Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics: A Case Study

of Liza Lim’s ‘Tongue of The Invisible’

Eric Clarke, Mark Doffman, Liza Lim

Music and Letters, Volume 94, Number 4, November 2013, pp. 628-663
(Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY AND ECOLOGICAL

DYNAMICS: A CASE STUDY OF LIZA LIM’S ‘TONGUE
OF THE INVISIBLE’
BY ERIC CLARKE, MARK DOFFMAN AND LIZA LIM*

1. INTRODUCTION

Through an analysis of its mediations . . . music is revealed as the exemplary locus of diverse
modes of creativity: social, distributed and relayed. In this way it offers unparalleled grounds
for rethinking creativity itself.1

The idea that musical creativity is distributed has been widely proposed: across an
enormous range of contexts of musical production (a rock gig, a remixed album, a
symphony orchestra performance, a DJ’s set, a jazz sextet) the distributed character of
the creative process (across people, times, media, traditions) is clearly manifest. But
against this apparently incontrovertible evidence has stood an equally implacable re-
sistance to overturning deeply entrenched attitudes and hierarchiesçat least in some
parts of the global and diverse musical ecosystem that we now inhabit. Classical, or
concert, music continues to project an image in which the composer takes pride of
place in the creative processçindeed is often represented as the sole source of genuine
creativityçwith performers, conductors, and record producers (among many others)
relegated to supporting roles, or seen in the guise of ‘realizers’ of a composer’s creative
imagination, as embodied in the written score.2 The increasing awareness of how dif-
ferent things can be in other musical cultures that has come from the growing influence
of ethnomusicology over the last fifty years has done a lotçin theoryçto unsettle
the picture, as has work in pop musicology and music education.3 But while it may
have unsettled these attitudes in theory, in practice most of the institutions of concert

*Oxford University; University of Huddersfield. Email: eric.clarke@music.ox.ac.uk; mark.doffman@music.

ox.ac.uk; l.lim@hud.ac.uk. We are indebted to the musicians and administrative staff of Ensemble musikFabrik; to
the conductor Andre¤ de Ridder; and to the soloists Uri Caine and Omar Ebrahim for their assistance and cooperation
throughout this project. Also to Emily Payne for her assistance with transcription; and to two anonymous reviewers
for their critical comments on an earlier version of the essay. This research was supported by award no. AH/
D502527/1 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, under its Research Centres scheme; and by supplemen-
tary funding from the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford and the British Academy (to Liza Lim) under its
Small Grants scheme.
1
Georgina Born, ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, twentieth-century music, 2 (2005),
7^36 at 34.
2
Corey Jamason points out the historicity of this attitude, stating that ‘the entirety of music history until around
1850, may with some justification be defined as an age of creative collaboration . . . between composers and performers
in the creation of a ‘‘final’’ product . . . ’. Corey Jamason, ‘The Performer and the Composer’, in Colin Lawson and
Robin Stowell (eds.). The Cambridge History of Performance (Cambridge, 2012), 105^34 at 117.
3
For example: Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, Conn., 1998),
and Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot, 2001).

628
music continue to behave in the same sharply demarcated manner.4 As Georgina Born
summarizes it: ‘The ontology of the musical work envisions a hierarchical assemblage:
the composer-hero stands over the interpreter, conductor over instrumentalist, inter-
preter over listener, just as the work ideal authorizes and supervises the score, which
supervises performance, which supervises reception.’5
Three passages of writing from rather different perspectives and disciplines provide
examples of how the situation might be seen differently. The first comes from the
work of the anthropologist, ecologist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, and relates
not specifically to music but more generally to the fluid and interpenetrating relation-
ship between mind, body, tools, and environment:
Suppose I am a blind man and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental
system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway
up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is
a pathway. . . .The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that
you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you
are trying to explain is a piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then,
for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so
on, round and round.6

Bateson points both to the seamless relationship between mind, body, prosthesis, and
environment, and also to the reciprocal relationship between perception and action in
a manner that anticipates more recent extended, embedded, and embodied theories of
mind.7
Bateson’s concern in the passage above is with the distributed ecology of an individ-
ual in his immediate physical environment. Howard Becker adopts a more obviously
sociological perspective on broadly similar questions of distribution and agency, and
of the role of the ‘everyday’ in the creation of art. In a memorial lecture for the ethno-
musicologist Charles Seeger on the subject of ethnomusicology and sociology, Becker
contrasts his own approach to the sociology of music with that of Theodor Adorno
and Lucien Goldmann:
The basic imagery in this [Becker’s] kind of sociology is of art as something people do
together. Sociologists working in this mode aren’t much interested in ‘decoding’ art works, in
finding the works’ secret meanings as reflections of society. They prefer to see those works as
the result of what a lot of people have done jointly. While the imagery of the older sociology
of art emphasizes great geniuses working more or less in isolationçthe studies are of great
novelists or composersçthe imagery underlying this other version is more likely to be
drawn from one of the collective arts, like filmmaking, where it might even be hard to tell
who to credit or blame for the work you see. This sociology of art is less interested in genius
and in rare works and more interested in journeymen and routine work which, of course,
most art consists of.8

4
See Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde
(Berkeley, 1995).
5
Born, ‘Mediation’, 26.
6
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (NewYork, 1972), 459. The same example of a blind man with a stick is
used for similar illustrative and conceptual purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty nearly thirty years earlier: Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York, 1962); originally published in French as
Phe¤ nome¤ nologie de la perception (Paris, 1945).
7
e.g. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford, 2008).
8
Howard S. Becker, ‘Ethnomusicology and Sociology: A Letter to Charles Seeger’, Ethnomusicology, 33 (1989),
275^85 at 282.

629
 Becker’s approach draws attention to the socially distributed and cooperative
nature of artistic production, and in a passage that elaborates upon his generic in-
sight Georgina Born identifies four orders of music’s social mediation. In the first of
these:
music produces its own socialitiesçin performance, in musical ensembles, in the musical
division of labour, in listening. Second, music animates imagined communities, aggregating
its listeners into virtual collectivities or publics based on musical and other identifications.
Third, music mediates wider social relations, from the most abstract to the most intimate:
music’s embodiment of stratified and hierarchical social relations, of the structures of class,
race, nation, gender and sexuality, and of the competitive accumulation of legitimacy, author-
ity and social prestige. Fourth, music is bound up in the large-scale social, cultural, economic
and political forces that provide for its production, reproduction or transformation . . . 9

These three overlapping visions of the distributed and ecological character of human
perception and action, and of aesthetic production, form a backdrop to this essay,
pointing both to the ways in which human agency is deeply intertwined with artefacts
and technologies, and to the multilevelled social orders within which musical produc-
tion takes place. Our aim in this essay is to give an account of the ecology of collabora-
tive creation in the specific context of a piece of contemporary concert music, ranging
across the enacted physicality of individual musicians’ creative engagements with their
instruments and notations; the detailed social engagements of performers, conductor,
and composer in the rehearsal of a new work; and the institutional setting within
which they operate. We argue that an ecological perspective provides a productive
framework for such an account by drawing together what might otherwise remain
separate domains of material culture, psychological process, social interaction, and
institutional context. Following Gibson and Heft,10 we understand an ecosystem (in
this case a musical ecosystem) as constituted of objects and processes whose affordances
criss-cross the physical and the social, the synchronic and the diachronic. A specific
musical notation may afford guided improvisation on instruments that afford more or
less pitched or ‘noisy’ sounds to players in particular (musical) ensemble circumstances
that afford greater or lesser freedom of expression at just this point in the ensemble’s in-
stitutional history, and within the constraints and opportunities of wider social, music-
historical, and institutional forces.
As Keith Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter point out,11 mainstream psychological research
into creativity for much of the twentieth century was intensely individualistic and
narrow in focus, reflecting the similarly narrow approach in cognitive psychology
more generally. The radically different systemic and distributed approach to human
cognition illustrated by Bateson’s blind man and stick was of a piece with the work of
James Gibson, and of the Russian psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria,
and from the late 1970s these somewhat distinct intellectual traditions started to come
together under the rubric of distributed cognition or cognitive ecology.12 As Edwin

9
Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal
of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 205^43 at 232.
10
James Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966 ); Harry Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context:
James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism (Mahwah, NJ, 2001).
11
Keith R. Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter, ‘Distributed Creativity: How Collective Creations Emerge from Collabor-
ation’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3 (2009), 81^92.
12
Gibson, The Senses; Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1978); Alexander Luria, The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology (New York, 1973).

630
Hutchinsçone of the leading figures in distributed cognitionçnotes, a major chal-
lenge for psychologists ‘will be working out the implications of the fact that for
humans, the ‘‘world’’ . . .consists of culturally constructed social and material
settings.’13 From the other side of the organism/environment relationship, the philoso-
pher Andy Clark points out how thoroughly embodied, and deeply distributed and
embedded in the environment, human beings are. ‘We are thinking beings whose
nature qua thinking beings is not accidentally but profoundly and continuously
informed by our existence as physically embodied, and as socially and technologically
embedded, organisms.’14
In the specific case of music, the apparently impenetrably private character of com-
positional creativity has been tackled either through the material traces of sketch
studies,15 or through the self-report methods of protocol analysis.16 The advent of
computer music composition systems has made it possible to track the materials and
implicit decision-making processes that are left behind in the successive files of com-
positional working sessions,17 an approach that might be thought of as combining
aspects of sketch study and protocol analysis. And recently, Nicolas Donin and
Franc! ois-Xavier Fe¤ron have employed what they call a ‘compositional situation simula-
tion interview’ method to elicit a retrospective account of a composer’s creative and
decision-making thought-processes.18
This work is all focused on composition as a self-sufficient activity, just as there is a
complementary body of research that has tackled creativity in performance as a
somewhat autonomous domain.19 But as a number of authors have pointed out,20 the
creative process in music (even in the concert music of the West) is increasingly under-
stood as a much more collaborative and distributed processçdistributed in a whole
variety of ways,21 but particularly obviously in relation to performance. There are,
however, comparatively few studies that have attempted to document or investigate
this phenomenon in any detail.22 Work by Eric Clarke and co-authors (two of them

See also Ulrich Neisser, Cognition and Reality (San Francisco, 1976 ), for an early attempt at a cognitive ecological
synthesis.
13
Edwin Hutchins, ‘Cognitive Ecology’,Topics in Cognitive Science, 2 (2010), 705^15 at 711; and see also idem, Cognition
in the Wild (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), a detailed ethnography of the navigational workings of a naval vessel understood
from the perspective of distributed cognition.
14
Clark, Supersizing, 217.
15
e.g. Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Processes (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Patricia Hall and
Friedemann Sallis (eds.), A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches (Cambridge, 2004).
16
John Sloboda, The Musical Mind:The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford, 1985).
17
See David Collins, ‘A Synthesis Process Model of Creative Thinking in Music Composition’, Psychology of Music,
22 (2005), 193^216.
18
Nicolas Donin and Franc! ois-Xavier Fe¤ron, ‘Tracking the Composer’s Cognition in the Course of a Creative
Process: Stefano Gervasoni and the Beginning of Gramigna’, Musicae Scientiae, 16 (2012), 262^85. The approach
involves reconstituting the working context of a prior compositional occasion (the same preparatory materials and
papers that were originally present), so as to elicit from the composer, Stefano Gervasoni, as close as possible a re-
enactment of his own creative and decision-making processes.
19
For overviews, see chapters in Ire'ne Delie'ge and Geraint Wiggins (eds.), Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary
Research in Theory and Practice (Hove, 2006 ), and David Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, and Raymond MacDonald (eds.),
Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance and Perception (Oxford, 2012).
20
e.g. Sawyer and De Zutter, ‘Distributed Creativity’; Go«ran Folkestad, ‘Digital Tools and Discourse in
Music: The Ecology of Composition’, in Hargreaves et al. (eds.), Musical Imaginations, 193^205; Karen Littleton and
Neil Mercer, ‘Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity: How Musicians Negotiate a collective ‘‘sound’’’, ibid.
233^41.
21
See Born, ‘Mediation’, for a wide-ranging discussion.
22
Some exceptions are: Sawyer and DeZutter, ‘Distributed Creativity’; Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Bryn
Harrison, and Philip Thomas, ‘Interpretation and Performance in Bryn Harrison’s e“ tre-temps’, Musicae Scientiae,

631
being the composer and performer of a solo piano piece), Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde
(the composer and performer of a piece for solo cello), and Amanda Bayley demon-
strates some of the methodological diversity that exists in this domain (quantitative
and qualitative empirical methods, video analysis methods, the involvement of the
composer and performer in analysis and authoring), and has pointed up some of the
ways in which performers see themselves as co-creators. One significant elementç
which Peter Hill has argued is the case for all music, however old or new23çis the
need for performers to find a way to keep a ‘live’ and provisional relationship with the
notationçthe requirement not to become static and complacent but ‘to keep kicking
myself in the arse to kind of take it apart again, I think that’s the problem, I’ve got to
keep unravelling it’, as the pianist Philip Thomas puts it.24 And another, particularly
relevant to the music discussed in this essay, is the idea of composition as a species of
instrument-building, an approach central to the work of the composer Helmut
Lachenmann and developed to interesting effect by the composer Fabrice Fitch and
cellist Neil Heyde. Fitch’s work with Heyde involves a kind of mutual tuning of the
instrument and performerçboth literally in terms of the exploration of a particular
scordatura, and more metaphorically in terms of the discovery and development of
playing techniques. But more than that, the ‘instrument’ that is built forms a bridge
between Fitch and Heyde’s roles as composer and performer:
Taking Lachenmann’s ideas into the collaborative context, one can observe the blurring of
traditionally clear lines of demarcation between performer and composer. Most obviously,
the composer becomes, according to Lachenmann, not only an organologist, but also an in-
strumentalist (albeit on an imaginary instrument). But the converse is also true: in the
process of reshaping the instrument, the performer takes on some of the attributes of the
composer in Lachenmann’s model. This would seem particularly true in the case of the present
collaboration, in which the performer has taken an equal role in defining the ‘problems’ we
have made it our task to solve.25

With these precursors in mind, we now turn to the case study that constitutes the
focus for this essayçLiza Lim’s Tongue of the Invisible. This music is in no sense a
unique work of ‘distributed creativity’, and while it provides a specific and fertile op-
portunity to see various aspects of distributed creativity at work, and indeed itself the-
matizes notions of distribution, entanglement, and attunement as important aesthetic
principles, it is in many other respects representative of a great deal of contemporary
music for mixed ensemble written over the last twenty-five to thirty years. What
marks it out is the rich mix of relationships required by a work that involves a consider-
able variety of agents and creative practices, incorporating different and simultaneous
systems of creative exchange.

9 (2005), 31^74; Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde, ‘‘‘Recercar’’çThe Collaborative Process as Invention’, twentieth-century
music, 4 (2007), 71^95; Amanda Bayley, ‘Multiple Takes: Using Recordings to Document Creative Process’, in
Amanda Bayley (ed.), Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology (Cambridge, 2010), 206^24; and the
documentary DVD: Paul Archbold, Climbing a Mountain: Arditti Quartet rehearse Ferneyhough 6th String Quartet (London,
2011).
23
Peter Hill, ‘From Score to Sound’, in John Rink (ed.), Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (Cambridge,
2002), 129^43.
24
Clarke et al., ‘Interpretation’, 45.
25
Fitch and Heyde, ‘‘‘Recercar’’’, 92^3.

632
2. TONGUE OF THE INVISIBLE
Tongue of the Invisible (TI) was commissioned by the Holland Festival together with the
Cologne-based contemporary music ensemble musikFabrik and premiered on 8 June
2011 in Amsterdam, receiving a second performance in Cologne on 25 June on the
occasion of musikFabrik’s twentieth birthday concert. The work, developed out of the
setting of a text by Jonathan Holmes based on the Sufi poet Hafiz, is scored for
singer, improvising pianist, and an ensemble of sixteen musicians, and forms part of
an ongoing exploration by Liza Lim of a Sufi poetics. The following extract gives
some sense of the character of Holmes’s text:
This door is the mouth of love,
Whether it leads to the mosque or the wine-shop.
Souls inhabit the dust of its threshold,
Swept up at every meeting,
Scattered at every leave-taking,
Living at the edge of inside and out,
Like a kiss.

The poetry explores images of intoxication and union, in which images of spiritual,
sexual, and drunken states intersect, and where the wine shop or a prayer house
might be a portal between life and death. One of the challenges in reading the poetry
arises from the way Hafiz mixes and shifts registers of meaning so that there are
elisions between profane and sacred states, giving a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’
quality to the way the words flow between categories of meaning. The layers of
meaning point towards but ultimately can never fully express the ideal of union,
adding to the almost painful sensation of longing in the poetry. Lim’s aim was to
explore this untranslatable aspect of the poetry, or the multiple translations that sit
side by side within it.
Holmes made translations or versions of poems (ghazals) by Hafiz based on both
English and Persian sources, which were then organized into a 7 !7 grid in which
each ‘square’ contains a line of poetry (see Fig. 1). The grid is the ‘world’ of the poem
in which all the lines resonate with each other, allowing readers to create their own
versions of the poem by freely tracing pathways through the text. These ideas about re-
lationships between freedom and constraint were transposed into a musical structure
that incorporated different kinds of improvisational strategies within more determined
materials. Hafiz’s poetry speaks of the lover longing for union with the beloved, of
processes of attunement and separation, of ecstasy and transformation, which invited
a participatory practice in the compositionça structural openness that would allow
unpredictable movements and transformations to occur in the space of the piece, so
that the ensemble performers in some way ‘live’ the spiritual ideas rather than merely
representing them. The work was therefore concerned less with improvisation versus
composition than with finding ways of activating, or allowing for, different ‘threshold
states’ in the performers that might resonate with the world of the poetry.
In the piece, improvisational strategies allowing for various kinds of choices are tools
intended to foreground the subjectivity of the performers. Musicians, for instance,
explore ways of tuning in to the group through improvised dialogues, giving rise to a
sense of intense communication ‘in the moment’. At other times, open sections are
intended to promote sensations of bewilderment, of being lost, wandering in multiple
worlds, or of complex entanglement. More detailed composed sections set up solos
for members of the ensemble: as well as the piano and baritone soloists, the work

633
 Welcome! Behold the eye The sun is a In envy the In the fecund I am reborn, Swept up at
Come! beneath the candle to the fire breeze holds womb of your eye each morning every
Enter! twilit archway in my breast her breath meeting

If the light has The crescent Halts in its A tongue May every night My bare arms May each
failed, light the vessel of the voyage across bring a new charm the evil day enflesh
lamp of the moon moon the over-ocean A poem dream of you eye that dream
humming in its
flesh

Let my pupil pluck Ensnared in the The roots of the At dawn I Our embraces Wear them You suck as
a rose from your thickets of your world are heard the are a banquet of always around if at your
garden hair entwined in the tongue of the revolving time your neck mother s milk
wind invisible

A rose between Wine in our In the smile of Drink boldly! A rapture We are Swimmers in
your breasts bowl the rose there is spreads through singers on the the wine-dark
no constancy (drink wine from the heart of wings of the sunrise
the garden) your ruby stars

My love in your At such a dawn This door is the Whether it Souls inhabit Living like a Oh, my lover!
heart mouth of love leads to the the dust of its kiss at the
mosque or the threshold border of
wine shop inside and out

The sultan of the Buds fear to Think how the The rose A language Caressing the Encircling its
world is slave to bloom cypress flowers for a day murmuring Along body of my towers with a
me measures the only a garland of city silver coronet
breeze streets of song

Scattered at Bending an n Stooping to sup Before the bud Between the Like a kiss Be Silent!
every before it from the red- is pressed pages of the
leavetaking rimmed cup world

FIG. 1. Poem text grid for Tongue of the Invisible

particularly features the oboe, violin, piccolo, trumpet, cimbalom, and percussion.26
The composer intended that these solos should create reference points for later more
improvised approaches to shaping and ornamenting musical ideas, so that the
composed parts are translated or reinterpreted by the performers, taking the music in
unforeseen directions.
The work consists of eight movements in which compositional strategies for
provoking or ‘performing’ these subjectivities can be seen to play out in a number

26
The work is structured as an unfolding narrative of ‘fixed’ and ‘open’ (guided improvised forms) where the
creative contribution of the musicians enacts a metaphor for pathways for renewal and the creation of multiplicity of
meaning that is in dialogue with the composed music. In the ‘project description’ provided in the score, Lim writes:
Improvisation as unpredictable play
Song as longing for the Divine
Musicians as listeners, drunk with desire
The Concert Hall as a tavern, a meeting-place between world and ‘other’

634
ways. The odd-numbered movements together represent around 70 per cent of the
work’s sixty- minute duration, while movements II, IV, and VI, which are all thematic-
ally related and two of which are wordless, function as shorter and more intimate inter-
ludes, with movement VIII as a more extended coda. Table 1 outlines the distribution
of the various compositional/improvisational strategies in relation to an outline of the
work as a whole, organized according to Lim’s guiding aesthetic/poetic principles, and
showing the placement of the three focal episodes (see below) that form the main sub-
stance of this essay.
From the outset of the study, the presence and active integration of improvised and
fully notated materials within the piece constituted a particularly interesting opportun-
ity to investigate aspects of distributed creative processes. Our focus on particular
episodes in the work (see below) is an attempt to take advantage of those moments
that encapsulate most saliently the issues of agency, creative sociality, and individuality,
and creative ownership that are central to this essay. In documenting the rehearsal
process, we noted that certain sections of the work threw up more questions, challenged
established social orders, or made more apparent processes of inter-social exchange.
These ‘activated’ episodes constitute the targets for detailed discussion in this study
because of the ways in which they bring to light specific examples of more general
process that remain largely tacit in the ‘seamless’ working that characterizes much of
the rehearsing of a professional ensemble.
The three episodes align with major points of efflorescence in terms of the com-
poser’s conception of the development of concepts of ‘attunement’ (Movement I, bars
57^62); ‘bewilderment and entanglement’ (explored throughout Movement V); and
finally ‘soloistic ecstasy’ (Movement VI, taken to a peak of intensity in this section for
solo piano). As Table 1 shows, rather than belonging to a single thematic category,
most sections of the work are characterized by overlapping and interacting attributes,
played out simultaneously. In the ‘bird calls’ section of Movement I and throughout
Movement V, we observe somewhat conflicting factorsçmusical situations that simul-
taneously demand a negotiation of qualities of attunement while engaging with
fluctuating states of independence and dependence, leadership and uncertainty. The
complexity of these interacting attributes, while not unique to the three episodes on
which we focus, nonetheless provides a rationale for their selection as critical moments
in the realization of the piece.27

3. METHOD AND CONTEXT

3.1. Method
The objectives of this study were to develop an understanding of the kinds of
distributed creativity involved in bringing TI to fruition through a concentrated docu-
mentation of the group work leading up to the first two performances. The documenta-
tion encompasses audio and video recordings of the rehearsals and performances, and
interviews/discussions recorded with the participants over the same period of time.
These materials were derived from a number of fieldwork visits to Cologne, the admin-
istrative and rehearsal base for musikFabrik. Three visits between February and late
June were undertaken to cover some of the preparatory work between four of the

27
Our discussion of Movement VIçwhich appears from Table 1 to have little of this interactive complexityçis
different in this respect, focusing as it does on unanticipated consequences of the circumstances of rehearsal and
performance.

635
TABLE 1. Broad distribution of musical materials across the eight movements of Tongue of the Invisible
according to the composer’s three guiding poetic categories of Attunement, Bewilderment/Entanglement, and
Ecstasy.The location of the three focal episodes discussed in the essay is shown in bold type

Mvt. Attunement Bewilderment/ Ecstasy

Entanglement

I Bar 1, percussion: ‘begin

‘‘tuning’’, i.e. briefly Bars 3, 7, vn. 1 solo
sounding each instrument
in turn’
Bars 4, 7, 9, ob. solo
Bar 5, fl., cl., sax., bn. :
‘notes in brackets: enter at
any time during the bar,
duration freely chosen’

Bar 7, ‘piano beginning

‘‘tuning in’’ to ensemble
shadowing any element of
the ensemble’
Bar 13, fl., cl.,
‘trace ascending (but
looping) melodic outline
following path through
pitch table’

Bar 43, pf., Bar 43, pf. solo

‘improvise ‘‘bird calls’’ç
looping, trilling gestures
using pitch tables’

Episode 1 Birdcalls Episode 1 Birdcalls Episode 1 Birdcalls

Bars 57^62, picc., ob., cl., Bars 57^62, picc., ob., cl., Freely soloing piano
tpt. : improvisation re- tpt. (with pf.): ‘improvise
sponding to piano short, intense bursts of
wayward, looping bird calls
(using pitch table 1),
respond to piano’
II Bars 1^6, solo theme
elaborated freely by piano
within ensemble
III Bar 40, perc., Mvt. II theme in ensemble
‘freely dialogue with piano writing
(set up groove)’ Bar 44, euph., bar 40, piano develops solo
‘trace path through pitch material in dialogue with
Bars 47^67, pf., table’ perc.
dialogue with baritone and
strings
Bar 82, hn.,
‘journey through pitch
table’
(continued)
636
TABLE 1. Continued
Mvt. Attunement Bewilderment/ Ecstasy
Entanglement

IV Distillation of
Mvt. II theme
V Episode 2 Mvt. V Episode 2 Mvt. V Episode 2 Mvt. V
Strings use the oboe part as Str.çaccompanying Ob. (written ‘boxes’ of
the cue for stylistic, ‘garland’, improvised material, freely
rhythmic, and gestural pathways using given pitch placed) þ perc. solo
qualities material (written and improvised)
VI Episode 3 Happy
Birthday
Solo improvisation by
pianist þ melodica ad lib.
Based on materials from
Mvts. 2 & 4
VII Bar 22, pf., improvisation
joined by perc. (b. 27) and
picc. (b. 31), improvised
‘wild bird’ solos
VIII Ensemble reciting poem Ensemble tracing lines of Baritone solo
over bowed piano poem through text grid
drone þ improvised
melodica part

musikFabrik players and the composer, the group rehearsals in the week leading to the
first performance in Amsterdam, and the second performance of the work in
Cologne.28 The first visit in February, lasting for four days, covered the initial
meetings between the composer and four musicians from musikFabrik,29 the function
of which was to experiment with instrumentation and techniques, and to try out some
of the improvisational strategies that Lim had envisaged. The major part of the field-
work took place during the week of rehearsals preceding the first performance in
Amsterdam. The researchers were present at six of the eight rehearsal sessions in
Cologne, and at the final general rehearsal that took place on the afternoon of each of
the two performances.
The analysis and interpretation of the large body of recorded material was
distributed between the three authorsçtwo researchers and the composerçin a series
of two- and three-person meetings over a number of months, and through individual
work on ethnographic data. Research that involves participants as researchers has
become a more common means of conducting intensive real-world study,30 and in
music research it has begun to play an increasingly salient role at a time when the

28
These were 24^7 Feb., 4^9 June, and 25 June 2011.
29
The four musicians were the trumpeter Marco Blaauw, the clarinettist Carl Rosman, the percussionist Dirk
Rothbrust, and the oboe player Peter Veale.
30
Jean Schensul and Stephen Schensul, ‘Collaborative Research: Methods of Inquiry for Social Change’, in
Margaret LeCompte, Wendy Millroy, and Judith Preissle (eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education (New
York, 1992), 161^200.

637
assumed boundaries between practitioners and researchers are being actively
questioned.31
Nonetheless, two aspects of the method outlined here deserve further comment: the
involvement of the composer (Lim) as a co-researcher and author; and the possible
impact of the other two researchersçwith cameras and audio recordersçat the re-
hearsals and performances. There are clear precedents for the involvement of the
primary creative agents as co-researchers and authors in research on creativity,32 and
the first-hand knowledge and insight that this can provide are clearly potentially of
considerable importance. What is somewhat different about the current project is that
while nineteen other musicians are involved, only the composer is a co-authorçwhile
in previous publications either all the living creative agents were involved, or none.33
Given earlier remarks about the continued dominance of a composer-centred model
of musical creativity, there might be good reason not to compound that situation by
giving only the composer an authorial voice. Against that we set three practical consid-
erations. First, it was Lim who initially invited the first two authors to use the prepar-
ation and performance of this work as a case study, and in doing so she clearly
established a stake in the project. Second, Lim has an active research interest and pub-
lication record in musical creativity, and was clearly in a position to make a potentially
decisive contribution.34 And third, the timetables and other commitments of the per-
formers and conductor made their involvement as anything more than interviewees,
discussants, and commentators impossible. We recognize nonetheless that a study that
involved different participants in equivalent roles has the potential to offer a signifi-
cantly complementary perspective.
In similar fashion, the presence of two researchers and associated recording equip-
ment is a potentially distorting influence in relation to the kinds of micro-social inter-
actions that we observed and recorded. There are, however, two mitigating factors:
one is that musikFabrik have for some time been actively seeking to make their re-
hearsal activities more publicly accessible, and have quite regularly invited pupils,
students, and members of a wider public to come to their rehearsal studios and
observe their work. Second, they have on a number of occasions agreed to be filmed
as they go about their work. This increasing openness to the public gaze is part of
their overall artistic mission, and their commitment to outreach and cultural transpar-
ency, so the presence of what in other circumstances might seem like intruders is in-
creasingly a part of their working practice. Finally, it was made quite clear both by
the researchers and the musicians at the start of the project that their musical
working had absolute priority over any research objective, and that if there was any
feeling that our presence was in any way disruptive, we would immediately suspend
our activities. Over the course of many hours of filming, and a large number of
recorded interviews and discussions, as well as many other more informal discussions,

31
See the work of the Orpheus Institute 5http://www.orpheusinstituut.be/en/home4, and the Performance
Studies Network under the aegis of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice
5http://www.cmpcp.ac.uk/performance_studies_network.html4.
32
e.g. Roger Chaffin, Gabriela Imreh, and Mary Crawford, Practicing Perfection: Memory and Piano Performance
(Mahwah, NJ, 2002); Clarke et al., ‘Interpretation’; Fitch and Heyde, ‘‘‘Recercar’’’.
33
In the case of Chaffin, Imreh, and Crawfordçwhich concerns the preparation and recording of the J. S. Bach
Italian ConcertoçImreh is the performer; in Clarke et al. Harrison is the composer and Thomas is the solo per-
former; and Fitch and Heyde are the composer and solo performer respectively.
34
e.g. Liza Lim, ‘Patterns of Ecstasy’, Darmsta«dter Beitra«ge zur neuen Musik , 21 (2012), 27^43.

638
there was never any sense that this was the case. Indeed, all of the musicians were very
willing to participate in the research, and exceptionally warm in their interactions
with the researchers, who were made to feel like participants in the musical project.
While it would be naive to be persuaded by an absence of counter-evidence, the
evidence of the video footage is that the musicians appeared overwhelmingly oblivi-
ous to our presence, and intensely focused on their work.35

3.2. Institutional Context

As an institution, musikFabrik has developed an unusual (though not unique)
approach to the management of their work. The artistic vision of the group is
negotiated through a non-hierarchical process in which the musicians themselves
make choices about the people with whom they wish to work, the pieces that they are
going to play, and the administrative staff that they employ.36 This process operates
through regular meetings of the entire ensemble with elected members carrying out
particular duties. The administrative work of the organization is carried out by a
team of project managers and support staff but is managed by a relatively flat
decision-making structure that includes all the members of staff. At this level of organ-
ization therefore, the musicians have a considerable stake in the running of their
business, are able to shape the broad direction of the group, and are required to take
an active role in the work of the organization. A number of musicians talked about
how the culture of decision-making has been fostered: ‘We have worked on our
feedback culture, really we have worked on that. We have [‘‘away-day’’] meetings once
a year: two days we go somewhere and we talk about these things; and we also have
professional guys . . . it is communication training.’37
Running alongside the demands of making an artistic success of the group, and
becoming skilled at co-management of the organization, are the everyday demands of
working in a room together with a conductor and composer on a piece of music. At
this more immediate level of co-presence, the flat organizational architecture in which
all have an equal voice is partially supplanted by more conventional lines of authority,
expressed through discussions during the rehearsals and the musical negotiations of
the participants. Within the constraints of finite rehearsal time, the requirement to get
things done efficiently translates into the practical reality of permanent members of
the ensemble and guests working within a relatively conventional format in which the
conductor and composer mark out the territory and lead the musicians.
But although the day-to-day rehearsing tends to be led from the front, and the musi-
cians to some degree restrain their own voices in the rehearsal process, this seems to
be motivated by a sense of responsible collective engagement rather than deference or
obedience. ‘Everyone has an opinion and has to say that, that is part of our kind
of working here . . . ’,38 says Dirk Rothbrust, even as the euphonium player Melvyn
Poore also recognizes the need for judgement and pragmatism: ‘I was on the verge of

35
A complete first draft of the paper was made available to the entire ensemble for comment, and no critical
remarks were received, about either the presence of the researchers or the findings and interpretations that were
offered.
36
‘[E]ach individual musician is responsible for everything that happens. We employ the officers; we are in a dif-
ferent situation to maybe an orchestral musician.’ Interview with oboist Peter Veale, 1 Nov. 2011.
37
Interview with percussionist Dirk Rothbrust, 6 June 2011.
38
Ibid.

639
saying something afterwards but I decided not to: probably enough cooks in the
kitchen . . .’.39 As Peter Veale puts it:
There is a very thin line with all of these thingsçit is the case that each player in
musikFabrik can comment on how to do things. Usually I think that works fine: the con-
ductors we work with are aware of the fact that we are not like an orchestra where people sit
quietly and play and maybe in the break come and say something. . . . I think most
musikFabrik players are aware of the fact of trying not to interfere too much with the flow of
how things are going.40

A significant part of musikFabrik’s working practice is the role of ‘research’ inter-

actions with their commissioned composers in the genesis of new work. As already
mentioned, in February 2011, when TI was still a very open field of possibilities, Lim
arranged to work with four core members of the ensemble (Blaauw, Rosman,
Rothbrust, and Veale) as part of the development of the instrumentation and perform-
ance practices for the piece. These preliminary workshops and discussions constituted
a significant creative phase in the work’s formation, guiding the composer in developing
or setting aside particular instruments, techniques, and improvisational practices, and
enlisting the creative input of the four ensemble musicians. At this point, Lim had estab-
lished an outline of the piece that included Movement V in detailed form, the first half
of Movement I (about six minutes of music), and a series of improvisational exercises
or tableaux to be workshopped during these February meetings. It was this workshop
that led to the final decisions about instrumentation, particularly percussionç
although all the musicians shared ideas with the composer about techniques and
offered different instruments that could be used in the piece over this three-day
workshop, including Blaauw’s distinctive double-bell trumpet and Veale’s lupophone.41
Lim had anticipated that each of the four musicians would take a significant
improvising role at different points in the work, and over the three days the workshop
involved two distinct areas of exploration: the sound-world that the piece was to
inhabit, which involved trialling and exploring particular techniques and instruments;
and a number of experiments with improvisation, to see how particular techniques
might be used within an improvisational framework. Seen from the musicians’ perspec-
tive, the workshops provided an equally important opportunity to engage with a work
that would require their improvisational input at a number of significant moments.
Two outcomes had a decisive impact on TI, the first of which relates to decisions
about the instrumentation. Lim’s work with Veale (oboe and lupophone), Blaauw (flu-
gelhorn and double-bell trumpet), and Rothbrust (percussion) commenced with an
open exploration of an expanding set of possibilities followed by a corresponding reduc-
tion as Lim began to refine her ideas about how these sounds might be integrated
into the piece. Lim’s original intention to include turntables as part of the percussion
set, for example, was dropped after a relatively brief investigation, and the remainder
of the time was spent on a more detailed exploration of various drums and metallo-
phones. The investigation of one of these drums revealed an underlying principle that
until then had remained tacit, but that would end up as a guiding factor. In exploring
the possibilities of various frame drums, Rothbrust demonstrated a large prototype

39
Interview with Melvyn Poore, 6 June 2011.
40
Interview with Peter Veale, 1 Nov. 2011.
41
A lupohone is a variety of bass oboe designed by Guntram Wolf and Benedikt Eppelsheim. For further details see
5http://www.guntramwolf.de/englisch/o_modern.html4.

640
that he had constructed consisting of skin on a shallow metal rim about a metre in
diameter. The drum afforded an extremely diverse and resonant range of sounds, but
despite these attractive attributes Lim concluded that the sounds of the instrument
were insufficiently ‘neutral’ to be incorporated into the sound-world that she was
imagining.
The second decisive outcome relates to the improvisational approach, in which the
‘failure’ of a particular aim resulted in the adoption of a significantly different creative
strategy. Lim had wanted to achieve a relationship between the notated and
improvised music of TI that would enact the tuning and shaping principle that
Hafiz’s poetry had suggested. Her idea was that the ensemble musicians, having been
tuned and shaped by the written material of the score, would behave (musically) in
ways that would demonstrate the consequences of that process. In order to see how
that might work, Lim experimented with a series of shorter and longer improvisations
based on the underlying pitch table for the piece, the aim of which was to see whether
the musicians might jump straight into this changed musical realityçrather than
emerging slowly from a period of more generic free improvisation. During the
workshop, Lim stated that ‘for the ensemble improvisations, one of the things I am
interested in is to see if we can somehow hit a higher energy level without the build-
up aspect . . . [whether] there is a way of going in without generating it beforehand,
within a fairly compact timeframe’. To which Blaauw responded: ‘Yes, but I think to
get it straightaway it would be good to decide on certain kinds of material like you do
now and then you have a focus for developing that material, that energy levelç
instead of inventing and re-inventing all the time . . . ’.42 Practical though this is as a
suggestion, it is at odds with the uncertain and dynamic principle of attunement that
was the basis for Lim’s intention to incorporate a significant element of improvisation
for the ensemble music in the first place; and on the evidence of these workshops Lim
decided to change significantly the balance between notated and improvised material
in the piece.
With the broad principles of method and context established, we turn to the main
substance of the essayçan exploration of three separate rehearsal and performance
episodes in the work: first, an improvised passage of ‘birdcalls’ from the first
movement; second, the oboe solo with strings and percussion that constitutes the fifth
movement; and finally, a sequence of exchanges between the solo pianist, Uri Caine,
and the rest of the ensemble in the sixth movement.

4. THREE EPISODES

4.1. Episode 1: Birdcalls

Between bars 57 and 63 in the first movement of TI, the first sustained thematic impro-
visation occurs with instructions to the piccolo, oboe, and clarinet to ‘improvise short,
intense bursts of wayward looping birdcalls (using pitch table 1), respond to piano’
(see Ex. 1). The ‘birdcalls’ of the piccolo, oboe, and clarinet are at first accompanied
by a series of sustained string chords that cease at bar 62, leading to a 30-second
chorus featuring woodwind, trumpet, percussion, and piano. This short, programmatic
improvisation became the subject of sustained reworking and discussion in rehearsal,
and a recurrent topic in our conversations with a number of the musicians. The episode

42
From the workshop on 27 Feb. 2011.

641
 EX. 1. ‘Birdcalls’ section (bb. 57^63) from Movement I of Tongue of the Invisible

642
points to the confluence between improvisation and pre-given musical materials in the
piece and, more broadly, to the complex underpinnings of the creative process with
which TI engages. The woodwind and trumpet soloists were encouraged to base their
approach on a narrative idea that Lim offered in response to the players’ questions
about how they might tackle the passage: ‘[T]he first movement is the movement
from twilight to dawnçso transition overnight; this is the point where these night-
time birds are preparing for the dawn, birds that are awake in the middle of the
night. So they are preparing for the dawn . . .’.43 Lim’s encouragement to the players
to adopt an expressly individuated approach stands in some contrast to much of the
rest of the piece, in which there is a stronger sense of ensemble, and in particular
contrast to the final movement, which explicitly requires the members of the group to
whisper self-selected lines from the poetic text of the piece in a manner that is deliber-
ately self-effacing and collective.
Over a period of two days, this brief section was rehearsed eight times, with discus-
sions ranging from quite extended interchanges to relatively brief clarifications. These
discussions were directed largely by Lim and the conductor, Andre¤ de Ridder, who
offered their perspectives on how the improvisation might work, Lim’s comments
often being summarized by de Ridder prior to a run-through, with frequent checks
that Lim was happy with the direction of the improvisation. Much of the talk was con-
cerned with ways in which the musicians might enact these birdlike identities, and
included both specific questions about the precise technical means by which these
might be achieved (such as the use of multiphonics), and broader questions about the
nature of the musical interaction (such as the degree to which the musicians should
imitate one another during the improvisation). Overwhelmingly, as is standard re-
hearsal practice for a new piece, the rehearsals involved the conductor coordinating
the work of the group and acting to some degree as an intermediary between the musi-
cians and the composer. But at other times the musicians by-passed the conductor and
went straight to the composer for guidance or clarificationçeither because of a
previous working relationship with the composer;44 or because the musical query was
one that only the composer might be expected to answer; or in some cases because of
the physical layout of the rehearsal space, which brought different musicians into prox-
imity with the composer depending on her position in the room. At times this placed
de Ridder, formally a guest with the ensemble, in a complex position:
[I]t is a difficult role for me . . . [N]ormally I guess the conductor can stand in the way a little
bit between the composer and ensemble . . . you need a line and most musicians want it; but
this ensemble is different because this is an ensemble of soloists and highly individual
personalities as well, and you actually really have to find a balance between allowing
everyone to speak and speak up but at the same time, there is still, I know that they do want
clear leadership as well but you know, it is almost schizophrenic. . . . It is less predictable and
more interesting.45

A feature of the birdcall rehearsal discussions was the particular nature of clarifica-
tion and questioning that moved the process forward. De Ridder consistently checked
back with Lim, asking: ‘Is that right? . . . Do you think it is too? . . . Anything this time

43
Composer talking to the musicians in rehearsal, 6 June 2011.
44
Some of the musicians are long-standing collaborators with Lim.
45
Interview with Andre¤ de Ridder, 6 June 2011.

643
we did in the bird improvisation? . . . What do you think? . . . [to Lim] Now that was
quite different’, and so on.46 De Ridder’s comments thus tended to act as links
between what had just been done and suggestive, directive comments about the next it-
eration of the passageça thread through the rehearsals that tended towards the
concrete and practical:
Maybe one could take on some longer notes; with maybe some glisses . . . 47

I thoughtçbecause now you [Lim] have mentioned this corresponding and dialogue thingç
that by the time the strings go quieter, and we are becoming really aware . . . it is very busy
all the way through. Maybe although it is intense and maybe there can still be more spaces,
even that long bar when we stopped; maybe we should make sure we still have some spaces
so we can actually hear individual voices . . . 48

Lim also made numerous suggestions, though these were often offered as more abstract
descriptions of what the passage was ‘about’, and were somewhat less practically
directed than de Ridder’s comments:
[I]t would be interesting to see if within that space, whether we can perhaps have more . . . you
know, sudden accumulations, more a senseçyou reach a tipping point, and then there is a
sudden density rather than the more continuous picture; you could suddenly swerve into one
state and then into another: does that make sense ?49

Many of Lim’s comments were turned back to the players as questions and directed
towards their feelings about the improvisation and how it might be shaped: ‘How did
people [to the players] feel about that? . . . What do you think?’50 By contrast, and
perhaps not surprisingly, questions from the players were much more specific and
focused on the performativeçthe way in which the character of the improvisation
could be sounded in practice: ‘Well, can we use multiphonics?’ ‘How much should we
respond to the piano?’ ‘Would it be an idea to not start together?’51çthese questions
more often than not were addressed to Lim.
To summarize, the typical pattern of interaction in the collective work on this
passage was for the conductor to consult the composer, for the composer to address
the players, and for the players to address their remarks variously to the composer,
the conductor, and one another. Lim retained a measure of direction in rehearsing
this section, but in offering her ideas about how to make the improvisation work by
means of questions (‘what do you think?’) she in turn directed control back to the
players. As pointed out earlier, an important aspect of Lim’s conception of the piece is
that the players should be ‘tuned’ by the work, becoming progressively more attuned
to one another as an enactment of the work’s poetic content. But some uncertainties
remain: if Lim is unwilling to adopt a standard ‘authorial’ role, and if de Ridder’s

46
Verbatim comments from rehearsal, 6 June 2011.
47
From rehearsal, conductor’s comment, 6 June 2011 after second run-through.
48
From rehearsal, conductor’s comment, 6 June 2011, after fourth run-through.
49
From rehearsal, composer’s comment, 6 June 2011, after third run-through.
50
Ibid.
51
From rehearsal 6 June 2011, respectively: oboist Peter Veale after third run-through; the same; and flautist Helen
Bledsoe after fourth run-through.

644
position as an intermediary between the composer and the players is complex, then
who decides what the ensemble are aiming at, and how to achieve it?
Lim’s ideal was for such problems to be resolved through an emergent process, but in
the practical circumstances of rehearsing for a first performance in just three days’
time, it was not obvious how this emergence was to be realized, or how to negotiate sig-
nificant differences of attitude within the ensemble. The euphonium player, Melvyn
Poore, expressed a strong view about the virtues of a non-interventionist approach to
the passage, observing:
My impression after the first time that they rehearsed it [birdcalls] this morning, just those in-
struments alone, my impression was that it was pretty fine and a very transparent texture,
and one could hear everything. One could wish for a little more interaction between them,
but I thought basically it was very nice, it had a good feeling about it. And then Liza [Lim]
made her comments and Andre¤ [de Ridder] made his comments and then they did it again
and all of the qualities of the first time through were gone, and unfortunately that is very
often the case, and I think it is about time we started to build this into our art: that there is a
certain thing that happens and it happens onceçthat’s it, and to try to recapture that is
verging on the impossible. . . . I was on the verge of saying something afterwards, but I
decided not toçthere were probably enough cooks in the kitchen. . . . But I felt that it was
going the way that these things often go, in the direction of, well, let’s start quietly and let’s
make a crescendo and at some point we stop altogether and that’s it. A very simple traditional
way of doing things . . . 52

And from later in the same interview:

If people start criticizing what has just been played when improvised, then it becomes less
improvised next time because the boundaries have been drawn in and you find yourself with
much less space. . . .These impulsive moments where something creative happens is a unique
thing and if you want another one of those moments, then you have to do something
else. . . . In fact we are doing that all the time, we are doing that every day, all of us, not just
musicians. . . . Everybody’s an improviser: when you see people having a good time, they’re
probably having a good time because they’re improvising with each other. . . . Making each
moment work is not the way to go about it because it works of its own accord, from my point
of view . . . 53

Poore articulates a position in which the intervention in, and management of,
improvised music-making is damaging: only in the process of unregulated and unre-
peated improvising can authentic expression be found, he suggestsça reflection of a
deep-seated everyday human capacity. An improvised moment is unrepeatable and
perhaps ungraspable, and the idea that one might ‘improve’ the birdcall section
through intervention and management misses that fundamental point.
By comparison, in the rehearsal the trumpet player Marco Blaauw expressed a
degree of unhappiness that an overly imitative relationship between the ensemble musi-
cians threatened to erode the distinct identities of the separate bird-musiciansçwith
the danger of converging towards an undifferentiated wash of sound rather than a
counterpoint of distinct parts. In contrast to the radically process-based attitude of
Poore, Blaauw spoke for the need to intervene and fixçto decide on who was taking

52
Interview with Melvyn Poore, 6 June 2011.
53
Ibid.

645
on which character, and then to hang on to that. Each player should ‘stick to one bird
but vary it’, he proposed:
Blaauw: Communication does not fall into imitation, does it?

Lim: [Communication] does not fall into imitation? Sorry? . . .

Blaauw: If we choose the character of a bird then we stick to that and don’t copy.

Lim: Sure, yeah.

Blaauw: Because it was kind of, when I tried to identify what is going on and I tried to choose
something completely different, [and] then hear echoes of that . . . [makes gesture of
dissatisfaction].

Lim: Sure, I mean, you stay in your own person.54

Blaauw’s outlook favours a position in which the individual crafting of materials

remains in the service of an overarching compositional visionça sense of working
towards a distinct and agreed outcome driven by the composer’s aims. Here are two
significantly different creative attitudes at work: one in which any attempt to exert col-
lective control over the materials is seen as an interference in the process itself; and
the other in which taking possession of the sounds, and giving them a clear identity, is
key to the success of the section.

4.2. Episode 2: Movement V

If a disagreement about the aims or the nature of improvisation lies behind the
problems of the birdcalls episode, then a similar uncertainty figures in Movement V
çthough arguably with a more productive impact on the resulting music, and more
in line with Lim’s aesthetic aims in TI as a whole. The fifth movement of TI, scored
for oboe, percussion, and strings (two violins, viola, cello, double bass), sits at the
halfway mark of the work and provides a particularly clear opportunity to explore co-
creative processes arising at the interface of the compositional, improvisational, and
performative factors that are involved in the realization of the work. The movement
features an oboe solo made up of nine sections of music of varying duration, separated
by pauses of variable duration to be determined by the performer, accompanied by
the percussionist and string players, who are provided with text instructions and
musical materials to be used as the basis for improvisation. Example 2 shows the oboe
part for the first, eighth, and final sections of the movement. The percussionist is in-
structed to ‘accompany with brief commentaries on drums, cymbals, cowbells (played
with fingers and brushes)’55 for the first seven sections of the movement, and is given
a more detailed notated part in a duo with the oboe in section VIII of the movement,
before being left free to improvise in the final section (section IX). The string
material consists of a sequence of scalic pitch cells (see Ex. 3), with instructions for
moving between and within cells. These instructions include suggestions for ornamenta-
tion, microtonal inflections, and the use of glissando, variations of register, timbre,

54
Rehearsal, 6 June 2011.
55
From score of Tongue of the Invisible (Munich, 2011), 62.

646
EX. 2. Sections I, VIII, and IX of Movement V of Tongue of the Invisible : The roots of the world
are entwined in the wind

and articulation, and with the explicit instruction to use the oboe part ‘as a cue for styl-
istic, rhythmic and gestural qualities’.56
The music of this section is intended to be created through rehearsal and perform-
ance processes, and prompts a consideration of: (i) the relational meanings brought to
the music by the musiciansçspecifically, various role or status identifications and ex-
pectations emerging from training, enculturation, and personal histories; (ii) the
impact of these as a co-text on performative action, particularly the modes of perform-
ance practice activated in various situations; and (iii) more broadly, the possibilities
afforded by the combination of composed and improvised elements in the music, as
revealed in the process of rehearsal and performance. In the preparation for the
Amsterdam premiere, two rehearsal sessions were devoted to this movement: an hour
on June 4, and an hour and a half on June 5, in addition to a run-through and dress
rehearsal.
The video footage of the first rehearsal shows a clear transition from tentative begin-
nings, in which players were trying to get their bearings in the score/instructions and
deferring to the authority of composer and conductor for orientation and securityçto
a point at which much more free play was evident in the improvisationçand finally
to a stage where this more uninhibited playing also influenced how the musicians inter-
preted the written score, allowing them in some cases to depart completely from it on
the basis of material generated in the improvisation. The beginning of the first re-
hearsal period was largely concerned with negotiating the decision-making process:
who leads and who follows; which musical ideas might be decided upon (‘fixed’), and
which should be left open. At this first rehearsal, de Ridder made a point of relinquish-
ing his conventional role as conductor by asking the oboist, Peter Veale, to move from
his ‘backseat’ position in the wind section to a soloist’s position at the front of the
group : ‘I’m getting out of the way . . . you’re taking my position . . . you don’t
need me.’57 A brief explanation (by Lim) and discussion of the ‘rules’ for the string
players’ interpretations of the pitch cells then followed, at the end of which Lim
observed to de Ridder that she was ‘curious to see what happens’. Both de Ridder and
Lim were clearly reluctant to give too much direction to the players at the outset of
the processçaware of the risk that whatever they said might be given more weight
than an idea emanating from the ensemble. Lim indicated that she was looking for an
‘emergent’ outcome, with the musical initiatives and ideas coming from the players,

56
Ibid. 63.
57
Rehearsal, 4 June 2011.

647
EX. 2. Continued

648
EX. 2. Continued

but the body language and compliant attitude of the musicians, seated in a standard
chamber ensemble formation, showed that they expected the composer and conductor
to take the lead.
The discussion after the first run-through focused on evaluating the kinds of musical
ideas and ensemble textures that had emerged, though Lim emphasized the need to
keep things open: ‘I think it’s nice not necessarily to decide beforehand on the [forma-
tion of the] ensembles; it’s nice how they emerge. . . . Suddenly there’s a crystalliza-
tion.’58 And a couple of minutes later in the same discussion, the percussionist Dirk

58
Ibid. ‘The ensembles’ here refers to the changing and temporary groupings of string players from section to
section, and moment to moment within each section.

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 EX. 3. Pitch cells to be used by accompanying string players in Movement V of Tongue of the Invisible

650
Rothbrust asked ‘do we fix it in the end?’çor in other words ‘do we set this up as a
rule?’ To which Lim replied ‘No, it’s like saying ‘‘this is really effective’’ . . . it [just]
becomes part of the vocabulary’çwith which the string players all agreed: ‘no fixing’.
The video footage shows that during a second run-through within this same re-
hearsal, there were many more direct interventions from Lim and de Ridder. By
section IV of the movement, there was a sense of dissatisfaction with how things were
progressing, and Lim proposed that this was a point at which something new could
be introduced. De Ridder suggested that the string players might introduce more
motivic materials, a rhythmic groove, and more differentiated individual lines as a
way of generating a more diverse vocabulary. By breaking the very rules that had just
been discussed earlier, Lim and de Ridder appeared to give the musicians permission
to do the same. In a similar manner, Rothbrust was encouraged to introduce percus-
sion instruments in addition to those identified in the score (drums, cymbals, and
cowbells), and it was decided that the strings should drop out during the oboe/percus-
sion duo section (section VIII), before returning in the following final section (section
IX; see Ex. 2). While the earlier ‘let’s see what happens’ approach had seemed to be in-
effective, this stronger input and direction resulted in more energetic and uninhibited
playing, and also had an impact on the dynamic of the rehearsal: conversation
became more animated, there was more joking, and a more uninhibited quality to the
players’ physical movements with a palpably greater sense of energy. The increased in-
ventive freedom and variation in the improvised parts also encouraged Veale and
Rothbrust to take a freer approach to their written parts, and to feel more able to
depart from the score. After the rehearsal Veale explained: ‘I decided to change my
strategy and to also start reacting, not just be reacted to’, which Lim encouraged as a
very positive development.
During the second rehearsal of the movement, on the following day, there was an
even stronger process of renegotiating boundaries and ‘permission giving’ among the
musicians. The footage of this rehearsal shows a much more engaged dynamic right
from the start, with the playing more confident and extrovert, and a variety of
gestural and bodily cues being passed around the musicians, all of whom were
actively involved in the accompanying discussions. Both de Ridder and Lim took up
positions out of the main sightlines of the ensembleçde Ridder behind, and Lim to
one sideçallowing Veale to stand directly in front with good eye contact between all
players. While the spatial arrangement in the first rehearsal suggested a more hierarch-
ical positioning of oboe soloist, composer, and conductor set against a string group
and percussionist, in the second rehearsal the much more integrated circular formation
reinforced the sense that the group had now established a stronger and more egalitar-
ian identity.
Early in this rehearsal, the viola player, Axel Porath, unexpectedly took the lead in
section V of the movement and elaborated a prominent and dominating solo. After
less than a minute of playing, the other musicians dropped out apparently bewildered
by, and uncertain about, the ‘legitimacy’ of what was going on, since they had earlier
agreed to introduce more distinctively motivic material and a groove in the previous
section (IV). Having ground to a halt, the four other string players looked at each
other in some embarrassment as if to say ‘Really? Can he do that? Is that allowed?’,
leading to a period of animated discussion between all the players, also drawing in
Lim and de Ridder. To begin with, the players checked with one another that
they had indeed agreed to introduce more identifiable and distinct material in section
IV, and that they were now at the end of section Vças if to counter the awkward

651
possibility that they might be lost or might have forgotten the agreement. Having es-
tablished that everyone was clear where they were, and what had been agreed, Porath
asserted that his more extrovert and forward playing was entirely consistent with the
new principles that had been decided at the start of the rehearsal: there might not
have been an agreement to play like that in section V, but what he did had grown natur-
ally out of the previous material. The other players concurred but with a continuing
sense of uncertainty, and when de Ridder, sitting behind them, commented that the
groove (in section IV) had been good, there was an uncomfortable silenceças if his
endorsement of the groove was (by omission) tacit criticism of Porath’s subsequent de-
velopment. ‘Soçwhat now?’ said one of the string players, followed by an awkward
laugh from the group, before Lim, sensing an impasse, suggested that they go back to
section IV and have another go. It was clear that the players were still uncertain
about what it was that they were trying to achieve, and what they were allowed to
do. ‘The viola solo took over and covered the oboistçisn’t that a problem?’ asked one
of the violinists, at which point Veale, who had contributed little to the discussion so
far, said clearly that he really liked that, andçdirecting his comments towards
Porathçsaid that he liked the way that his own part disappeared below the surface,
and then reappeared. Turning to Lim, and changing from German to English as if to
make sure that she was quite clear what he was proposing, he said again: ‘I don’t
mind if I’m occasionally submerged in a phrase . . . ’çwith which she agreed, and
with a sense of relief and new understanding the whole ensemble agreed to a more
flexible attitude to where and how these more assertive parts of the accompanying
texture might appear.59
As with the ‘birdcalls’ discussion, Lim’s rehearsal comments tended to be treated as
‘rules’ by the musicians despite her intention that these suggestions should be under-
stood as merely contingent responses to a particular version of the work, a part of the
working method rather than an interpretative solution. These ‘rules’ might quickly
become invalid and irrelevant, putting the musicians in a difficult and potentially
stressful situation. Who decides when a rule still applies but perhaps isn’t working
properly, and on the other hand when the rule should be, or has been, abandoned?
The players are at the sharp end of these decisions but without a clear sense of whose
judgement, in the end, should prevail. Who is responsible for this music, and is the
composer’s invitation to them to take the initiative an abdication of her responsibility
or a genuine opportunity? Who decides ‘what this music is supposed to sound like’
and whether it is yet sounding like that? In short, who is in charge, and if it is no one
in particular, is any judgement being exercised, and if so how?
In the context of conventionally notated music, there are established responses to
these questions, just as there are within the world of free improvisation. But the
hybrid circumstances that TI attempts to explore, reinforced by Lim’s own wish not to
adopt the default authorial position, placed the musicians in an uncertain and poten-
tially unstable context, and in doing so it illustrated the manner in which the music
demands a number of different kinds of roles, rules, and identities to be played out.
The oboist is cast as a leader with entirely scored material, the string players as

59
Not surprisingly, uncertainties remained, as the following exchange later in the same rehearsal between Lim and
Jessica Kuhn, the cellist in the string group, illustrates:
Lim: I felt that you were about to play a solo but then you backed off.
Kuhn: It wasn’t too much?
Lim: No: I was waiting for you to do something expansive.

652
accompanists with only the most schematic indications for their music, and the percus-
sionist in an intermediate position.
A striking feature of the rehearsal process for this movement was the manner in
which authority was opened up and destabilized by the improvisational elements. The
improvised framework offered possibilities for the ensemble to take up its own creative
authorship, but the transfer of authority from its more usual locations in notated
music (composer and conductor) towards the players did not take place by a simple re-
linquishing of leadership by Lim and de Ridder. Rather, Lim and de Ridder made a
strong input into the shaping of the work, but in a manner that then appeared to ‘give
permission’ to the players to do the same. As we have seen, there was a decisive
moment in the second rehearsal, when the viola player (Porath) was felt to have signifi-
cantly reinterpreted the rules so as to assert himself in a distinctly new way. By
breaking out of the more conventional role of an accompanist his behaviour provoked
discomfort among his fellow string playersça discomfort that can be understood in
terms of ‘rule-making and rule-breaking’ and the tacit conventions of accompanying
behaviour. Despite the fact that musikFabrik is a specialist ensemble of soloists essen-
tially free of hierarchical distinctions, and with considerable experience of projects
involving free improvisation,60 the conventional politics of a string group places the
first violinist in the dominant role, with the viola player hierarchically subordinate.61
The conservatoire training of musikFabrik’s musicians and the continuing dominance
of the Western orchestral model inevitably project various behavioural scripts and
power relations onto these players, and it may in part have been these that were residu-
ally activated in the rehearsalçtacitly reinforced by the ensemble’s conventional
spatial layout.
Lim’s suggestion that the viola should enter first in the accompaniment, and the sub-
sequent discussion between Lim, de Ridder, and the musicians about varying the
material and introducing new energy at section IV of the movement, established the
background to Porath’s unexpectedly strong musical contribution and the discomfort
and discussion that it provoked. The ‘permission’ to introduce new ideas granted by
Lim and de Ridder’s suggestions can be seen as the catalyst for Porath’s playing, just
as the decision that Porath should be the first instrument to enter among the accom-
panying instruments also arguably constructs him as an initiator. But at the same
time, there are unspoken understandings regarding role boundaries, and when Porath
then asserted himself to the extent that he appeared to compete with Veale for
musical space, this unsettled the assumed balance of voice and role. The ensuing discus-
sion was an attempt to clarify tacit and explicit rule-making and agreed roles, since
Porath’s playing had contradicted not only the musicians’ explicit decision to stick to a
relatively sparse accompaniment at that point in the movement, but also the tacit
agreement that Veale was a soloist who should be heard. The outcome of this
apparent conflict was a new understanding among the players that they need not
adhere to these roles and rules, that accompanists might become soloists, and that the
soloists need not stick to their assigned roles, nor even strictly to the score. As described
earlier, Lim’s intention was to compose a piece that was deliberately ‘about’ the explor-
ation of different subjectivities, using various performative modes to model different

60
One of a number of such examples would be the two-hour-long improvisation project entitled Tiere sitzen nicht
(2008^9), led by Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger in collaboration with the ensemble.
61
See J. Keith Murnighan and Donald Conlon, ‘The Dynamics of Intense Work Groups: A Study of British String
Quartets’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 36 (1991), 165^86.

653
ritual states of being. The Sufi spiritual and poetic background to the piece provides a
way to understand the use of different notational strategies along a continuum from
highly detailed scoring to the simple textual instructions that leave most of the
decision-making to the performers. As a consequence, the performers’ engagement
with the work is crucial to its meanings as a form that can be remade and experienced
anew at each iteration, allowing certain relational factors or cultural ‘lines of force’ to
become apparent through the combination of fixed and fluid elements in the work.
By combining strict notations and freer injunctions to improvise, Movement V of TI
calls up an axis of obedience and freedom that seemed to spark a number of
overlearned responses from the musicians. The existence of these psychical or cultural-
biographical scripts in relation to leadership hierarchy and rule-making, reinforced by
the spatial arrangement of the participants (composer, conductor, solo and ensemble
musicians), created uncertainties in the rehearsals as musicians sought to figure out
how to operate within an environment of apparently mixed messagesças the discus-
sion triggered by Porath’s viola solo demonstrated. These moments of uncertainty and
conflictças with the birdcalls episodeçhave distinctly productive potential, though
in rather different ways in the two cases. In the case of birdcalls, the players collectively
wanted to establish a relatively fixed principle that would guarantee a particular
resultçdespite different aesthetic positions within the ensemble;62 while in Movement
V it was ultimately the shedding of a number of self-imposed restrictions that led to a
shared and more explicitly collaborative understanding among the composer, con-
ductor, and ensemble musicians of what the movement might be like, and how to
achieve that.

4.3. Episode 3: Movement VI and ‘Happy Birthday’

The last of the three episodes from TI that form the focal material for this essay is a
movement that moves further in the direction of free improvisation, but which acts as
the locus for an apparently spontaneous, and yet ritualized, social exchange of an unex-
pected kind. Movement VI of TI, entitled ‘Between the pages of the world (iii)’ is
designated in the score as: ‘Solo improvisation by pianist (melodica ad lib.) based on
materials from Movements II and IV’, below whichçbetween bracketsçappears the
same pentatonic ‘folk melody’ that constitutes the solo piano introduction to
movement II (‘Between the pages of the world (i)’) and which suffuses the instrumen-
tal and vocal lines in movement IV (‘Between the pages of the world (ii)’) (see
Ex. 4). Improvised creativity has conventionally been understood as something that
takes place in the moment, whether it occurs within the constraints of what Derek
Bailey terms idiomatic improvisation,63 or within the apparently unconstrained cir-
cumstances of free improvisation. Where they exist, the frameworks (chord changes,
or formal structures) are of course understood to have a history, but what happens
within the frameworkçthe raw ‘stuff ’ of the improvisationçis imagined to have a
direct and momentary immediacy about it: a kind of idealized instant composition.
But even these apparently improvised moments can have surprising histories, as the re-
hearsal and performance of Movement VI of TI demonstrate.
In the rehearsals and subsequent performances of this movement, the pianist Uri
Caine’s improvisation began with a direct restatement of the melodic material, played

62
Note that Melvyn Poore, who articulates a contrary position, is not himself one of the wind and brass soloists
involved in this passage. His view is one that is offered from the sidelines, as it were.
63
Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (London, 1992), p. xi.

654
EX. 4. Movement VI of Tongue of the Invisible: Between the pages of the world (ii)

on melodica and piano as indicated in Ex. 4, developing from there (in different ways
on each occasion) into increasingly active and embellished elaborations of the
material. The score indicates that the movement should have a duration of three to
five minutes, and in the run-throughs and performances Caine typically took around
four and half or five minutes, with the last minute or so invariably consisting of a sus-
pended filigree treatment of the main melodic material played in the highest register
of the pianoça mobile of melodic fragments eventually fading into silence.
The day of the TI premiere at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam (8 June) was Caine’s
birthday. The ensemble, soloists, conductor, and composer assembled at 2.30 at the
Bimhuis auditorium for the final general rehearsal before the evening concert.
Triggered by the oboe player’s tuning A, the ensemble slid into an impromptu render-
ing of ‘Happy Birthday’, Caine already at the piano and joining in, and with increas-
ingly raucous contributions from a number of the players. As the tune reached its
rousing conclusion, a member of the ensemble’s administrative team presented Caine
with a large bunch of flowers, at which point he got up from the piano, looked genu-
inely surprised and touched, turned to the ensemble clutching his flowers and said ‘Oh
my God . . . it’s embarrassing! Thank you. . . . It’s a pleasure to play with you. Thank
you’, in response to which de Ridder and other members of the ensemble wished
Caine a happy birthday. There was a brief moment of awkwardness, until the oboe
again sounded an A, Caine sat back down at the piano, and everyone resumed their
focused professional personae.
This final rehearsal finished with a straight run-through of the whole piece. Caine’s
performance of movement VI ran its course in the manner described above, reaching
the passage of high, quiet, stillness at about 30 5000 into the movement. Caine’s playing
at this point took the form of broken arpeggiations of the principal pitches of the
melody (F, D, C, B b, Ab) in the highest register of the piano, played very quietly and in-
creasingly slowly (see Ex. 5). With the ensemble sitting very still in front of the
pianoçalmost all of them with their backs to himçCaine brought his unwinding ar-
peggiation to rest on F, D, and Bb in turn, in more or less equal long notes, as if begin-
ning a final reiteration of the melody. But following the Bb, and still in the same gentle
manner as the rest of the passage, he moved first to an An against an E b in the left
hand, and then a G, forming an unmistakable 4-3 suspension, with a long pause on
the resolution (see Ex. 5). The move retrospectively reinterprets the preceding F, D,
and Bb as the notes corresponding to ‘(Happy) birthday dear Uri’ in a rendering of
‘Happy birthday to you’ in B b, the 4-3 suspension functioning as the subdominant prep-

655
EX. 5. Summarizing transcription of the end of Caine’s improvisation in Movement VI of
Tongue of the Invisible from the Amsterdam run-through, showing ‘Happy Birthday’ reference,
with 4-3 suspension at*

aration for the final (‘Happy birthday to you’) cadence with which the tune finishes.
With this brief reference over, Caine made no further allusion to the tune, and
allowed the final thirty seconds of the improvisation to fade out with repetitions of
the pitches F, D, and C.
The communicative success of Caine’s ‘Happy Birthday’ reference is clear from the
video recording of the run-through: as the 4-3 suspension resolved, a number of the
playersçwho had all been sitting very still and quietçturned smilingly to one
another, or to look at Caine with his head down at the piano. The ripple of recognition
through the ensemble is clearly visibleçeven audible in the slight shifting of players
in their seats. And musically, the gesture had a very distinct impact: the end of
Caine’s improvisation had a suspended, static, and otherworldly character to itçboth
because of its circulating and pentatonic qualities, and because (as specified in the
score) the piano had been lightly prepared (just eight notes across the whole range of
the instrument) with gamelan-like timbral consequences. By contrast the 4-3 suspen-
sion and its reference suddenly elicits a completely different musical worldça world
of functional tonal harmony, of celebratory song, and of a clearly identifiable and dis-
tinctly worldly everyday reality. But rather than causing an unwelcome lurch from
one musical and poetic world to another, Caine’s fleeting reference managed to
preserve the overall character of the musicçand indeed transform ‘Happy Birthday’
as much as ‘Happy Birthday’ transformed the end of this movement. To weave a refer-
ence to his own birthday into the improvisation might seem self-serving, or perhaps
no more than a piece of clever musical humour. But from the reactions of the musicians
in the ensemble, who seemed touched and amused by the reference, it seemed to
function in an almost diametrically different mannerças a kind of reciprocal gesture
by Caine to the players in response to their earlier birthday wishes to him. Caine
made no reference at all to the tune in his improvisation in that night’s public perform-
ance (the premiere)çsince to do so would have seemed baffling for any audience
members who noticed it, and like a rather exclusive ‘in-joke’ for Caine and the
ensemble.
A little over two weeks later, on 25 June, the ensemble reassembled in Cologne for
the second performance of TI, in a concert held in the Funkhausçthe concert hall of
the West Deutscher Rundfunkçto mark the ensemble’s twentieth birthday. Members
of the ensemble had been involved in a variety of other projects in the interim, and
Caine had been in the USA, so this was the first time that this group of players had
reassembled since the Amsterdam performance. At the start of the afternoon’s pre-
concert rehearsal, de Ridder welcomed everyone to the rehearsal, and significantly
(in the light of subsequent events) went on: ‘It’s really nice to see you, and [to the
whole ensemble] Happy Birthday [brief applauseçde Ridder, the baritone Omar
Ebrahim, Caine, and one or two members of the ensemble joining in]. No, seriously,

656
it’s a pleasure and a privilege for us [gesturing to Ebrahim and Caine] as guests to be
involved with you in this. It’s great.’
Before the start of the evening concert, in front of a large audience in the Funkhaus,
the President of the Bundestag spoke for about ten minutes about the twenty-year
history of the ensemble, about the important cultural role that it plays, and about its
achievements, reinforcing the celebratory function of the concert and its new commis-
sion. The ensemble then came onto the stage, and the performance began. Movement
VI followed its established course, reaching the high, quiet music that had become its
standard pattern at around 30 0000. At this point, with dynamic emphasis on the notes
F, D, and Bb, Caine again worked in the same phrase from ‘Happy Birthday’, followed
immediately by a cascade of notes down the pianoças if to wipe the reference from
auditory memory. Prompted by the conductor’s remarks at the beginning of the after-
noon’s rehearsal, emphasized by the speech at the start of the concert, and undoubtedly
primed in the performers’ minds, this was plainly a reference to the ensemble’s own
birthday, and at the same time a link back to the ensemble’s marking of Caine’s
birthday at the rehearsal two weeks earlier. The video of the performance shows that
as Caine plays the ‘Happy Birthday’ reference, one or two members of the ensemble,
all of whom were sitting immobile with their instruments, moved slightly as if in
almost involuntary recognition of this ‘payment of respect’.
This extended episode revolves as much around a social distinction as it does around
a musical deviceçthe distinction between ‘host’ and ‘guest’. It is Caine’s position as
guest in relation to his ensemble hosts that lies behind the social and musical exchanges
both in Amsterdam and in Cologneçalbeit in different registers. In Amsterdam, in
the privacy of the run-through, the ‘happy birthday’ reference is both an immediate
response to the ensemble’s marking of Caine’s birthday, and a musically creative way
of weaving together that local moment, a personal history, and a ritual acknowledge-
ment of the guest^host relationship. It is, in short, a kind of handshake. In Cologne
the repetition takes on a different character: in a public context, the reference now
refers back to the earlier instance as far as the ensemble is concerned, but for the
wider audience it again acknowledges a guest^host relationship, but in a public, institu-
tional, and more formal manner. Had Caine been the regular ensemble pianist, this
gesture might have seemed narcissistic (a member of the ensemble celebrating the en-
semble’s own birthday), but as an outsider he was in a position genuinely to mark and
recognize the ensemble’s twenty-year achievement. And it is the musical codification/
expression of this relationship that is significant as far as creativity is concerned.
Movement VI not only highlights the nature of guest and host within an institutional
structure, it also points to the operation of temporal processes at a number of time-
scalesças do the other episodes within TI on which we have focused. There is
evidence that members of the audience other than those associated with the ensemble
might have picked up on this birthday reference and its immediate significance.64 But
this is principally a communication with the ensemble, conductor, and composerça

64
The programme listing for the radio broadcast of this concert six months later included the following
commentçindicating that the reference was noticed by at least some people outside the musikFabrik circle: ‘Im
vergangenen Jahr ist das Ensemble musikFabrik 20 Jahre alt geworden. Aus diesem Anlass hat Liza Lim den
Musikern ein faszinierendes Werk geschenkt, das unterschiedliche kulturelle Einflu«sse miteinander in Beziehung
setzt. . . . Der Jazz-Pianist Uri Caine hat es nicht verabsa«umt, in seinen Part ein kleines ‘‘Happy birthday’’ zu
schmuggeln.’ (‘Last year, musikFabrik reached twenty years of age. For this occasion, Liza Lim gave the musicians
a fascinating work that brings together a whole variety of cultural influences. . . .The jazz pianist Uri Caine took the
opportunity to smuggle a little ‘‘Happy birthday’’ into his part.’)

657
paying of respects by a guest to his hosts, a repaying of a debt of gratitude from two
weeks earlier, and a subtle commentary on the passing of various timescales with sig-
nificance for different individuals and social groups: fifty-five years of birthdays for
Caine, twenty years since the formation of the ensemble, seventeen days since the
final run-through before the Amsterdam premiere. Alan Perlman and David
Greenblatt draw attention to the importance of this kind of semantic reference in jazz,
players paying their respects to what they regard as their influences by weaving in
melodic tags or stylistic devices that signal ‘where they’re coming from’.65 Henry
Louis Gates conceptualizes this web of references in more potent and potentially
critical terms within the framework of Signifyin(g): ‘Thinking about the black
concept of Signifyin(g) is a bit like stumbling unaware into a hall of mirrors: the sign
itself appears to be doubled, at the very least, and (re)doubled upon ever closer
examination.’66 At the shortest timescale, ‘Happy Birthday’ is appropriated from its
simply celebratory function at the start of the rehearsal (when the ensemble literally
celebrates Caine’s birthday) to its incorporation into the musical texture an hour later
in the rehearsal run-through. Part of the meaning of this gesture is a light-hearted
display of musicianly expertise and of friendly reciprocityça classic illustration of
that quality of Signifyin(g) that Gates characterizes as ‘repetition with a signal dif-
ference’.67 But the repetition ‘escalates’ the interaction rather than simply reiterating
it, and in this sense the meaning of the musical utterance is a little more significantç
both musically and socially. Caine both incorporates the material into the music and
articulates a social bond, weaving a ‘local’ and serendipitous musical and social
exchange back into the material texture of the work as well as into the historical
fabric of the group. The second repetition (at the Cologne concert) takes that inter-
action a stage further: the gesture now articulates two timescales, simultaneously re-
minding the ensemble of the incorporation two weeks earlier in Amsterdam, and
opening out to a more public and longer term celebration of musikFabrik’s history and
accomplishmentsçand in doing so it illustrates in microcosm the diverse ways in
which musical creativity is distributed across time, traditions, individuals’ lives, and
personal/institutional engagements.

5. AN ECOLOGY OF DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY

Ecology is the study of organism/environment dynamics, and an ecological perspective
makes it clear how the dynamic and fluid processes that converge and entangle in the
making of TI are distributed in time, space, and level. The temptation might be to see
this as a series of concentric spheres, like the layers of an onion or a Russian dollç
where there is an outer layer of large-scale historical and institutional forces, a middle
layer of social relations, and an inner layer of material engagements and sensorimotor
processes. But the discreteness of the layers seems only to beg questions about what
they communicate, and how to reconnect them. A more messy, dynamic, and ecologic-
ally plausible model, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold has argued, is that of a fungal
myceliumçthat always-changing tissue of filaments and knots that constitutes the
distributed identity of a fungus.68 Ingold describes organisms ‘not as externally

65
Alan Perlman and Daniel Greenblatt, ‘Miles Davis meets Noam Chomsky: Some Observations on Jazz Impro-
visation and Language Structure’, in Wendy Steiner (ed.), The Sign in Music and Literature (Austin, Tex., 1981), 169^83.
66
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: ATheory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988), 44.
67
Ibid. 51.
68
Tim Ingold, ‘Two Reflections on Ecological Knowledge’, in Glauco Sanga and Gherardo Ortalli (eds.), Nature
Knowledge: Ethnoscience, Cognition, Identity (New York, 2003), 301^11.

658
bounded entities but as bundles of interwoven lines of growth and movement, together
constituting a meshwork in fluid space’, and the environment as ‘not the surroundings
of the organism but a zone of entanglement’.69 And this seems to capture only too
vividly the entanglements that we have described in the making of TI. As Ingold
writes in relation to the activities of builders, gardeners, cooks, and painters: ‘neither
brick nor mortar, nor soil, nor the ingredients in the kitchen, nor paints and oils, are
objects. They are materials. And what people do with materials . . . is to follow them,
weaving their own lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the
lifeworld. Out of this, there emerge the kinds of things we call buildings, plants, pies
and paintings.’70 And music.
Lim’s explicit intention in TI was to write into the structure and techniques of the
music those states of ‘bewilderment’, ‘entanglement’, ‘union’, ‘separation’, ‘attunement’,
and ‘ecstasy’ that are particularly valued in Sufi poetry and philosophy. While her
aim was to use the categories of ‘composed notation’ and ‘improvisation’ to point the
musicians towards such states, the reality was that these components interacted with a
whole variety of unanticipated factors in rather more paradoxical and subtle ways.
Like the stick for Bateson’s blind man (see above, ‰1), the various notational strategies
act as prostheses that expose boundaries of various kinds, musical and socio-political.
These technical devices take on a transformational character, causing musical functions
and roles to cease to be taken for granted, exposing tensions and conflicts, and
requiring negotiation and a degree of reconceptualization within the group. Rather
than converging towards predetermined musical goals, the divergent and initially
unstable qualities of the ensemble interactions constitute a set of creative conditions.
This displacement of the composer’s original narrative in the score by an interaction
of social expectations, spatial arrangements, historical traditions, assumed power rela-
tions, and other kinds of tacit ‘scripts’ is of a piece with the nature of a project that
points towards elusive and ungraspable experiences. Just as Hafiz’s poetry articulates
experiences that resist reduction to any one form by mixing different expressive and
signifying categories, so TI works with multiple forms of musical subjectivity that
weave contingent action into the musical fabric. The embedding of intentional
uncertainties into the work, and their negotiation by the musicians (composer and con-
ductor included), perform a ‘mode of becoming’ in which these deliberately bewildering
elements call upon the collaborative creativity of the group. The shifting relationship
between composition and improvisation allows (or even obliges) the members of the
group to ‘retool’ musical materials and their ensemble roles as an adaptive and
creative response to the contingencies of situation, time, or place. Veale and Rothbrust
become freer in their interpretation and performance of the written materials in
Movement V (in some cases discarding the written materials altogether) in response
to the changing status of solo and accompanimentçand indeed of ‘fixed’ (written)
and ‘fluid’ (improvised) music, just as the string players rethink the accompanimental
politics of their parts. And in Movement VI, by drawing in a fragment of ‘Happy
Birthday’, Caine retools the echo of a banal biographical episode into a moment of
much richer musical and social import.
These social and notational elements constitute two of the many factors (or mycelial
fibres) at work in what we can understand as a complex creative ecosystem; and as dis-

69
Tim Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World’, Environment and Planning A,
40 (2008), 1796^1810 at 1796.
70
Tim Ingold, ‘The Textility of Making’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34 (2010), 91^102 at 96.

659
cussed earlier (see ‰3.2), two others are the material level of the music’s instrumentation
and tuning systems, and the institutional arrangements and politics of musikFabrik as
an ensemble. But how do the musicians themselves view their part in this highly
distributed and arguably collaborative processçgiven that in the end the creative own-
ership of the piece will be attributed to a single composer? For Marco Blaauw, the
sense of fulfilment in working in this way depends on the manner in which what he
has to offer to a composer is taken up and developed in the formative stagesç
the outcome of those workshops and investigations. He was quite clear that
‘it is really the composer’s process . . . it is really the composer’s piece’,71 and that
creative fulfilment lay not in the rights over the eventual music, but in the good use to
which his finely honed craft was put:
I mean, when you build a house and somebody delivers the bricks, the brick owner is not the
owner of the house or not the architect, there is no way the brick factory can say this is our
house; so I have no problem delivering bricks if the composer makes a beautiful house. But if
the house is bad and falls apart, and the material is actually good, then I feel robbed. And
also it has been worse: when a composer has a recording device, records the improvisation
and writes it out and puts it in the piece, then there are issues . . . 72

Similarly, in a statement that is typical of many of the other ensemble musicians in its
resistance to the attribution of an explicitly creative role, the guest saxophonist Josh
Hyde remarked:
I have a fairly small role in the creative process. I mean, I come in and play my part. I guess in
the ensemble we all come in and play our part, and we don’t have a huge role in the creative
process. . . .We do have a roleçwe have to have an energy, and we have to react a lot and we
have to be able to transform what Liza has written into the sound that she was imagining:
she’s transformed the sound that was in her head to paper and we have to in turn transform
that into the sound, and hopefully that’s something that resembles somewhat what she’d
imagined. . . . But that is not really creative, in the sense that we’re not really creating any-
thing. . . .We are reconstituting the text . . . 73

As Blaauw’s and Hyde’s comments indicate, questions of ownershipçexpressed ex-

plicitly or implicitly by the musiciansçare critical in an understanding of distributed
creativity. First, the term (‘ownership’) situates the discussion within a socially
relevant worldçthe actual domain of work in which musicians engage so as to earn a
living. Second, it pinpoints the way in which artistic creativity is felt to be possessed
by individuals and groups. Ownership encompasses the economic power that may
derive from artistic production, but perhaps more significantly it expresses affective
and subjective engagementsçthe ways in which a musician might sense that this
process or that product is ‘a part of me’. And these engagements are important
because they affect how creative agents behave: creativity is not simply a capacity
that is discharged or distributed within a group through technical training or the
demands of the musical moment. Rather it is exercised and developed as musicians go
about their business within the frameworks and demands of musical institutions at a
variety of histories/timescales and degrees of explicitness.

71
Interview with Marco Blaauw, 7 June 2011.
72
Ibid.
73
Interview with Josh Hyde, 7 June 2011.

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 Much of the discussion of ownership in artistic work is preoccupied with two related
areas of control: the economic control that relates to issues of copyright; and ownership
in the broader sense of the ways in which groups or individuals exercise their cultural
rights.74 Both of these perspectives tend to emphasize the baleful effects of power and
control within the public realm of artistic production. Understandings of the ownership
of artistic creativity are further framed around two particular dimensions: the degree
to which authorship can be ascribed to an individual voice;75 and the extent to which
creative workers can be viewed as abject or empoweredçsubject to the demands of
rationalizing corporations, or able to resist the commodification of their cultural
work.76 In the case of musikFabrik, ownership of the creative process appears to cut
across these two binaries (individual/social; abject/empowered) through two distinct
layers of musical practice. First, the ensemble’s practices in relation to the continuum
of improvised to strictly notated materialçnot only in relation to TI, but in much of
the music-making in which the ensemble is involved; and second, the institutional set-
up, which frames and regulates the work of rehearsing and organizing the piece, and
in which the players have considerable investment and power. In both cases, there are
complex issues of ownership and authority at work, and the latter in particular can
expose underlying tensions. A brief interaction between Blaauw and de Ridder (the
conductor) in the rehearsal of the birdcall section illustrates this finely balanced
dynamic. In one of the later rehearsals of the passage, de Ridder queries Blaauw
about the duration of his improvised part, to which Blaauw responds:
Blaauw: . . . yesterday we said I should overlap . . . [so that I was] playing a little bit longer.

de Ridder: Ah I see, I see.

Blaauw: Sorry to bother you. [laughter]

de Ridder: I didn’t know about that.

Blaauw: I forgot in the first run but you [directed to Lim] reminded me.

Lim: Just so it [the ending of the section] is not so abrupt.77

The interchange is light in tone, but acts as the gentlest of reminders of the complex
network of roles and status at play (permanent ensemble member, guest conductor,
commissioned composer), and a playful challenge to the rehearsal process. Blaauw
jokingly apologizes for ‘bothering’ the conductor with a reminder of what the
composer (implicitly higher in status) had said in the previous day’s rehearsal, and in
doing so hints at some of the tensions that are inevitably sedimented in the conductor/
player relationship.

74
See e.g. Simon Frith and Lee Marshall (eds.), Music and Copyright (Edinburgh, 2004); and Andrew Weintraub and
Bell Yung (eds.), Music and Cultural Rights (Chicago, 2009).
75
Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (London, 2000), 42^6. See also Jason
Toynbee, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (eds.), The
Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (2nd edn., New York and London, 2012), 161^71.
76
See Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (Basingstoke, 2007).
77
From rehearsal, 7 June 2011 after seventh run-through of the ‘birdcall’ section.

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 Referring to the particular contexts of record production and orchestral playing,
Simon Frith argues ‘that in these collaborative processes ‘‘creativity’’ is the term
around which collective action is organized hierarchically and that it is, consequently, a
matter for dispute. ‘‘Creativity’’ doesn’t simply describe a particular kind of individual
action but the way in which such action is recognized and acknowledged.’78 Frith
draws attention to what he regards as creativity’s patently ideological characterça
term that presents itself as a productive cause, but is in reality an effect of particular
social relations. As we have demonstrated in this essay, there is a whole spectrum of
music-making practices that take on a more or less ‘creative’ character depending on
circumstances and perspectives. But rather than doubting the value of creativity (as
Frith does), which seems to stem from a pessimism about the conditions of musical pro-
duction, our study points to a more nuanced set of practices even within the apparently
constrained and hierarchical circumstances of contemporary concert music. Many of
the musicians in this project may not see themselves as the primary ‘owners’ of the
eventual product, and in response to what they take to be the particular ideological
construction of the term may even disavow the creativity of their own contribution;
but their engagement with the process demonstrates their fierce commitment to a col-
lective endeavour whose creative outcome is beyond doubt. The complex ecology of
players, conductor, and composer working together on a piece of music presents us
with vastly more than a pragmatic discussion of technical requirements and notational
intentionsçthough these too are there in the mix. We witness the operation of a
complex dynamic that is loaded in different ways (psychologically, economically, in
terms of status and career) for the various actors, suffused with the musicians’ self-
presentations, embedded within a particular institutional context, and overhung with
the complex histories and values of different musical traditions (contemporary music,
conservatoire training, free improvisation, jazz). To use Toynbee’s phrase, it is a
complex ‘interanimation of social materials’79 that coalesces around various catalysing
agents at different stages of the creative process: the composer, the conductor, the
ensemble players, the soloistsçcollectively and at times individually. Such creative
work is the everyday work of musicians, but its quotidian character belies a complex
coming together of separate interests and claims. Musicians (composers, conductors,
performers) may choose whether or not to collaborate (literally ‘work together’), but
there’s simply no avoiding distribution.
Rather than abandoning creativity as a suspect value that only gains recognition
beyond a certain threshold, as Frith proposes, this study demonstrates how creativity
operates in a radically distributed sense across a field of action that draws in sensori-
motor engagement, instrumental and social affordances, micro-social interactions
within the framework of established social relations, and institutional arrangements at
a variety of scales and durations. We see a tangle of local interactions and feedback
loops, initiated by the actions of multiple agents and giving rise to the structured
sonic, temporal, and inter-social ‘threads’ of the work. It is an ecology of multiply
distributed creative values, neither completely ordered nor entirely disorderly, in
which composer, performer, conductor, listener, and their embedding institutions
operate together as a fluctuating field of power relations. To paraphrase Ingold,80

78
Simon Frith, ‘Creativity as a Social Fact’, in Hargreaves et al. (eds.), Musical Imaginations, 62^72 at 64^5.
79
Toynbee, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, 164.
80
Ingold, ‘The Textility of Making’, 97: ‘The role of the artistças that of any skilled practitionerçis not to give
effect to a preconceived idea, novel or not, but to join with and follow the forces and flows of material that bring the

662
musicians do not make manifest a preconceived idea, whether novel or not, but join
with and follow the forces and flows of material that bring music into being. Their
musicking invites listeners to join them as fellow travellers, to listen with the music as
it unfolds in the world, rather than searching behind it for an originating intention of
which it is the final product. Musiciansçlike artisansçare itinerant wayfarers. They
make their way through the music as do walkers through the landscape, sounding out
their work as they press on with their lives. It is in this forward movement that creativ-
ity is to be found. To read creativity ‘forwards’ entails a focus on improvisation, and to
improvise is to follow the ways of the world, as they open up.

ABSTRACT

This essay addresses distributed creative processes in the preparation and performance
of a new musical workçTongue of the Invisible by Liza Lim, commissioned by the
Cologne-based Ensemble musikFabrik. Situating the research within a broadly ecolo-
gical perspective, and in the specific context of the interface between composition, im-
provisation, and performance, the study offers a social and distributed understanding
of creative production. From the sizeable body of audio and video data recorded
during the preparatory workshops, rehearsals, and performances of the new work, as
well as interviews and discussions with the players, conductor, and composer, three
discrete episodes from the piece are analysed in some detail. These three examples dem-
onstrate the complex interweaving of musical role, institutional structure, spontaneity
and intervention, and designed underdetermination in the creation of a performance,
and are couched within an explanatory framework anchored in principles of ownership,
signification, and the interanimation of social materials, understood as the components
of a dynamic musical ecosystem.

form of the work into being. The work invites the viewer to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it
unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. . . . Artistsças
also artisansçare itinerant wayfarers. They make their way through the taskscape . . . as do walkers through the land-
scape, bringing forth their work as they press on with their own lives. It is in this very forward movement that the cre-
ativity of the work is to be found. To read creativity ‘‘forwards’’ entails a focus . . . on improvisation. To improvise is
to follow the ways of the world, as they open up, rather than to recover a chain of connections, from an end-point to
a starting-point, on a route already travelled.’

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