Acts of Balancing and Unbalancing
Kathy Hinde
Both the Futurists and the Fluxus movement were politically revolutionary, and the idea of throwing out the tired, ‘elitist’ and irrelevant values of the past seemed intoxicating and provided a lot of the energy that drove these movements’ beliefs. Cage is often seen as a revolutionary too, but his approach is less about destroying the past and more about noticing the present. Although learning to embrace all the sounds of the world might be interpreted as anti-musical, this is not at the heart of his argument. In the essay Experimental Music, for instance, he acknowledges that turning toward sounds that are not intended, “seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity — for a musician, the giving up of music.” But if we come to understand that “humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together”, then we may also understand that “nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained”. Later in the essay, he tackles the critique that just listening to sound reduces the humanity of the experience:
Hearing sounds which are just sounds immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing , and the emotions of human being are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mount unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? Otters along a stream a sense of mirth? Night in the woods a sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant that grows? What is more angry than the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder? These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another’s. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.
What is being invited here is recognition of the sense of wonder with which we may sense the world, providing we’re not trying to make what we’re experiencing something other than what it is. It’s an idea that keeps coming up - we may encounter it in Barthes and in Zen and in the Irish word aoibhneas and in so much of the writings of our philosophers - yet it’s a remarkably difficult thing to embrace. Humans seem to need to be doing something, making something their own in some way. Let’s not create a false dichotomy by viewing this solely as a virtue or as a failure: in fact, the balancing act is itself very fruitful.
In a work like Acts of Balancing and Unbalancing, the performing musician is faced with systems that can not be mastered in the conventional sense. Their unpredictable responses are caused by a wealth of factors, many of which change from performance to performance. The amount of water in the jars, the exact position of the balancing arm, the acoustics of the venue, the types of speakers being used and how close they are to the balancing jars, the proximity of the instruments and exactly what they’re playing, the exact settings of the controls for the electronics that process the feedback signal — all play a part in what happens when we turn up the volume control and invite the feedback to begin. The result is that performance on these devices involves a continual interaction between the person operating them and the device, in which changes to the controls lead to results of varying levels of unpredictability, and those results induce an idea about what we might try next. We ‘chase’ sounds through a labyrinth of sonic possibilities without a map, something that Kathy describes as a ‘negotiation’ between us and the instrument. A friend of mine objected to this idea on the grounds that an inanimate object can’t negotiate, but of course there’s the other meaning of the word, which we encounter when we talk about negotiating a path. The negotiation that takes place with Kathy’s instruments has qualities of both meanings: there is the sense that we negotiate the uncertain paths they lay out for us, but it very much feels to a performer like negotiating with a living entity as well. There’s a delight in coaxing, persuading, guiding and being guided by these amorphous beings that exist only in sonic behaviours.
We play conventional instruments as well in this piece. While two of us at a time operate the balancing jars, the rest respond to, colour and cooperate with the sounds being produced by them. The ‘location’ of our creativity, so to speak, is determined by what’s coming from the jars. By accepting the nature of the ‘space’ they create, we are brought together into a community of improvisers: the improv is not about saying what each of us wants to say, but about being together in the complex of sonorities that flow from the behaviour of the balancing jars. There’s a remarkable beauty in this fragile interconnectedness that, for me, is at the heart of QME’s practice.