Ezz-thetics

Ezz-thetics

a column by
Stuart Broomer

Canadian space and time are different. You can tell from the statistical data, even with old figures that likely persist with the expansion of its southernmost cities. Canada currently claims roughly the population of Tokyo (okay, throw in Phoenix as a suburb) and a total area second only to Russia (China has a little more land area, but that’s only because Canada has more water, including 20% of the world’s fresh water). 90% of Canada’s (Tokyo + Phoenix) population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border, and 70% of the population live south of the 49th parallel, the ostensible border with the U.S., that is, south of Seattle. You can stretch a lot of time into that kind of near empty space (a population density of 4.35 per square kilometer, an absentee population only exceeded by places like Greenland and Iceland [largely frozen wastelands] or Libya and Namibia [deserts at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum]). That brings us to time, which in Canada is largely comedic. While the U.S. gets by largely with four continental time zones, Canada has seven, including one that switch-hits seasonally with its adjoining time zones and another, in part an island, with a 1/2-hour difference from its neighbors.

Perhaps as a result of that excess of absence, that haunting resonance of space and time, Canadians can develop diverse forms with radical perspectives on listening and looking, like Glenn Gould’s “contrapuntal radio,” layering recordings of speech and instrumental music in radio documentaries like The Idea of North (1967) in which he explored Canada’s Northern frontier. A Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer, pioneered outdoor projects incorporating elements of nature and was also responsible for founding the World Soundscape Project. There’s also Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, a three-hour film shot with a robotic arm in an unpeopled Northern wasteland over five days, the soundtrack based on the movements of the camera. In contrast to that art of isolation, absence, and abstraction, there’s the contrarian work of Éric Normand, who has built his joyous improvising orchestra GGRIL (Grand Groupe Régional d’Improvisation Libérée) some 400 miles North-Northwest of Montpelier, Vermont. It may be that a few Canadian artists develop a special capacity to see the “big picture,” just to make sure that there’s something there.

Given that special national legacy, I like music that dances at the borders of possibility, pressing those borders, sometimes even skipping across them, music that means there might be more space next time or more time in the next space. The recent release of Montreal trombonist Scott Thomson performing Enamel (for solo trombone and Harmon mute), by Toronto composer Martin Arnold, fits that description. It’s a download, released on Eric Chenaux’s pioneering and recently revived label Rat-Drifting (which he co-founded with Arnold), largely devoted to the music of Canadian outsiders (My favorite from the label’s first incarnation in the early 2000s is Blasé Kisses by The Reveries, possibly the strangest [at least most distant] version of familiar music that I have ever heard). The present work also represents something of Thomson’s acumen as conceptualist and engineer of spatial compositions (see “Ezz-thetics,” PoD 76 for an example).

Enamel finds a fresh relationship between composition and improvisation, while at the same time investigating duration and our experience of time. It is three trips in different situations through the same score. The score is not particularly long, but it’s composed for continuous elaboration, and Thomson decorates each figure in the score.

As Thomson describes it, Enamel began in his experience of the Covid lockdown:

“In the dark doldrums of February 2021, I was thrown a lifeline by Michel Levasseur, who proposed that I play a solo concert at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Quebec, in May 2021, my first in-person concert since things had shut down. Michel insisted that the concert be at least fifty minutes long; while I had played more than one hundred improvised solo concerts over the previous seven years, none had been longer than about thirty. So, I had a few months to rather radically extend both my range of playable ideas and the stamina needed to play them. For lack of much else tangibly motivating me, I threw myself into the preparation with what feels like, in hindsight, impossible dedication.

The concert was great, a spark of spring joy after a Montreal winter snuffed out by curfews and ennui. It also felt like punctuation, an ‘okay that’s done what now?’ moment. The process had transformed my playing, but the physical demands of the ‘training’ felt overbearing and unnecessary for lack of immediate application to follow. It was around then that I asked Martin, a bit sheepishly, if he would write me a solo. Knowing his musical loves, I anticipated something far less physically taxing than my solo improvising, but that would challenge me differently but no less expansively. I hoped for melody, probably of a slowly unspooling sort, and sought the avenues to wonder that his writing so deftly paves.”

The result of their developing discussion was Enamel, a piece of roughly 30 – 35 minutes of written music that would be elaborated with figuration throughout. Developing the work, Thomson opted to improvise the figuration in performance rather than create a personal expansion of the score. The recording documents three separate performances of the piece, each quite different in its contours, but each a substantial – that is, a durational – work. The first is a recording in an empty theater, clocking in around one hour and 15 minutes; the second, a studio recording, about the same; the third, the work’s debut, in Thomson’s words, “at the 2023 Suoni per il Popolo Festival (Casa del Popolo), where I invited the audience to enter and leave as they please during a concert that would last ‘about three hours.’” The manner of the piece is not immediately hypnotic in any conventional sense of drones or insistent repetition; the duration itself, though, becomes hypnotic as it requires a surrender to its length as well as the recurrence of its lyric underpinnings, its arresting melodic figuration and certain gestures, particular shifts in mute usage, certain isolated multiphonic figures, various slightly altered, developing phrases that become signposts or touchstones in the work. Spread over such a time scale, the work’s gestures assume a kind of exalted meaning, a resonance that embraces and celebrates the significance of time and attention in themselves. Its attention to figuration links it to traditional Scottish solo bagpipe music, Piobaireachd, with the element of a continuous drone removed.

That element in the development of Enamel accounts for a certain dilation of rhythm throughout. Thomson explains, “I’ll underscore that the piece is ‘about’ the ornaments, but they are anchored to and serve the specific intervallic (melodic) and rhythmic (dance) material, as enamel is enamel only in the context of what is enamelled. One thing Martin emphasised as we worked together is that an ornament can (and often should) be additive, timewise; grace notes aren’t to be superimposed on the end of the previous beat, and instead activate a temporary pause of the beat, which resumes upon landing on the target note. I believe this is conventional practice in piobaireachd piping, for example. This surely contributes to the drifting time that feels measureless.”

In this process It becomes, I must suspect, (at least) one of the longest solo wind performances, let alone recorded ones, and it is, most remarkably, a work that is in Thomson’s words, “both a work of through-composition and through improvisation,” an ideal of collaboration, an act that extends to the listener who might devote oneself to its audition, however long, contributing a length of time to a work that cannot be encapsulated or segmented (the performances heard on the download are only segmented because of the limitations of the medium). As such it goes beyond the usual expectations of music’s parameters to enter the realms of theatre and phenomenology. It’s highly gestural, in the sense that certain forms of theatre are gestural, the way certain classic films are gestural, the way certain great jazz trombonists are gestural ... also slightly guttural. The first flash of its broad roots that I had were a collocation of unlikely trombonists like Kid Ory, Jack Teagarden, and Bill Harris, but there was also something else that occurred to me, a bevy of trombone slurs and with them a recollection of Samuel Beckett’s A Film with the silent genius of Buster Keaton, something strange – mutter, aside, slur, whisper – formed in the sotto voce of Thomson’s myriad-voiced Harmon mute, the dream-life of the trombone.

Enamel can be heard here:

https://rat-drifting.bandcamp.com/album/enamel-for-scott-thomson-solo-trombone-harmon-mute

> back to contents