- Part of 'A topology of musical encounter' (summary) -
A rare and rather awkward state of a musical collective is a transpositional collaboration. Instead of starting a collaboration close to one’s own musical perception, the musicians leave it all behind and take each other’s respective positions. Altogether they swap roles and try to experience their viewpoints and execute each other’s natural tasks in the collective. This would be like a band in which the drummer plays as if he is the singer, the bass guitarist becomes the soloist and the singer becomes the bass. A admirable example of transpositional collaboration is for instance the virtuosic ensemble-jazz of Weather Report. In many of their recordings the original roles inside a jazz-band have become so free that indeed this role-exchange happens frequently, and doesn’t lead to unnatural sounding music at all. In their case it was certainly the result of a carefully ripened musical concept.
In our laboratory situations that seems a few steps too far to begin with. This situation is a rather theoretical possibility, and seems a quite conceptual approach that can only be established by an artificial agreement to work in such a way. Such a collaboration would need a strong musical framework, a composer’s ear and mind to guide all the musicians in the experiment. From the composers point of view this is in fact a well-known situation that has quite a few predecessors in the past century. To centralist the peripheral instruments of an orchestra and fundamentally deconstruct the old hierarchy of instrumental groups have been leading principles in the development of contemporary orchestration through the works of Schoenberg – Webern – Boulez.
Although we imagine a musical conception less abstract and closer to the musicians perception we definitely shouldn’t leave it out of consideration. Recalling the example of the ‘clave’ as a thread through the music of different continents – how amazing and delirious would it be to undertake the intention to not only bring together the music of three continents around a similar musical principle, but furthermore to provoke the African to play the clave like the Latin, the Persian to become the African and the Latin to act the Persian altogether. Realistically we should be aware that in most cases this would be simply too much to ask from musicians. And also such a high degree of conceptual synthesis between musicians is not a formula by any means for musical synthesis, which can only take place in the sounding realization of music and can be miles apart from a beautiful completed concept. But let our dreams not be limited too much by presumed realistic argumentation - in the rare case that musicians do gain the trust and pleasure to undertake this process and there is enough effort and skills to execute it, I imagine a sounding result no less than revolutionary.
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