The performance began with a bed of sounds — of voices and instruments, working in and out of phase with one another. A drum kit held down what felt like a straight-ahead swing groove. Then a guitar could be heard. A saxophone. A tuba. They worked together to create a texture that a piano climbed out of, while a violin sailed over the top. As they worked toward a kind of consonance, their conductor gave them a series of signals. Under the conductor’s direction, the ensemble moved together, creating a fluid musical line, the sound rising and falling, growing and changing. Then the conductor set it loose again, and the music continued.
The concert was a performance of “Composition 381 (Echo Echo Mirror House Music)” by New Haven-based avant-garde legend Anthony Braxton, whose works integrate structure and freedom to allow for new ways of making music. His ideas, spanning decades of musical exploration, found a place in virtual space on Monday afternoon, using technical tools developed out of necessity during the pandemic and turning their limits and complications into assets for creating art.
Case in point: the ensemble — guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, saxophonist Steven Delannoye, tubist Niels Van Heertum, violinist Winnie Huang, and pianist Hampus Lindwall — was assembled in a large space in Antwerp, while musician Carl Testa, of the Tri-Centric Foundation, dedicating to supporting Braxton’s music — was conducting them from his home in New Haven. In addition, and in accordance with how Braxton wanted the piece to be played, all the musicians and Testa were triggering sounds from all of Braxton’s recorded works, which were nestled in a server in Amsterdam. It was a musical performance spanning three countries, across an ocean. “There are a lot of multi-city, ‑country, ‑continent connections,” Van Cauwenberghe explained before the concert, “which is what Anthony Braxton had in mind.”
“Composition 381” is written as a one-page graphic score overlaid with transparencies, intended to guide the musicians through the span of the composition while allowing them to add their own improvisational voices. When Braxton first wrote the piece, to create the collage of his previous recorded works underpinning it, he gave each musician an iPod, “generating this mass of sound,” Testa explained. In the past five years, with advances in technology, Testa was able to program a new way to do it, without the musicians having to be in the same place.
“So what we’re able to do is, instead of having a bunch of different iPods, we have one library with the music in high quality,” Testa said. “There’s a webpage set up, connected to that library.” By visiting the webpage and clicking on the buttons provided, “we can send control signals” to play recordings in the music library.
The server housing the library was in Amsterdam because it was “the closest I could get to Antwerp,” Testa said. That meant the lag was the smallest he could make it for the musicians. Meanwhile, he was able to monitor everything from New Haven.
“The musicians can connect to the server now,” Testa said. “Everyone ready?”
Music Across Miles
Over ten minutes into the performance, the background began to change, the drums giving way to gurgling electronic sounds and voices. The live musicians created a texture of their own. Van Cauwenberghe now on his guitar on his lap. Delannoye and Heertum created a miasma of notes while Huang skittered over it. As the live musicians emerged from the background, they began to play more, creating a more moving, pulsing sound. There was a clang from the electric guitar, stabbing notes.
Testa held up a sign to the musicians in Antwerp from his New Haven living room, asking them to switch their collage parameters to play only selections from Braxton’s operas. Now the background was a series of orchestral sounds, voices and strings. Van Cauwenberghe added a squall of static. A sound from somewhere — saxophone? tuba? — like air being let out of a balloon. Testa held up a sign for a violin solo and Huang responded with a series of wrenching sounds unusual to hear coming out of a violin. Testa gave the ensemble more signals to create a series of swells.
“It is crazy that it’s even possible,” Testa said after the performance. “The fact that I could do it from my living room and everything worked the same is kind of incredible.” It got him thinking about the technology we “take for granted. When we go to a website, we don’t think about where the piece of data is coming from.” Setting up the concert made him aware of it all. “I’m clicking on a button that’s making something happen over in Amsterdam, and it gets sent to Antwerp, and it all happens in half a second.”
At the same time, it was a culmination of decades of musical and technological development. “This networked music thing has been around for 30 or 40 years, and there have been musicians that have been experimenting with it for a long time,” Testa said. Regarding the delay — the necessary time it takes for a signal to be processes and sent through wires, or bounced off a satellite, composers “tried to incorporate the delay into how the music is made, and either write compositions that will still work even if people aren’t hearing the exact same thing at the same time, or incorporate it into the music.”
And, as in several other aspects of our lives, the pandemic hastened the ability of musicians to use this technology. “When the pandemic started, people remembered that there’s this software,” Testa said. The questions were, “how do we use it? And how do we use it to make music together?” But it wasn’t just about “replicating what it is to make music together” in person. It was “to see what possibilities can come out of this new musical situation.”
In conducting musicians an ocean away, Testa said, “I had to stop thinking so much about conducting a cue and listening to it.” Instead, he had to “make it a flow of conducting signals” — in a sense, conducting the music he wanted to hear and trusting that the musicians would follow. “And that’s part of conducting in general, but also is part of a particular subset of conducting.”
The particular graphic score of Composition 381, Testa said, is “an airport map, like a terminal, with graphic notation drawn onto it.” Dotted line extend from the notation, with arrows pointing at three different spots. “They’re places for the musicians to connect up with one another, and then go off on their own in exploring the map.” The musicians always knew they would come together at various points in the piece. The question was when. They spent time “rehearsing different potential places we could go,” Testa said. “There’s the collage, there’s the layers of the collage that I’m controlling, and that the musicians are controlling. Then there’s the musicians and their instruments. You can recombine them in different configurations during the performance.” Instead of the iPods of yesterday, the musicians each had a smartphone that could go to the same webpage Testa was using. Through it, they could send information to the server in Amsterdam about what pieces to play. “It’s taking the iPod idea and making it wireless,” Testa said.
If the details sounded confusing, however, the overarching musical idea was straightforward. “I want to walk across the room. How do I get there?” Testa said by way of analogy. People don’t need to plot out every step they take to get to their front door, even as there were perhaps infinite ways to traverse the distance. One could go straight across, or walk the perimeter of the room. Or crawl across the floor. Or first make futile attempts to scale the walls before settling on rolling across.
“We’re all improvising in our day-to-day life,” Testa said. “Improvising is asking those questions in performance.”
Silver Lining Or New Direction?
Testa said that “making this version of ‘Echo Echo’ happen has been a dream of mine for a while.” He’s already looking ahead to what else is possible. Is it possible to connect with a musician playing halfway around the world, to have them play, and for Testa to manipulate the sound they’re making, and send it back to them? That would be a start for what Testa has in mind. “We’re now very close to where you can have multiple musicians come into a virtual room, and process the signal and send it back out” to wherever an audience might be. “I want to find a string quartet in New Zealand, where they can do their performance like normal, and I can process the sound and send it back to them. There’s also the potential for the performance happening in a 3D virtual space, and the sound changes depending on where you move.” Or, “you go into a virtual world, and the world is changing itself, and being controlled by the musicians.”
The technology hastened by the pandemic has moved these musical ideas from concepts for the future to almost practical ideas now. For Testa, this has implications for the world outside of music.
“It just goes to show that when people have to do something, we can do it,” he said. “We have to get past the mental block of whatever issue it is — whether it’s climate change or racial equity. It’s solvable. We can stop wringing our hands and just do it.’” Adopting new ways of living is also about leaving past things behind. “In every aspect of life, the broken systems are being exposed. What do we want our lives to be like? Let’s build that.” Because thanks to the pandemic, many older systems are “almost completely dismantled already.”
And back in the musical realm, “Anthony Braxton has been thinking about these kinds of possibilities since the 1980s,” Testa said. “He famously said that he was going to write pieces for orchestras on different planets by the year 2000, and that was in 1978. He got flack for that at the time because it seemed so outlandish.” His career has been long enough for such ideas to seem more aspirational than fantastical. “He has been on the forefront of conceptualizing all the possibilities and what they would mean for music. Now we are at a point where they are possible, and are happening, and within the scope of what is real, and not just conceptual.”
Toward the end of the performance, the musicians moved into a section that featured an electronic sound that was something like a bagpipe being fed through AutoTune. The bed of sound had changed to a chorus of chittering voices, decorated with curlicues from the piano and saxophone.
With another signal from Testa, and the ensemble came together to create a long, full, musical gesture. Testa tapped his headphones, a final cue. He cut off the music and the musicians cut out too. Testa smiled and folded his hands. From somewhere — was it in New Haven, Antwerp, or elsewhere? — there was the sound of applause.
