Day 69 - The Meta-Conductor and the Jazz Musician

I've recently had a few occasions to show off some YouTube videos of my modular rig to some friends and associates and somewhat predictably their initial reaction is something along the lines of "Whoa, there are so many wires, that looks incredibly complicated!" True enough, right? After a few minutes of gazing upon the hairy knot of cables and the starfield of blinking LEDs, almost without fail they follow up with a question that is some variation of the following:

"How do you tell it what notes to play?"

Often "Where the hell is the keyboard?", this question can have some complicated answers if you're using quantized random voltages, as I often do. If you're using sequencers, the answer may be a little less obtuse, though I think I might be hard pressed to explain the full range of functionality if something like the Make Noise René which seems to rejoice in its own (mild) incomprehensibility. A less abstract sequencer such as the Intellijel Metropolis is fairly easy to explain and simple to demonstrate to a layperson. But these explanations are often unsatisfactory, as they fail to address the unspoken and perhaps even unconscious subtext in their question, a subtext with some pretty deep implications.

This subtext might be best expressed as "If, for the most part, you're not telling your instrument what notes to play, then are you really playing an instrument at all, and if not then what is it exactly you are doing?"  In short "Are you really a musician?" A good question indeed. Although I would certainly concede that throughout most of my noodling, jams, and performances, I am not concerned with telling my machine which notes to play at any given moment, and yet I am producing sound that (occasionally) resembles music. So I would say, yeah, I'm playing a musical instrument. And yet that's not quite right.

The role of a modular synthesists may perhaps be more aptly compared to that of an orchestral conductor who, besides keeping time, controls the dynamics of a section, urges timbre, and crafts the emotive message of a performance. In modular terms, he is a mixer, a clock, and a source of modulation in one small sweaty package (lol @ "small sweaty package"). And so that is a comparison fits. Almost.

"Almost" because there's no one among modular synthesists who is, for the duration of his performance, actively keeping time (i.e., tapping on a tempo button) or twisting every knob there is to be twisted at any one time. There are modules that take care of that for us: clocks, LFOs, et al. In essence, a modular synth performer, is a conductor-of-conductors; a Meta-Conductor. Catchy, yeah? But it's still not quite right.

Though a conductor may impart each performance with subtle differences those differences are subtle, and often unintended. (Bear in mind I say this with very little authority on the subject, so feel free to drop a comment to call me on my bullshit.) Orchestral performances are meticulously rehearsed affairs that are thoroughly drilled into the musicians for months before they are ever presented to a live audience. In contrast, compositions coming out of the modular world (with some exceptions) come from a musical philosophy that is far less regimented, far less concerned with following a score. It's a lot more like jazz.

I might not be the first to suggest the comparison between modular synthesists and jazz musicians. It's obvious once you spend a little bit of time in the modular world, especially as you trek out to the West Coast (in modular terms) and experience some of the more experimental (a.k.a., avant-garde) compositions that arise from the Buchla sensibilities. In the same manner that a jazz quintet puts a spin on an old jazz standard, a modular synthesist puts a spin on each performance, subtly or not adjusting the various parameters over which they have control. In jazz these parameters might be rhythm, harmony, melody, timbre, etcetera, and so it is in the modular world too.

In the words of bassist Charles Mingus, "You can't improvise on nothing, man. You've got to improvise on something." And that might be true in the context of a jazz band. After all, without some framework to tie all the parts together, you can quickly descend into non-musical chaos. Of coarse "non-musical chaos" describes a lot of modular "music" out there, for better or worse. Still, a virtuoso musician (jazz or otherwise) might not need to rely on a framework to tie things together. They can just play and play and play, the music continually evolving. And this is true of the typical modular performance as well. Perhaps as with the jazz virtuoso, they start with something small in their head, a musical seed, and then pick up their instrument and watch it grow. My own compositions tend to follow this sort of approach, and though I hate the word "organic" in most artistic contexts, it seems to fit well enough here. No two trees grow exactly the same, even if they've come from the seeds of the same parent, and so it is with improvised music. No matter how much I meticulously patch my rack, no two performances are the same, even if I'm not doing a lot of in-process patching. Simply glitching out my hihats or bumping the coarse tuning knob on an oscillator will instantly take my music on a strange an unexpected journey. Sometimes it might even not sound like shit.

So where does this leave us? How do we answer the "Are you playing a musical instrument or not?" sort of questions? As with most questions where art is concerned, there's not going to be an answer the everyone finds satisfactory. I'm a musician, in the sense that I produce music; my instrument is this rack of modules. I'm a conductor in the sense that I conduct a flurry of unseen electronic hands; my score is the patch, this tangle of cables. I'm a jazz performer in the sense that I improvise, experiment, and push against the boundaries of music; my weapon of choice is modulation. So, I dunno. I kind of like as a response: "I'm a jazz meta-conductor."