SA2: THE NETWORKING ISSUE
the BSC
BSC: 23% Bicycle And/Or The Ribbons Of Order
THE BSC was formed by Bhob Rainey in August, 2000.
Comprised of eight improvisers with a variety of formal and informal musical backgrounds, the ensemble’s intent has been to confront the difficulties of large group improvisation without recourse to predetermined, compositional solutions.
The group is made up of the following musicians:
Mike Bullock: Contrabass
James Coleman: Theremin
Chris Cooper: Guitar and electronics
Greg Kelley: Trumpet
Bhob Rainey: Soprano saxophone, director
Vic Rawlings: Amplified/prepared cello, open circuit electronics
Howard Stelzer: Tapes
Liz Tonne: Voice
![REHEARSALS AND AESTHETICS, PART ONE: METHODS AND GOALS When talking with members about the early years of rehearsal and their practice together as a group, several themes and remembrances repeatedly appeared. One is the amount of performance and improvisation that was happening in Boston prior to the BSC’s formation and the ways in which that music affected, often in an inverse way, the developing aesthetics of the large group situation. Another is the impact of Bhob Rainey as leader and facilitator, in particular his ability to hear and to process with uncanny speed the music happening around him. A third is the extent to which everyone contributed, as musical interlocutors and friends, to the early years of discussion, diagnosis, and work. But deeper goals also become clear, desires that traverse both local and more general concerns in the domain of improvisation. These would include at least the following: the foregrounding of material that has been insinuated rather than overtly or frontally presented; the attention to development of form, bolted to a desire to create performance-length pieces equally provocative and satisfying for audience and players alike; the decision to multiply choices and options during group improvisation rather than to follow predictable structural shapes; the explicit commitment to diffusing authority amongst players and audience; the injunction to think orchestrationally and in terms of music as a field rather than a collection of objects and sounds. Always well attuned to discussing the matter at hand, the players in the BSC were able in conversation to reframe by retelling, to rethink by remembering, and to reflect by recounting the many facets of rehearsals that held sway during the early years of the ensemble’s existence. Through a revolving door of intelligence and candor, patience and wit, care and poor cell phone connections, hundreds of significant details emerged. The earliest rehearsals took place after hours in Twisted Village, the record store owned and operated by Kate Village and Wayne Rogers. Mike Bullock sets the scene. “There were record shelves and CD shelves and we were there in the middle of the floor. We would go after hours and set up around the shelves, pack ourselves around them. I would usually stand back behind the electronic music section. Bhob would be up in front near the counter, and Howie would set up his tapes next to Bhob. We were squeezed in at crooked angles, so that we could see each other,” Bullock recalls. But what did the rehearsals amount to, in reality? What took place? What was the balance between playing and talk, exercises and analysis? In conversation, Rainey is humble and self-effacing about rehearsal and his role. Not without wit, he begins, “A lot of people have asked me about this over the years. An article would be interesting, especially if it were largely fiction.” He is wrong, of course — the real story has plenty to recommend it. But Rainey’s disclaimer aside, when asked about the early exercises that he devised for the group, he adds a cautionary word about the privileges of memory: “I cannot with complete confidence say exactly what all of the exercises were. I can talk about things that I know that I have done over the years with the BSC, as well as in other workshops that I have taught, but I cannot say exactly when those things happened, or in which contexts precisely.” Not surprisingly, he can, of course, remember things in extraordinary detail, though his response is echoed by the other members: when asked to recall the earliest practice sessions, nearly everyone began by qualifying their ability to recount specific detail. This was, after all, more than a decade ago. With a bit of conversation, however, all of the members seemed to remember fondly and speak openly. The first thing that becomes evident is the degree to which the ensemble addressed the problems and aesthetic dilemmas they faced as improvisers working together for the first time as a large group — a group, furthermore, who were eager not to repeat past excesses or to settle for less than what they imagined achieving. It was this sense of working toward a shared but unnamed goal, by way of refusal and avoidance of familiar ground, that allowed them to take guidance along the path. One way to achieve it, the members all recognized, was to situate the ongoing conversations in relation to the state of the art of improvisation at the time, especially in Boston, but harnessed as always to their own playing and to their own work as a newly formed group. The standard format of a practice session seems to have been fairly straightforward. The BSC would meet, set up, improvise a piece, and then talk about what they had just played. The discussions were led by Rainey and ranged from the general to the extremely specific; examples of both are given below. Over and over in conversation with members the topic of Rainey’s prodigious aural memory came up, as did the ways in which the group discussed specific issues occurring in the playing itself. Through meeting and playing regularly, the BSC were developing the ability to create and to remember everything that they had just played. As we will see, this was one of Rainey’s goals from the beginning. In conversation, Vic Rawlings is as analytical an improviser as one could hope to meet. On the subject of the early practice sessions and what they were like, Rawlings begins with a comment on the pre-history of the group: “I should say at the beginning that the BSC did not simply happen; it was a product of much time spent playing with each other before being in the BSC. There was already a lot of shared language and shared understanding of what we were doing, and of what we wanted to do. Obviously, being in an eight-member group was different from any of the duos, trios, or quartets. So the rehearsals and a lot of the exercises that we did — and I would include the composed pieces here — gave us insight into ways to behave as a group.” This last phrase, “insight into ways to behave as a group,” elegantly captures what so many other members reported. Rawlings continues his recollection of the earliest days, “Bhob really is the leader of the group, so the rehearsals would often amount to this. We would play, and Bhob would say what he thought of it. And he would give notes, in the same way that a bandleader would give notes, or a director would give notes after a rehearsal. Sometimes we would play for twenty minutes but an hour of conversation would follow.” Howard Stelzer and Liz Tonne emphasized the degree to which the discussion-side of the rehearsal equation depended on Rainey’s ability to remember everything that the ensemble had just played. Like everyone else at the time, Rainey’s ears and memory, and the members’ growing aesthetic judgment, were fulminating in the hothouse environment of a city filled with improvisers and new music performances. This experience naturally seeped into everything that the BSC were doing in rehearsal. Tonne surmises, “Bhob must have had a pretty solid idea of what he wanted the group to do because it was his idea to gather so many musicians in the first place. He seemed already to have an understanding of what it was, and why it was, that he wanted to work with so many people. He brought that background thinking into the rehearsal process immediately.” She continues, “You have to know that Bhob is great at being able to analyze a piece of music in the due time that it’s being played. He hears everything and he hears everything at that moment. He does not need a recording to review what has happened. He was obviously applying this already in his listening and playing, both with the BSC and elsewhere around town. At the time in Boston there were so many performances happening, and there were so many opportunities to see and to hear improvised music, that you frequently had the chance to analyze what was good or not about a performance, and you were able to exercise that skill every time that you went out to see music.” Recollections of what happened in rehearsal tended to lead immediately to reflections on the kinds of strategies that Rainey and the BSC were adopting, both verbally and in the playing. According to everyone, the analysis was most often directed at specific problems that would arise. Effects of a player’s entrance, duration, timbre, or level of activity on the piece as a whole were measured through close scrutiny from the earliest days forward. Rawlings remembers it this way: “Bhob would begin by saying, ‘Here’s what we did,’ and he would facilitate a conversation about what we did, and we would then talk about what we wanted to do. He would raise topics such as, ‘When it comes to this type of playing situation, to the different types of places where the music can go, here is one type of sound that can have a certain effect on the ensemble, and here are some options for what we might do when that happens.’ But we would also discuss things like turning something into a transition, or ways to get out of a section. These were all very basic things about improvising, ideas that were being stated in a clear way for the first time.” Tonne expands on Rawlings’ recollection by saying more regarding the kinds of issues that were discussed at the beginning. Tonne, “Bhob would point out what he was observing as weaknesses in the overall improvising community. He would talk about how to shape our own playing as an ensemble. He would talk about a piece’s overall compositional elements. The rehearsals started out by being more of a discussion of what not to do rather than specific things to do. He would suggest not doing X or Y, because it would lead to a weak piece. Or perhaps, not to a weak piece, but to a way of playing that has been done many, many times before. We were all in agreement that we wanted to avoid that, and we all knew that we wanted to do something different, something new, something fresh. I think that this was Bhob’s main point from the beginning, to ask how we can shape our improvised music in a fresh direction, instead of relying on things such as our natural rhythms and tendencies, especially on this arc- shaped natural rhythm that was being played out over and over and over again. How can we consciously break that up and reshape it?” Members repeatedly explained that one major aspect of rehearsal involved dissolving and rethinking natural inclinations while simultaneously discovering new ways to prevent or to occlude more obvious tendencies in the group’s collective constructions. Greg Kelley articulates all of these points but moves into matters of details when doing so. Here we find a critique of layering, an attention to the shape and architecture of the sound, and a concrete explanation for one strategy that Rainey urged from the beginning, namely, entering together as a group when starting a piece or getting out of a silence. Kelley, “A lot of the work at the beginning was about trying to create interesting music and not to take the easy way out. With so many people involved it’s not an agile situation. Everyone can’t change on a dime. There are tendencies that will come out.” Kelley continues, “For example, there are times when everyone will play a texture together at the same time and not get in the way of anyone else. With that you can create an ambiance where everyone is coexisting. But musically it is completely un-engaging. If everyone picks a texture and settles into it, then yes, it can be easy to create a cohesive, or a seemingly cohesive, whole, but it’s not necessarily musically interesting, at all. So one of the things that Bhob really tried to instill was to create something that was formally interesting, something that had many different shapes to it and that was not musically or formally stagnant. To achieve that places demands on the individual player, because you have to be assertive, you can’t simply sit back and add to the texture. One of the things that we tried to avoid was a layering of sound, where someone starts and then others begin layering in, where it becomes this kind of grey mass of sound. To counter that, we would try to start at the same time, to avoid the situation where one person begins and then others creep in, and then more people creep in. When everyone starts at the same time you have to adapt quickly.” Countless hours were given to the process of rehearsal, especially early on. James Coleman vividly recalls, “We played. And then Bhob would talk about how we were playing. And then we’d play again. And Bhob would talk about how we were playing. And then we would play again. And Bhob would talk about how we were playing.” He laughs warmly. The affection in his voice still palpable, Coleman continues, “Bhob would critique what we were doing and he would point out the problems. The beautiful thing that Bhob did, and it was happening a little bit before, but it became formalized in the BSC, was to be really harsh. To be really harsh and truthful about what the music sounded like.” Coleman adds, “In the beginning Bhob talked a lot about bad habits, about the typical types of things that we’d all tend to do in performance. As in, the things that we would fall back on — he may not have used the word ‘habits’ — but he would say, ‘Now see, there’s this, and when this happened, you did that, and that’s very typical, so maybe we don’t want to do that every time, or at all.’ It was very powerful and very instructionally negative — in the best way. I think that Bhob really stepped it up to a much more negative and critical level, and I would not have had it any other way. It was beautiful.” Rawlings also mentions the amount of labor involved, “It was a lot of work, very fun work to do, but there were times when it was definitely hard work. There were rehearsals that were very much nose-to-the-grindstone, there was sweat that went down, and it was worth it. I don’t think that we would have gotten to the level of discussion and playing that we achieved without it. I would not say that it was so much an organic process as it was like pruning a tree. We knew that there were things that we did not want. Likewise there were times when we would say, ‘We want to do more things like this.’ But you have to practice to make that happen.” The accounts of Coleman, Kelley, Rawlings, and Tonne all point to two major subjects that came up time and again when talking with members about early rehearsals: (1) the realization that in order to move forward there was much to be rejected, reworked, or rethought, all in the name of improving the group’s flexibility and attentiveness to musical shape, structure, and form, and (2) the express desire to cultivate an attention to form so acute that it would allow each player to think and talk in significant detail about the effects of any sound, change, entrance, exit, or other sonic intervention, at any moment, on the shape of the evolving piece as a whole. One of the more intriguing aspects of the process of reconstructing the early rehearsal methods of the BSC is the degree to which individual players, through the haze of a decade’s worth of memory, still managed to speak in ways that reflected Rainey’s clearly articulated vision for the group at its inception. Rainey’s initial comment to me illustrates a reversal of what most people might think were the greatest obstacles at the beginning. Rainey, “Usually when you talk about having eight people, or any large group of people improvising, the problems become things like, people are not being sensitive enough, the sound is a big fat mess, people are not listening well enough, and so on. But with the BSC, it was the opposite problem. Everyone was listening very carefully and giving everybody space. Everyone was playing in such a way that it showed that they were listening to each other, and being very caring, almost in a cloying way. So we had to push our way out of that. That approach had to be shaken up. And I think that you can hear that in the Hampshire recording [from 2003], there’s more persistence, there’s more willingness to be in your own space and to stay in your own space. The music may be rough at times, but you can hear that everyone is confident in not agreeing with everyone else.” As for the oft-rumored early exercises and strategies that he devised for getting the ensemble to drop improv crutches while learning how to attend more patiently to overall form, Rainey eases into the discussion with a general comment about the rationale behind anything that he may have brought in for group consideration. “All of the exercises derived from what I identified as the problem. It’s not as if I had exercises in my pocket, as if to say, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ We would play and there would be something wrong. Or there would be some other option that we could have chosen. And I would come up with a way of exploiting that. You have to get a feeling for what it physically feels like to do the thing that you are talking about, to physically experience what you are talking about in theory,” he explains. When I mention to Rainey a number of the common problems that the other members discussed trying to avoid, whether it be drones, arc forms, awkward transitions, call and response interaction, or other, he immediately corrects the impression that the first task of the rehearsals was to exclude any one of these approaches. Never, he says, was the goal to forbid any one phenomenon or way of playing. The problem, and methods of correction, were more fundamental than that, he explains, more primordial: “Those things [drone, call and response, etc.] are surface problems that most improvising ensembles deal with, especially when ensembles get bigger. We dealt with them too, sure. But I don’t think that they were really at the core of the actual problem for us. Because you can end up doing a nice drone, and you can have a nice arc form, and it will be absolutely the right thing to do in that situation.” Rainey continues with an explication that gets to the heart of the BSC’s strengths: “The whole idea of playing the piece and then for me to say what had ‘happened’ was part of a much larger process. One of the things that I wanted to do was to build people’s memories for what we were playing. To give them a sense, while they were playing, of a greater period of time. There is an ethos amongst many improvisers that it is important to be ‘in the moment’ all of the time, and in a sense it is, but I wanted that moment to be bigger. The fact that we would play, and that I would then talk about what had happened, was itself part of an impetus to get the players to say to themselves, ‘Ah yes, you can do that, you can open up the frame of the moment and get a more immediate picture of how different phases of the piece interact with each other, and you can use that picture to better understand what you are doing and what you want to do.’ It was a very basic thing that I did to get things started, to try to help people take stock of what they were doing.” Rainey expands on this when recounting the origin of his notion of playing-memory and its interior connection to the compositional elements of collective improvisation. In a revealing comment, Rainey covers this whole skein of interconnected topics when he explains further the influence of Joe Maneri. “Actually I got much of this, in a way, from Joe Maneri. It seems so obvious, but when you witness someone do it with as much depth as Joe, it’s a revelation. I was improvising with Joe during our lessons and we’d be playing for twenty minutes and it would be very complicated — he was an extremely complicated musician — and it was often difficult to decode what he was doing when he was playing. The piece would come to an end and I would be confused, and out of breath, and then he would begin talking in great detail about everything that had just happened, everything that the two of us had just played, and he would say things like, ‘You know, we were doing this A section and we moved to the B section and you heard that, and it was great, and then at some point I started bringing back the A section and you noticed a change, but you didn’t really recognize that it was the A section coming back, so you waffled for a bit until we got to a certain point.’ And my reaction was basically, ‘Wow, (a) you remembered all of that, and (b) you were right, there was a point when I was wondering what was going on, when I had noticed a change, and I knew that I was going to have to do something about it, but I was struggling.’ So I acquired from him this idea that if you tell people what happened, and then you give them a sense of what they may have been thinking when it happened — and usually you are going to be right if you’ve been doing this long enough — and then you give them a sense not only of what they were thinking but where the crisis occurred and what options were available other than the one that they actually chose, then, with that memory and awareness, you can begin to build.” A few points here merit further comment. One would be Rainey’s suggestion that the larger improvisational moment can become a field filled with an elaborate musical architecture. Much electroacoustic improvisation today, when steering away from variations on drone forms (layering, temporal constancy, expositions of density, etc.) or arc forms (e.g. low activity, high activity, low activity again, or the inversion, the hour-glass form), tends to follow a pattern whereby the musical material unfolds according to a string of presents or a sequence of events — a string of present-tense actions, gestures, sounds, reactions, silences, listening, anti-listening, or whatever. The result is a linear sequence of this or that novel sound placed with care and thought, this or that surprise or silence patiently rendered, this or that section featuring juxtaposition and manipulation of intensity, density, dynamics, and so forth, but not necessarily an overall form that is being sought, developed, insinuated, revealed, or other. What Rainey’s discussion indirectly suggests is that one reason for this is that playing- memory seems rarely to have been foregrounded by improvisers, and that, as a result, both formal agility and the on-the-fly facility for elaborating compositional elements are not much discussed publicly — or at best, have become a matter of instinct, intuition, and ‘feel,’ rather than the result of formal control or deliberate creation. Such intuitions and instincts — or what BSC members repeatedly referred to as “natural tendencies” (or in James Coleman’s terminology, “body-time”) are precisely what the BSC have actively worked to undo, rethink, and redeploy. Rainey’s conception of “a larger moment,” of a moment that is bigger and whose duration may or may not last for twenty or thirty or forty minutes (without being primarily a drone, arc, or linear string of presents), brings with it a good deal of potentiality and fresh air for thinking about the formal possibilities still available to electroacoustic improvisation as a practice, genre, or way of playing. 1Autumn Uprising, an annual Boston improvised music festival, took place from 1997 to 2002. It occupies a special place in the history of Boston’s improvised music. Curated first by Dave Gross and later assisted by James Coleman (Taylor Ho Bynum assisted in 2001), the event became a showcase for the area’s musical developments that year. Boston-based musician Steve Norton maintains a website where reviews, schedules, and photographs of the first four years of Autumn Uprising are still available. http://tautology .rednotebook.org/AUhome.html 2The recording session of this large group ensemble resulted in the release from 2000, entitled 8x9, by the Jack Wright Large Ensemble, on John Shiurba’s label, Limited Sedition. Performances from Rainey and Wright’s West Coast tour are available on the Signs of Life CD from 2000, on Spring Garden Music, which also features Matt Ingalls and Tom Djll.](images/u10796-76.png)
