introduction to conduction workshops · to, classical, jazz and new music instrumentalists and...

Conduction® Workshops - of 8

INTRODUCTION TO CONDUCTION® WORKSHOPS

My interest lies in that area between where the interpretation of the symbolism that generates notation meets with the spontaneity of improvisation; and in the evolution of the musical ensemble, and of the individual and collective identities and expressions that constitute music, musicianship and music making for a far greater expression in the sonic arts. At the same time, I have also recognized an overriding need to locate in music an essence that can, by its various operations, present questions, prompt definitions, explanations and expressions of and to what I feel, hear and think-- transformed into coherent, often poignant information. For more than 24 years through Conduction®, I have had the privilege to engage and enjoy, from the inside, this intermediate space between notation and improvisation, acquiring new skills and perspectives while doing so. The context, of course, has been polarized by history and practice: musicians and musical communities bound by notation and musicians and musical communities bound by improvisation. Yet between them is the space where a potential for new life, an expansive range of expression that has gone untouched, prevails; and where ideals and ideas incubate for the continuum of the ‘musical’ canon. Conduction® (conducted interpretation/improvisation): is a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real-time musical arrangement or composition. Each sign and gesture transmits generative information for interpretation by the individual and the collective, to provide instantaneous possibilities for altering or initiating harmony, melody, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, or form. It is the expedient practice of constructing, initiating, transmitting, transforming, manipulating and exploiting symbolic

Photo Credit: Claudio Casanova AAJItalia


signs-gestures and sonic information for individual and collective interpretation and may be accessed by all forms, styles and traditions of music and musician.

CONDUCTION® WORKSHOPS

INTRODUCTION TO CONDUCTION® 1 day / 3-5 hours For the general public and musicians who have an interest in new ways of creating music for ensemble, this introductory lecture-demonstration and discussion with emphasis on theory. CONDUCTION® MASTER CLASS 1-3 days / 6-9 hours total Lecture-demonstration theory and practice. We explore the many interesting and vibrant ways of constructing and arranging music through the use of the Conduction vocabulary, as well as how Conduction engages and confronts musical, cultural and social differences through collective and individual interpretation, while engaging each musician in a system of real-time music making that draws on his or her unique personality, history and ability. The Master Class is for the advanced student and/or professional instrumentalist, composer and conductor. 8-10 piece ensemble is requested. CONDUCTION® WORKSHOP INTENSIVE 3-5 DAYS / 3 hours per day An intensive investigation of the Conduction vocabulary in theory and practice. The Conduction Workshop stresses ensemble 'team play,' which allows each individual the opportunity to participate in the overall construction of compositional development. It enhances and enriches the ensemble's interpretive skills by strengthening each musician's knowledge of composition, orchestration and arrangement in real-time, and elaborates on the elements of the decision-making process. The Conduction Workshop is open to all musicians interested in developing new skills of perception and the enhancement of ensemble intellect, ensemble arranging and composition. Its aim is to maximize real-time capability in ensemble interplay, to raise cognition, and to improve focus, concentration and interpretive skill. The Workshop is challenging, demanding, rewarding and fun. Ensemble requested. CONDUCTION® MASTER WORKSHOP INTENSIVE **WITH CONCERT** With emphasis on performance, is 10-15 day, 3-5 hour per day intensive investigation of the Conduction vocabulary in theory, practice and performance. The Workshop stresses ensemble 'team play,' which allows each individual the opportunity to participate in the overall construction of compositional development. It enhances the ensemble's interpretive skills by strengthening each musician's knowledge of composition, orchestration and arrangement and elaborating the elements of the decision-making process. The Conduction Master Workshop is open to the advanced musician/instrumentalist interested in developing new skills and techniques of perception. Its aim is to maximize real-time capability in ensemble interplay, to raise cognition and to improve focus and interpretive skill. The Workshop is challenging, demanding, rewarding and fun. 20-35 piece ensemble is requested

**CRITERIA FOR CONDUCTION® MASTER INTENSIVE** It is not necessary that the instrumentalist for Master Workshop Intensive be an improviser, however it is necessary that they are able to take and interpret direction, have command of their instrument and be strong confident players /composers/ interpreters interested in developing new requirements, skills of perception and enhancing the ensemble intellect. ALL PARTICIPANTS MUST ATTEND EVERY SESSION OF MASTER INTENSIVE


The workshop process informs and provides musicians the opportunity to hone their skills by developing new concepts of analysis, perception and representation in an ensemble while learning the Conduction vocabulary. Although Conduction is not a method of teaching improvisation, Mr. Morris has frequently been called upon to teach Conduction to non-improvising musicians to reinvigorate their sense of focus and concentration. A highly successful example of this is his work with the Orchestra della Toscana, resulting in Conductions Nos. 57, 58 and 59, performed to great acclaim in Florence, Carrara, and Pistoia, Italy, in February 1996. These performances demonstrate one of the most significant ground-zero effects for the merger of all music by consenting musicians. The international appeal and acceptance of Morris's Conduction workshops is also evidenced in the 10-CD Boxed Set, Testament: A Conduction Collection on New World Records. Recorded over a seven-year period in nine countries with thirteen different ensembles, Testament is indeed a testament—and, more than that, a lifeline—to a totally new understanding of what music can be. Conduction workshops provide an excellent opportunity for students and professionals alike to get a glimpse into what has been described as curious, challenging, demanding, rewarding and fun: "something rare in real time—something new in pure sound." These workshops are for, but not limited to, classical, jazz and new music instrumentalists and ensembles of intermediate, advanced or professional levels. They are typically held over the course of three to ten days, for three to six hours per day, with groups of 15 to 40 musicians. Smaller and larger ensembles/orchestras may also be accommodated.

PURPOSE

To balance the influence and essence of the intuitive, improvisational, interpretational and compositional nature of the ensemble collective and combine this essence to construct a music that can reflect all known and unknown elements that exist in the fabric of (all) music and the sonic world.

GOALS MOTIVE FUNCTION UTILITY CONTENT

• To expand the intellectual reach of the individual and collective by elaborating on the elements of the decision making process.

• To supplement all existing musical forms by maximizing potential for continued development in their own distinctive creative paths.

• To wed the concepts of notation and improvisation by providing all musicians (composer, conductor and instrumentalist) with a vocabulary that can convey the knowledge and opportunity to surpass their heretofore-perceived artistic limits.

• To engage each musician in a system of music making that draws on his or her unique personality, history and ability.

• To enhance the ensembles interpretive and expressive abilities and skills by strengthening each musician’s knowledge and concept of composition, orchestration and arrangement in real-time, therefore expanding the notion of music theory and the idea of potential.


• To engage the individual, ensemble and the audience in the discovery of a world of expressive possibility by refining the qualitative standard for what music is and what music can be.

• To apply new tools of analysis, new requirements and new scales of evaluation to the concept of music and the idea of musicianship.

• Ultimately, to cultivate, nurture, and educate, while keeping the collective landscape creatively and economically healthy by satisfying the artists’ need for challenge and the audiences desire to be rejuvenated, enlightened, entertained and more.

In the last 24 years, and within the parameters of the Conduction® vocabulary, over 180 Conductions have been constructed. Employing more than 5,000 musicians in 23 countries and 65 cities, resulting in 26 CDs as documented proof, Conduction has amply demonstrated its capacity for cultural diplomacy by uniting communities and serving as a powerful example of a new social logic based on collective interpretation and personal interaction. In its ceaseless investigation of an "extra dimension" that transcends style and category, Conduction has proven itself supplemental to the entire scope of musical and artistic endeavor. For each of the participating ensembles it has been a creative investment and never ending journey to seek and refine a collective perception that describes, explains and expresses the continuum of music by using all of its potential. REQUESTED ENSEMBLE / NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:

4 VIOLIN, 3 VIOLA, 2 CELLO, 2 BASS, PIANO, HARP, VIBRAPHONE, ACOUSTIC GUITAR, FLUTE, CLARINET, OBOE, BASSOON, BASS CLARINET, TRUMPET OR CORNET, TROMBONE, TUBA, SOPRANO SAXOPHONE, ALTO SAXOPHONE, TENOR SAXOPHONE, BARITONE SAXOPHONE 2 PERCUSSION (full percussion section) & DRUM SET, KEYBOARD ELECTRONICS, GUITAR ELECTRONICS, LIVE SAMPLING.

Conduction concerns transmission, communication and expression; a common ground where all culture and style cohabit, not only by way of their distinctiveness, but also in how each contributes, in the ensemble, to a unique encounter. More intimately, it concerns a capacity of musicianship for new skills with new principles. The vocabulary of Conduction is symbolic information (directives: signs and gestures) that carry definition and meaning to propel musicians toward substantive understanding and achievement. It provides the precision and the focus needed to navigate music’s vast terrain. The principles of Conduction foster, enhance and evoke the analytical reasoning of each musician’s history, knowledge, intelligence, experience, instinct, intuition, expression, will and fantasy as fundamental requirement. In Conduction, the art of composition and the immediacy of performance become interdependent -- while the language of music cultivates and integrates all vernaculars and traditions open to, and in, the ensemble.


Results are ever present: enhanced musicianship; discovery of structure and substance in the arc of the performance; the evolution of a social logic based on new reciprocities between human and music, and between composer and conductor, conductor as composer, instrumentalist and conductor, instrumentalist and composer -- and audience, attaining new levels of momentary logic and new clarities about the character of the work itself.

Now, this bridge that Conduction builds between notation and improvisation fuels interest. For with it, I can identify, embrace and exploit the weaknesses and strengths of both together and depict, in the process, core limitations in either. Conduction also requires its realization in physical, rather than theoretical, form to facilitate (new) kinds of augmentation. The logic of circumstance(s) dictates the maximizing of encounter, and the musical and social structures that grow from such encounter. Conduction is vivacious in that it draws on the full expanse of musical design while asking of its musicians that they refine their capacities beyond style and cultural aesthetic or social difference. There are as many rewards as questions here but none, it seems, as significant as that which opens pathways, both individually and collectively; pathways shuttered previously by custom or


fear. And I refer to the exclusionary focus of most musical traditions and to the fear of compromising identity. Conduction, however, is not in contestation with given forms as much as it seeks to supplement them with a greater appreciation of possibility -- a capacity for dialogue uniquely spurred by the moments and movements that appear and vanish. At the same time, by stripping away predispositions to value this or that in music, we also construct a mirror to the kinds of relationships that subsist in society, and the wherewithal of music to challenge and transform them; a community in microcosm that functions via this dynamic.

Conduction is neither method nor process, but practicum that reveals only in practice and through all its metaphorical concepts. A sonic arena utilizing every tool in its arsenal to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct with and from the basic properties of pitch, duration, intensity and timbre. Primed by an ‘Extra Dimension,’ which motivates us to engage and respond within, as beyond, all territory, Conduction invokes a continuum that thrives in a real-time transmission of relationships and


meaning; the spontaneity and precision that we need to ignite and combust order and organization within sonic thought. From the Conductor’s Perspective Conduction is the art of “environing,” the organization of surrounding things, conditions or influences. It is a technique to capture and discover sonic information, structure and sub-structure, meaning, implication and expression (as we construct together) -- all primary values in our pursuit of coherence and poignancy, and the immediacy of place. From the Perspective of the Instrumentalist The musician learns that Conduction is ensemble skill, and that Conduction’s criteria drive attentiveness, discrimination, understanding, perception and execution. Each sign in the Conduction Vocabulary has definition, yet within that definition each musician is obliged to qualitatively define its ‘content’. The descriptive (vocabulary) thus generates prospect; and by virtue of the definition attached to each sign, each interpretation evolves by progressive self-development through historical and momentary orientation. To contribute to Conduction, the musician reveals explicit content within the evolving work. As such, musical flexibility and potential expand as we explore a new condition of liberty to foster individual and collective freedoms in real time. A state of risk, certainly; a distillation of immediacy, no doubt; the incarnation of a step in the evolution of music that each musician embodies – this is a goal. Conduction is an art that flowers in contradiction (for some), ambiguity (for others) and encounter (for all involved). By constructing, deconstructing and contrasting composition at will, we forge an intermediate space, both intensive and extensive, for the evolution of ensemble music, and for a new virtuoso thus versed. In this way, Conduction opens a range of possibility previously unknown, just barely known or in what we know all too well. After all, Conduction is a way to explore music as we make it -- a probe to mine music and the ensemble at its most basic levels. All in all, what we have here is the evolution of a model of empirical form; a way to contribute to the musical continuum as possibility and a (new) musical responsibility where the collective determines the experience of symbolic sonic stimuli; where all forms of notation, improvisation, style and thought combine to establish a unique constellation of momentary logic (improvisation); where consciences can mature in a perfectly working precision that can never reach what is traditionally known as perfection.


Let us not forget that Conduction lends itself to the extra-musical: transmission, energy, convection, radiation, currents, potential differences, substance, electricity, guidance, excitation, temperature differences and impulse, among many more. To foster meaningful interdependent architectonic relationships between music, musician and audience is indeed a real-time action whose resources are adaptable to a limitless scope of production. I for one am curious, and desperate, to know what is behind every idea we can possibly find and have about the creative self, and how the creative self so richly contributes to the ‘science of finding’.

introduction to conduction workshops · to, classical, jazz and new music instrumentalists and...

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