e o Ensino de Composição Musical na Bahia. Salvador: FazCultura/Copene, 1999.

VARELA, Francisco. Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves. Organism and The Origins of Self. Ed. Alfred I. Tauber. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dordrecht: 1991.

WIDMER, Ernst. A Formação dos Compositores Contemporâneos... e seu Papel na Educação Musical. In Marcos Históricos de Composição na UFBA. Salvador: 2013.

Notes