Words by Bradford Bailey
Works of art are always pursued by questions of definition and proximity. What is a given object, and what does it do? Where does it come from, and where does it belong? For avant-garde and experimental music - organisations of sound that venture toward the unknown, seeking new forms of creative liberation - these inquiries are often mutually exclusive and bound within the creation of a work.
What the sounds are and do is entirely connected to their movement within and ultimately away from the literal and conceptual spaces that they occupy. This restless pursuit lays at the heart of the latest LP, ‘
Acoustic Shadows, by New York based composer and instrumentalist, Lea Bertucci, issued by SA Recordings.
The relationship between music and space is often tense. Great art is transportive. It can take us beyond our perceived limitations, as well the boundaries of the particular moment and environment in which it is encountered. Historically, this potential lays the basic expectation of musical experience; that in order for a listener to establish a pure relationship with its meaning, sound must retain autonomy from the influences of where we encounter it.
My goal was to make something modular and free standing.
Across a body of recordings and live performance, evolving over the last decade, it is this basic value system and expectation that Lea Bertucci intervenes with and challenges. The form taken by each composition is entirely responsive to, and dependent on, the context in which it is performed.
Early in Bertucci’s career, she began to work with feedback by placing a microphone into the body of her bass clarinet. “I was immediately forced to contend with radical differences in the sounds that I generated from one venue to the next.” Rather than attempting to control these situations or maintain the integrity of a work, she embraced them. “Through a process of trial, error, and failure, I realised that I couldn’t write anything with a strict form or expectation. It would never be the same as when I had practiced it in my studio. The acoustics of each space, the quality of sound system, and my physical relationship to the speaker heavily affected the realisation of each piece, forcing me to cultivate a more sympathetic understanding of the relationship between acoustic conditions and what we hear.'' As such, while the process of composing begins well before a work emerges, it remains effectively incomplete until the definition, meaning, and personality of the performance space assert themselves.
The venue dictates the terms of a music’s development, rather than the other way around, locating Bertucci at the contemporary apex of a line of composers that includes the likes of Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Akio Suzuki, Christina Kubisch, and Yoshi Wada, among others, each having acknowledged and shared artistic vision with the forces of acoustic phenomena and place.
‘Acoustic Shadows’ began as a series of performances and a sound installation, staged during the Brückenmusik 24 festival, in the enclosed hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany, during 2018. Developed in situ and conceived as site-specific, each of the album’s two side-long works - Brass (II) and Percussion (III) - encounter Bertucci expanding her previous explorations on a monumental scale.
Not only do these works incorporate acoustic phenomena and naturally occuring sonorities, but also the free will of each ensemble, and the subjectivity rendered by each listener’s movement and ear. Each element played an equal hand in the works’ development and structure, as well as how they manifested in real time.
Conceived following a site visit earlier in the year, both Brass (II) and Percussion (III) are direct responses and attempts to excite - through the deployment of tone and pulse - the acoustic conditions of the body of the Deutzer bridge, a space that had already played host to works by Eliane Radigue, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Maryanne Amacher, and numerous others.
The pitches of Brass (II) were derived from the “room tone” of the space, composed within a graphic score that offers each member of the ensemble - 4 trumpets and 4 trombones - a range of freedoms over their actions and interventions within its form. However, unlike most realisations of music, these elements only make up a small amount of the compositional process and subsequent work.
Bertucci’s attempts to activate the space hinged on three additional factors; the acoustic qualities of the space itself - played as a third, meta instrument - the materiality and movement of sounds already present within it - notably the low rubble of a tram passing at regular intervals - and its scale, which demanded transience to fully acknowledge. In order to contend with this, she placed each member of the ensemble, accompanied by a playback speaker, across the space, creating a condition in which they were forced to play out of sight of the next, with the movement of the score corresponding to their placement, creating an aural echo of the tram’s journey. The audience was encouraged to move freely throughout the space during each performance.
With such a vast environment dictating the structure of the work, and within which the possible vantage points and relative experiences were nearly infinite in number, Bertucci was forced to consider how members of an audience could negotiate it. “Rather than trying to replicate the same experience for every listener, I became interested in ceding my control as a composer to their subjective experience. Inevitably a personal relationship with certain kinds of spaces and sounds, with the provocation to respond to them through different movements, is present and impossible to control or account for.”
As such, a performance of Brass (II) can never be the same thing twice on structural or experiential terms. Each member of the audience creates a discrete realisation of the work through their own movements, their ears becoming a mirror for proximity and place.
Percussion (III) was composed utilising roughly the same conceptual concerns and structural parameters as Brass (II), but addresses the other side of a sonorous coin, deploys percussive pulses to activate the space, rather than tone.
Reduced to an ensemble of three players placed at distance across the space, a woodblock was chosen as the orchestral equivalent of an impulse, and timpani for its auditory resonance with the passing tram. “For Percussion (III), I wanted to explore endurance and volume, moving away from the gratifying sounds that tend to locate sounds belonging to the territory of music, into the type of experience that would be more typically encountered in this kind of environment, often provoking us to seek an exit, rather than appreciating its character and value… I was consciously testing what was tolerable."
Rather than trying to replicate the same experience for every listener, I became interested in ceding my control as a composer to their subjective experience.
While Bertucci granted vast influence to the space, musicians, and listeners during the process of creating Brass (II) and Percussion (III), in both cases the tension in compositional control became increasingly present as her hand intervened with their progression in real time, pushes a mix, shifting in and out time, back through the speaker system, resolving the performance with acousmatic playback as the respective ensembles concluded their sections of the score. Those recordings, in conjunction with those of a proceeding solo saxophone work, were then used as the material for an untitled, 8-channel installation, joining them as a unified body of percussion and tone.
As listeners, we tend to seek the authentic or definitive rendering of a work. This impulse affects how we choose our seats in a venue, the recordings we buy, and how critical evaluation is formed.
As an album, ‘Acoustic Shadows’ entirely upends this possibility on both experiential and conceptual terms. What we hear of each of its works is a snapshot or single vantage point of a near infinite number, in themselves eluding to their unheard culmination as an installation. When forming Brass (II) and Percussion (III) into an album, Bertucci conceived the LP as an entirely separate space and occurrence. “My goal was to make something modular and free standing. I didn’t want it to depend on an awareness of its context or basic elements, nor to mimic or create a document, but rather approach the residuals as raw material and a transient echo, given new life in the stereo field.”
In unexpected ways, this is exactly what ‘Acoustic Shadows’ achieves. Its two sides re-conceptualise the notions of space, time, and event within the constraints of their own volumes. As free standing as the works are, they double as provocations of transience and recognition of the happening at their source.
We may not be fully aware of Bertucci's ideas and hopes, but their effects are palpable. As the sweeping, minimal tones of Brass (II) intersect with incidents of ambient sound, they render an image of the physical distances and vast hollow body of the Deutzer bridge.
Heard from a fixed point, the seductive beauty of the primary instruments - trumpet and trombone - is threaded by a corresponding awareness of loss, elevating the value of the sonorities that span the gap. The same is true for Percussion (III), but here the encounter is made that much more dynamic by a material sympathy between the actions of the ensemble, the passage of the tram, and the ringing hollow body of the bridge, at times making it impossible to distinguish between them.
Defying accepted notions of what recorded music sets out to capture, ‘Acoustic Shadows’ stands as a startling challenge to the perceptions of definition and proximity in art. Paradoxically, encountered in recorded form, its works become transportive in ways that musical performances rarely achieve, creating a “fourth space” of occupancy. While different, they remain the listener’s to complete.
Perhaps most importantly, Bertucci draws us toward the basic truth uncovered through her early observations of chance. The musicality of a place is always present. The choice to offer it value and hear its voice, is down to us.