The Prepared Guitar of Christopher Riggs By Christopher Riggs Faculty Advisor

100 Pages·2012·20.16 MB·English

by  Christopher Riggs

Sweet Spot of Potential: The Prepared Guitar of Christopher Riggs

By Christopher Riggs
Faculty Advisor: Ronald Kuivila

i
I would like to thank the following people for their support during the
creation of my projects, the writing of this thesis, and all that led up to the two:
my parents, Ellen and Thomas Riggs; my friends, Andrew T. Royal, Ryan
Kiblawi, Mike Khoury, Matt Gilbert, Brian Parks, Jessie Marino, and Daniel
Parcell; my advisor, Ron Kuivila; my professors, Paula Matthusen, Dan St.
Clair, Anthony Braxton, and Alvin Lucier; and my friends and willing
participants in Duos with Chris!, Benjamin Klein, Anne Rhodes, Carl Testa,
Nathan Bontrager, and Adam Matlock.

i
 i
Table of Contents

1. Introduction - 1

2. Gordon Monahanʼs Piano Mechanics and Speaker Swinging - 4

3. Derek Baileyʼs Niigata Snow and Time with Tony Coe - 15

4. Duo with Andrew T. Royal – Recorded 3/11/12, Chicago, IL - 37

5. Sweet Spot of Potential (for Andrew T. Royal) - 46

6. Duos with Chris! - 73

7. Conclusion - 88

8. Works Cited - 97

ii
 i
1. Introduction

I am a guitarist, improviser, and composer. I have not always been
comfortable referring to myself as all three of these things. My early
development as a guitarist progressed along two parallel trajectories. Once
these paths converged, I became willing to identify as more than an
instrumentalist. This convergence and subsequent artistic re-identification
eventually lead me to study music as a graduate student at Wesleyan.
As a nine-year-old, my initial experiences with the guitar involved
attempting to make as much noise as possible on a semi-functioning, child-
size nylon string that my mother acquired for free from a local music store. At
the time, I was not interested in learning anything about properly playing the
guitar. I was content to indulge in my fascination for the unusual sounds I
could produce on the instrument. A few years later, I took up the classical
guitar, studied under private teachers, and eventually went on to study the
instrument at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, OH. While
refining my technique and learning repertoire, the early experiments, although
transferred to the electric guitar, continued. My parents encouraged both of
these seemingly conflicting tendencies.
My musical split personality began to coalesce into one after I was
confronted with the work of John Cage and Derek Bailey. This confrontation
1
was partially the result of my own independent study, encouragement from
peers, and classes taken as an undergraduate with Randolph Coleman and
Ross Feller. At this time, I abandoned the many hours spent practicing
contemporary music written for the classical guitar in exchange for time to
refine my extended techniques and improvising prowess on the electric guitar.
I developed a large catalog of sounds using small violin bows, wooden
dowels, springs, magnets, and pieces of metal and plastic. Without modifying
the electronics of the guitar or processing the signal, I made music that
attempted to mimic the sounds of analog electronics and synthesizers,
compositions by composers like Helmut Lachenmann, and extended
techniques by other improvising instrumentalists like Evan Parker.
My time at Wesleyan has allowed me to seriously engage with my
trajectory as an instrumentalist and improviser and examine where it might be
headed in the future. In my thesis, I will begin with works by Gordon
Monahan. I was not familiar with Monahanʼs work until the start of writing this
thesis. I believe that this engagement with something outside of my musical
preoccupations has been fruitful. It has put the chapter that follows it, a
detailed analysis of a small portion of Derek Baileyʼs musical output, into
perspective. This analysis has helped me develop the tools to see my own
improvisations in a new light. I hope that the contrast between examinations
of Monahan and Bailey allows me to test my analytical skills against both my
2
affinities and the unknown before applying it to my own work. Following the
chapter on Bailey, I will perform a similar analysis on the playing of Andrew T.
Royal, a violinist and collaborator of mine, during a live set of improvised
music performed by our duo in March of 2012. Once I have discussed
Royalʼs playing, I will look into my own playing during this concert by
performing a sort of genealogy of my improvisatory behavior that traces the
sources of techniques and strategies to two of my projects completed at
Wesleyan.
The narrative that I will be tracing is not all encompassing. I will not be
discussing Limbo World of Intention, a project that consumed my music
making during my first year as a graduate student at Wesleyan. While I regret
its exclusion from this thesis, I believe it is necessary in the interest of time
and space.

3
2. Gordon Monahanʼs Piano Mechanics and Speaker Swinging

Gordon Monahanʼs Piano Mechanics, first performed in 1983 and
recorded by the composer in 1990, requires the performer to execute
extended techniques at the piano that mimic electronically-produced sound.
In the composerʼs words, “an un-pianistic keyboard technique is used to
ʻexcavateʼ acoustical sounds that are not normally associated with the piano”
(Monahan). The title itself can be read as a play on “mechanics”. Does the
noun refer to the inner workings of the instrument or those individuals who
work on it?
The piece is organized in an episodic fashion where each section
focuses on a single extended technique or group of extended techniques on
the piano. The titles of the sections reflect, sometimes loosely, the
techniques or sonic products of techniques used in that particular section.
Abrupt Stops, Solitary Waves and Far Away Sounds, Melody Concealed by a
Tremolo, High Trills Becoming Combination Tones, and Fingers and Arms
Becoming Four Hands all appear as section titles.
The sections are notated with a mixture of traditional and invented
notation. The order of events is indicated but not their precise timing.
Monahan occasionally instructs the interpreter to “ad-lib” using the group of
techniques specific to a section.
4
In the first section of the piece, Voices Emerging Along High Tension
Wires, the performer is instructed to quickly scrape the copper-wound strings
with the back of their finger nails while manipulating the damper pedal. This
is juxtaposed with the sound of grabbing the strings of the low register and
sweeping back and forth to create a thunderous effect.
In Trill With Hand Controlled Pitch Release, the fifth section of the
piece, the performer plays fast trills with the right hand while using the left
hand to dampen the strings associated with those keys. The left hand slides
up and down the strings to alter the harmonics and then begins to
occasionally release the dampening to reveal staccato bursts amongst the
pattering of hammers on deadened strings.
The sound of an individual section isolated from its context has some
affinities with the sounds of free improvisation. These sections are populated
with visceral sounds performed by the person who developed them. A quick
glance at the CD liner notes or performance history of the work will reinforce
this. Monahan has been the sole performer of the piece since it has been
written. These isolated facts and sonic observations align the work more with
improvisation than modern composition.
However, it should be obvious given the description of the structure of
the piece outlined above that it is not an improvisation or a composition that
uses elements of improvisation as a structuring device. It is this juxtaposition
5
between the sonic character of the extended techniques that might be
reminiscent of free improvisation and the formalized framing that I find so
salient to the work. This juxtaposition prevents the use of extended
techniques to fulfill the same task as the contents of tonality; well learned and
embodied cultural tropes used to express an abstract form. The structure of
Piano Mechanics is not derived from the interaction between and recurrence
of the extended techniques.
How might this interaction and recurrence rear its head in performance
if the piece were composed differently? Here are two hypothetical extremes:
1) Greatly increase the pieceʼs structural openness. This example
simply instructs the performer to play an improvisation using extended
techniques at the piano. The techniques, their place in time, dynamics,
register, etc. are all left to the whims of the player. The techniques are not
foregrounded in the performance. The performer uses them as mere
ingredients to express a musical form.
2) Organize the piece into sections and notate those sections with
absolute precision. Every minute detail of the production of an extended
technique would be explicitly stated in the score. This degree of detail within
the notation would force the player, not unlike the interpreter of new
complexity works (e.g. Ferneyhough), to pick and choose which aspects of
that detail would actually be realized.
6
As the notation approaches the extremes of both performability and
aural cognition in the second example, the performer has the option to revert
back to the strategy offered in the first. In other words, if the notation is
complex enough, why not simply improvise? If this path is chosen, the
performer can once again attempt to develop form via the organization,
interaction between, and recurrence of the extended techniques.
By placing his piece in the middle of this spectrum, he has effectively
squashed the opportunity for the performer to indulge in what Iʼm going to
refer to as a language improvisation, an improvisation that uses something
(e.g. extended piano techniques) as the building blocks of a language that
communicates a musical form to the listener. The interpretative freedoms
outlined in the first example stated above disappear when Monahan
structures the extended techniques into large sections. This hypothetical
version of the piece allows the performer to arrange and develop the
techniques on their own.
The opportunities for agency outlined in the second hypothetical
example disappear in the actual version of the piece because Monahan has
made the structure and the instructions/notations within each section
incredibly simple and obvious. Unlike the hypothetical, Monahanʼs structure
is not inaudibly complex. The demarcations of the movements are easily
discernable to the listener and aided further by the framing provided by the
7