Part II:  Transformation Focused Improvisation

Evil Clown’s Grand Aesthetic Problems and Solutions

In the recent FreeJazzBlog interview with Nick Ostrum, he asked a very probing question which I placed first in my responses since it directly led to a detailed discussion of the Aesthetic and the underlying framework of theoretical concepts that enable it.  Here is his question:

NO: In a discussion we had about the sheer and growing volume of your catalog, you once mentioned that individual releases and performances “are solutions to aesthetic problems posed by big ideas.”  What did you mean by this? 

Due to space limitations on FJB, I did not discuss the Evil Clown history in detail as I have done here (which I think provides helpful context for the following discussion of Theory responding to Nick’s question).  I also did not fully elaborate on all the key components of the Grand Aesthetic.  What follows is a reorganized version of my interview answers with additional material added.  As I stated in the introduction, I have been carefully considering these issues for many years, and the purpose of this essay is to put the ideas that drive the Evil Clown enterprise and my own playing on the record.  Hopefully, these words make clear my artistic intent and the processes I use to achieve that intent. 

I present a brief statement on the Big Idea of Improvised Music, and then discuss my Theory of Transformation Focused Improvisation in several sections:  The Application of Chaos Theory to Structure in Improvisation, the Application of Set Theory to Sonority in Improvisation, the Role of Tension and Release, The Role of Imitation, The Role of Line, and The Role of Harmonics in Improvisational Languages as set-up for the description of my Big Idea that drives the Evil Clown enterprise.  Finally, I will discuss the Application of the Big Idea to Evil Clown’s processes generally and to the PEK Solo and Leap of Faith Orchestra projects in particular.

The Application of Chaos Theory to Structure in Improvisation

Merely because there is no preplanning does not mean there is no Structure:  Structure is an emergent property of the decisions made by and the interactions between the performers.  I don’t like the terms Free Jazz and Free Improvisation used to classify our music because “Free” implies to many people that no rules are in place to guide the decision making of the musicians.  In fact, every improvisation is performed by musicians who have developed a specific musical language (or vocabulary) comprised of the sounds that they can make on their instruments, and the logic they use to arrange those sounds in sequence and to react to other musical sounds.  Disciplined improvisors expend a great deal of effort developing a musical language which is specific to their own Expressive intent.  This responsibility of each improvisor has equivalent importance to the discipline and training of players of more traditional styles of playing like Jazz, Rock or Traditional Classical where Structures are transparently evident in the melodic / harmonic relationships expressed, the Structures are compositional and determined in advance, and performer training regimens to develop mastery of a style are firmly established.

I have often heard people say that improvisation is like having a conversation and I think that is true in many ways.  I express sound sequences in my musical language and other players respond with sound sequences from their own musical languages.  Sometimes there is a significant overlap in the languages of all the participants (like between Glynis and me) and sometimes there is not, but always I am reacting to the Expressed sound and Predicting the likely sounds about to be Expressed.  All the players do this simultaneously with skilled ensembles able to make spontaneous group decisions controlling the Development of the work as it unfolds.  Structure is revealed as Transformation through a sequence of Sonorities over the duration of the work. 

I use Chaos Theory to think about Structural Development in improvisation.  “Chaos” means something very different to scientists who deal with complex systems (and me) than it does in general usage where it typically means “random”.  Chaos Theory describes complex systems such as the weather or the economy where the observable patterns are emergent properties of those complex systems.  In the weather, the observable pattern of an event (like a hurricane) is deterministically caused by billions of interactions between local points in space each containing their own discrete temperature, humidity, direction, and speed of airflow, among many other properties.  Chaos Theory tells us that the behavior of the overall system is unpredictable because the huge amount of information required to precisely map those interactions cannot be completely measured.  It does not mean random:  In fact, if in a computer model a starting state is completely described, and the interaction rules are applied to that starting state, the system will evolve in the same way every time the model runs.  However, a tiny change in those initial conditions or in the interaction rules will lead to very different global behavior in the system over time.  This property of complex systems is called Sensitive Dependance on Initial Conditions, also known as the Butterfly Effect.

Unlike in the weather, where the interaction rules are strictly determined by physics and chemistry, the rule structures in improvisation governing the interaction of sounds are subject to the free will of the performers who make decisions about which sounds to introduce into the system and the timing of the placement of those sounds.  Multiple choices conforming to the rules are always available, and it is each player’s job to evaluate the options within their musical language and select a choice which comports with their expressive intent and contributes to the Sonority of the moment or to a Transformation from the current Sonority to the next one.  Global patterns in the music emerge from the simultaneous decisions of the players.  If you analyze an improvisation from this point of view you can evaluate the skill of the ensemble and the quality / success of the music without having to rely on any of the regular rules of Western music that do not apply.  In general, I consider an improvisation to be successful if its aesthetic intent is interesting, if the performers achieve that intent, and if there is Development across the work.

To me, this limitation is overcome when the music Transforms between distinct Sonorities over the length of the work.  Skilled ensembles can achieve these Transformations within a small instrumentation by utilizing extended techniques and having each player always focused on the overall unit sound.  However, a path to the widest possible world of Transformation lies in increasing the size of the Set of musical resources as large as you can to make available a larger number of distinct Sonorities to the Sonority Set.  Over the duration of a work following this approach, each section may be comprised of completely different Set of sounds than any other section.  Most Evil Clown albums contain a single CD length work with at least 20 to 25 distinct movements.

The most obvious means to change the Sonority is to change the sounds utilized:  The Sonorities Expressible by a clarinet and a cello are completely different than the Sonorities Expressible by a drum set and a guitar.  However, there are a huge number of more subtle means for transforming Sonority within a fixed instrumentation.  There are continuums of sound properties of individual performers or the unit sound that when varied strongly impact the Sonority.  Here is a partial list:

A successful improvisation often is comprised of the combined sounds of the ensemble where over the duration of the work different regions of the continuums from this list or others not listed are Expressed in the different movements of the piece.  If one section is Soft / Sparse / Tonal / Lines and the next section is Fast / Dense / Atonal / Points, there is Structural Development from the first section to the second one.  Generally, I like to keep to the middle of these continuums for most of an improvisation and introduce the extremes on both ends for smaller portions of the work.  For example, good Development for dynamics might mean 50% of the duration at mp to mf, 25% of the duration at ppp to pp and 25% of the duration at f to fff.  

Different ensembles have different solutions on how to distribute the regions of a continuum over the work.  For example, the proportions of the dynamic continuum expressed in the previous paragraph are appropriate for a Leap of Faith performance.  Metal Chaos Ensemble is generally louder and might have 50% f, 25% p to mf and 25% ff to fff and an Expanse performance with Michael Knoblach (who typically makes much quieter sounds) might have 50% mp, 25% ppp to p, and 25% mf without ever Expressing a forte or louder dynamic.

The Role of Tension and Release

In conventional music, Tension and Release is purely a function of harmony.  For example, Berklee teaches the II-V-I cadence found in Major keys in jazz and classical music.  In the key of C Major, the II chord is D minor, the V chord is G7 which contains the dissonant interval called a tritone between the 3^rd and 7^th notes in the chord, and the I chord is the very consonant C Major.  When the tense G7 chord moves to the consonant C Major Chord the B and F tritone (3 and 7) notes in the chord move by stepwise motion to C and G (1 and 5).  This creates a very palpable feeling of arrival – A famous example that many will be familiar with is the Amen Cadence (V7 to I major) which occurs at the end of nearly every hymn.

In Pure Improvisation, the harmonic context required to make a II-V-I cadence is nearly always absent, but resolving Tension is still a significant device indicating arrival and contributing to Development.  However, there are many more levels in the amount of Tension available.  On the low end of this continuum are the tense intervals in regular harmony: the tritone, the minor second, the minor ninth, clusters, and a few others.  However, there are much more tense intervals available such as two pitches less than a half step apart, which produce an audible “beating” sound when sounded together.  This “beating” sound is an example of a Resultant – a sound within a Sonority created by the physical interaction of two or more sound waves each not containing the Resultant.  Players can create dirty sounds (for example with multiphonics) which by themselves are more dissonant than the regular intervals available in the 12-tone scale.  The densest improvisation textures, where many players create active moving sounds simultaneously (often called a Wall of Sound), are much more dissonant (tense) than any harmony that typically occurs in regular music.

The Role of Imitation

Imitation in improvisation can take many forms:  Motivic Exchange, Phrasing Structure, Timbre Imitation, Energy Level, Consonance Level, and many others.  As I hear a sequence of sounds, I abstract information about that sequence’s properties, and I decide to complement those sounds with my sounds or contrast those sounds with my sounds.  The Imitation can mimic a single aspect of that abstraction (for example, the energy level) or multiple aspects (for example, the rhythm and the pitch sequence).  A motive is a short musical phrase that has a particular rhythm and shape; when I hear a motive, I can respond with the same phrase or a variation of the phrase and that is perceived by the observer as motivic Development.  If I hear short choppy phrases separated by pauses and respond with my own short choppy phrases in the pauses of the other Line, the Sonority becomes about the exchange of these phrases:  I call this a Chase Texture.  If Glynis is playing a thick and sustained harmonically rich passage with the bow on the cello, I can Imitate her sound on an instrument like a low clarinet in such a way that it is very difficult to tell which player is creating which sound:  I call this a Blended Sound, and it is very common when Glynis and I perform together.  In fact, I have developed technique specifically to respond to certain sounds she commonly makes:  For example, she often makes long glissandos, and I have learned to play long glissandos on woodwinds to Imitate her sound.  If both our glisses are in a higher register where there are fewer harmonics and, therefore, the sounds are purer, the sliding nature of the notes and the timbre of the notes are both Imitations simultaneously.   

The Role of Line

Conventional music involves Melody, defined on the web as “a sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying.”  My Mom used to say to me all the time, “Where is the Melody?” when I was listening to Art Ensemble of Chicago or Cecil Taylor in the early 80s.  I would often say to her, “Listen to the pretty Melody” about the same music.  I was kidding her, of course; Melody is generally understood to be “pretty”, a relatively simple rhythmic sequence of pitches that is a center of focus in the music presented.  One generally expects the melody to be memorable and perhaps even non-musicians can it sing or hum it back. 

Another web definition: “Melody is the principal part in harmonized music.”  Generally, Melody contains the highest notes in the harmonized passages with the lower parts referred to as Harmony parts.  Sometimes conventional music contains multiple Melodies that interact with each other, each part having roughly equivalent importance to the Sonority expressed.  This is called Counterpoint. 

While I think all of what I play fits the requirement in the first definition to be musically satisfying, I would not call much of it melodic.  Some of what I play clearly violates the first definition:  Multiphonics, or a dirty texture generally is not a “sequence of single notes” since the sounds are each complex.  However, I do play lots of “sequences of single notes” pleasing to me that I do not consider melodic:  They are probably not hummable, they probably don’t occur in a standard Western scale for very long, the note sequences might be very fast, or for many other reasons.  Sometimes I do play melodic passages; I especially like slow moving low register atonal melody on low clarinets and play them frequently.  I also often play melodic Lines over highly dense and active Sonorities.  There is a sound continuum from Melody to Noise, all of which can be an appropriate choice to Express in some Sonority. 

I prefer the concept of Line over the concept of Melody to describe a sequence of single notes.  The meanings are similar, but with several important distinctions.  Line does not necessarily imply any hierarchy of importance between the multiple Lines expressed by multiple players.  Line does not have to be “pretty” or “musically satisfying”.  Line does not have to operate at a slow enough tempo to be memorable in detail or hummable.  Lines can include sequences with complex sounds that are not simple pitches.  Lines can be made with instruments (like some percussion) that make sounds that are not pitch-specific.  Line is a generalization which broadens Melody to include any sequence of pitches and aggregated sounds.

Critically important to a player’s mature improvisational language is how they construct Lines.  This is a big part of the work that every improvisor must perform to achieve maturity.  Musicians from different cultures learn different scales to use in the improvised music of their culture.  Many cultures have improvisational music with Structures of similar sophistication to Jazz:  Improvised content within a well-defined Structural system.  Indian music, for example, uses raga scale modes and rhythmic patterns to create very sophisticated improvisations.  Jazz education is all about the construction of improvised Melody from the sequence of scales implied by the harmonic motion.  I studied scales for a decade with Kurt Heisig and then again at Berklee, so I know how to transpose various scales, so they start on different notes on my various instruments.  However, this is not how I think of my pitch material when I am selecting pitches to form Lines most of the time. 

Line selection is equally as important as Texture to Sonority.  The Musicians each choose when to play a Line or some other category of sound, how that Line is constructed, how consonant or dissonant it is within itself and relative to the other Lines, and other decisions.  These choices, combined with the Timbre of the sound sources, create the overall impression of the sound sources that comprise the Sonority Expressed at that moment.  So, it turns out that pitch choice is important after all, but not that the selected note have the “correct” harmonic relationship to the harmonic motion.  Instead, the Line, which is a sequence of notes (or sounds), needs to contribute constructively to the Sonority. 

The juxtaposition of ensemble member’s individual Lines, which I call Line against Line, is a key element in the Structure of the music, equalizing the importance of each performer’s role.  In regular music, the most “important” part is the Melody, with the other players providing context and support.  A critical difference between improvised and conventionally composed music is the deconstruction of the hierarchy of importance among the parts of the ensemble:  One player’s contribution is not more important that the other players contributions.  In a typical rock song, for example, the vocalist has the most important part, followed by the guitar player who would take the solos, with the bass and drummer providing support.  In improvisation, all the players are much more equal:  Ensemble sections occur where all the sounds are equally important contributors to the Sonority, and other sections occur with players providing support to each other.  Even ensembles with very traditional instrumentation like a sax, bass, drums trio follow this pattern.  In a Sonny Rollins sax trio, the hierarchy is very strong, in an Anthony Braxton or Evan Parker sax trio all the players are much more equal in importance.  Like Sonority, these role relationships should be under Transformation across the duration of a performance.

Harmonics are parts of a sound which give an instrument its specific tone color or Timbre.  The reason that the same note played on a clarinet, a piano, a guitar, or a trumpet all sound different is that the relative strengths of the harmonics are different on each instrument due to the physics of how each sound is produced. 

Wikipedia says:

A harmonic series (also overtone series) is the sequence of frequencies, musical tones, or pure tones in which each frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental.

Pitched musical instruments are often based on an acoustic resonator such as a string or a column of air, which oscillates at numerous modes simultaneously. At the frequencies of each vibrating mode, waves travel in both directions along the string or air column, reinforcing and canceling each other to form standing waves. Interaction with the surrounding air causes audible sound waves, which travel away from the instrument. Because of the typical spacing of the resonances, these frequencies are mostly limited to integer multiples, or harmonics, of the lowest frequency, and such multiples form the harmonic series.

The musical pitch of a note is usually perceived as the lowest partial present (the fundamental frequency), which may be the one created by vibration over the full length of the string or air column, or a higher harmonic chosen by the player. The musical timbre of a steady tone from such an instrument is strongly affected by the relative strength of each harmonic.

The Big Idea

So, here is my Big Idea:  Assemble a huge collection of instruments and a huge Roster of musicians and take fundamentally different sections through these resources for different projects and recordings.  The idea of Transformation Focused Improvisation and the associated performance techniques are the same on different pieces of music, but the Sonority Set is different for each performance due to the Set of resources utilized and the resulting music is therefore different each time.

The first aesthetic problem for me individually is to learn to make as broad a palette of sounds as possible.  I play multiple instruments each from at least the following Timbre Sets:  Saxophones, Clarinets, Double Reeds, Flutes, Free Reed Aerophones, Strings, Electronics, Electro-Acoustic, Wood, Metal, and Membranes.  Unlike in conventional Jazz, where I would not use a new instrument until I achieved the significant mastery of the scales and control of the sound to “correctly” navigate the chord changes with “correct” tone, I will use new instruments as soon as I can make interesting sounds (most often, immediately).  Anton Webern pioneered the idea of klangfarbenmelodie (melody of colors) in the early 1900s where a Line is built from a few notes each played by a sequence of different instruments.  Sequences of sounds from different instruments or Timbre Sets are another method of decoupling Development from melodic or harmonic Structure. 

Any instrument provides immediate feedback data to the player when it reveals what sound output results from what physical input.  For simplicity, consider just my woodwind instruments:  Control of the sound of each instrument is achieved by a whole group of physical inputs which act in concert.  Among these are air speed, armature position, throat position, diaphragm backpressure, angle of mouthpiece or air stream, pressure on mouthpiece or reed, and finally, at the end of the list, fingering.  I can make dozens of very different sounds on a woodwind without changing the finger position.  Some instruments, like a saxophone, have a huge variety of possible sounds while others, like a bell or a foghorn, make basically one sound.  To me, the aesthetic problem of learning any new instrument to broaden my Arsenal’s Sonority Set boils down to leveraging the instrument’s physical system and creating a mapping of the set of input techniques to the set of sounds created. 

My rhythmic concept uses Phrasing rather than strict alignment with a meter or time signature.  I can Phrase equally well to a metered or an ambient environment with no clear beat.  Consider the rhythm of speech where syllables and words are unequal in length and the spacing of the words and speed of verbal delivery are dynamic.  A sentence or a clause from a sentence is a Phrase with an Expressed rhythmic delivery which is not likely aligned with a regular pulse.  Many African rhythms are based on speech patterns.  This rhythmic concept is transferable across all the instruments I use, and together with the ability to make at least a few interesting sounds on a new instrument, allows me to use most new instruments immediately.  While my control over the new instrument improves over time, I accumulate new vocabulary and can use the instrument for greater stretches of time within a performance. 

• Leap of Faith / Leap of Faith Orchestra – Core duet of myself and Glynis Lomon (cello, aquasonic, voice) with various guests to make ensembles varying in size from duet to orchestra of 25, featuring horns, strings, and percussion.

• Metal Chaos Ensemble – MCE has been the core duet of myself and Yuri Zbitnov (drums, percussion) with various guests.  This band features metal and wood percussion instruments and rock elements including grooves which are not present in the other bands.  Recently, there has been a stable sextet version of this band which has created a sequence of albums.  This sextet band is in flux due to Yuri’s recent withdrawal.

• Turbulence – ensembles comprised of only, or mostly horn players who may also double other horns, percussion, or electronics.

• String Theory – ensembles comprised of me with string players.

• PEK Solo – performances by myself with or without studio construction (overdubbing).

• Expanse – Core duet of myself and Michael Knoblach on exotic percussion where the dynamic range is much quieter and there is more open space than the other bands.

• Sub-Units – performances by a small group of Evil Clown Roster members not assignable to one of the other band names.

The final aesthetic problem in this discussion is specific to each performance.  Once the musicians and the instrumentation have been selected for a session, we play the whole duration of the work continuously.  Sometimes we discuss the Sonority selection for the opening or the closing of the piece, and sometimes certain sections have minimal preplanning (for example, recent Metal Chaos Ensemble CDs have thematic spoken word sections drawn from movies and literature which are recited during quieter sections).  Each performance is a specific and distinct solution to the aesthetic problem posed by the Big Idea and constrained by the decisions made on the specifics of the resources utilized for the ensemble generally and the performance specifically.  We solve the posed problem with the individual sound action decisions of the performers and the combination of those decisions over the duration Expresses the solution.

In 2019, I worked a great deal on updating the video recording equipment in the ECH studio.  I have eight good video cameras mounted to the walls and wired to a video mixing console in another room.  There are a bunch of video lights mounted to the walls controlled with a DMX program on another computer in that room.  Raffi runs a real time video mix which is combined with the good sound from the audio mixer into a LIVESTREAM to YouTube and Facebook.  This setup turns any session at ECH into a Live Performance, not only to the recording but to any people who watch over the internet during the performance or its Archival post afterwards.

The video rig does not quite make up for real persons in the room while we perform, but it has some huge advantages.  I don’t have to haul equipment (LOFO shows require a large U-Haul truck and smaller ensembles usually require a full van).  The Video and Audio recording equipment are always in place and so breakdown and setup effort is minimized (although still non-trivial).  All the Arsenal is available to each session:  While the studio room is big and we also use the kitchen (usually for the heavy and orchestral percussion), there is not enough space to ever use all the available instruments from the Arsenal at one time even with only a few musicians in the studio.  As in Live Performance, there is a constraint on how many instruments will fit in the space forcing a Sonority Set selection for every different studio performance.  Those selections are made with the size, personnel and Sonority focus of the performing ensemble in mind. 

Applying The Big Idea to PEK Solos

Due to the pandemic, a great deal of progress has come in the last year on PEK Solo Projects.  The following discusses applications of the Big Idea to this recent portion of my output.

As described in some detail above, my basic approach to music is to define a set of resources for a particular performance optimized for creating Transformation over time.  While the kind of output has changed due to the virus to include much more Solo work, I have not reconsidered my approach to music generally in any way.  The set of aesthetic problems posed by solo work is a bit different than the set posed by ensemble work.  I have simply used my existing approach to solve problems of a specific subgroup of the whole class of aesthetic problems I work on generally. 

In general, I consider Pure Improvisation to be fundamentally about the moment.  As an improviser, I predict and react to the evolving Sonority as I make my musical statements.  For this reason, I have always preferred playing music that is performed entirely in the moment with all the players simultaneously interacting.  When I have used sampling and electronic transformation of samples in works prior to the virus, I controlled the volume and presence of those premixes in real time while the performance of the live instruments is proceeding to preserve the sense of real time decision making.  I also sometimes use loopers to capture and layer sounds from the evolving improvisation to replay later in the piece.

One thing that I have done, which is brand new since Covid, is to use overdubbing and studio construction techniques to create category 3 (Quartet of PEKs) and category 4 (Orchestra of PEKs) performances as defined above.  The studio techniques mimic the interactions between players in ensemble improvisation with a few key differences:

Unlike the studio technique used in rock and other studio recording where one instrument or a small group of instruments are recorded at a time and for small sections of the overall work, I fill the room with instruments and microphones and record the full duration of each track of the work with many instruments serially.  This is very similar to how you perform working in real time with an ensemble.

One impact of the Virus is it has both slowed down my production and increased the amount of time actively spent playing.  The studio construction works (Categories 3 & 4) require at least 4 1/2 hours of my performance compared to 70 minutes for a regular ensemble set.  Those recording sessions are stretched over days instead of concluded in the real time duration of simultaneous ensemble performance.  The Orchestra of PEKs performances have taken as much as a month to do a single disc, since the intermediate mixes used as a basis of samples for the premix are also recorded over days.  Since 2015, Evil Clown has generally had over 30 releases per year, instead of just over 20 achieved in 2020.

The Orchestra of PEKs solo albums address the same aesthetic problem as the Frame Notation Scores for The Leap of Faith Orchestra:  How to ensure music with a really large number of available resources does not turn into chaos (in the common meaning of randomness) with little or no Development.  The Orchestra of PEKs Solo sets use an entirely different mechanism to solve this problem:  Instead of specifying activity on a timeline, I conceived of an algorithm for the steps in the studio construction.  Following the algorithm results in a work which is compositional, in that it is planned, while all the sounds are still improvised.  Both solutions bridge the difference between composition and improvisation in different ways.

John Cage performed a work with David Tudor in 1959 called Indeterminacy, where Cage recited short 90 second poetic stories and David Tudor separately recorded improvisations with electronics:  These performances were then overlaid, so that the interactions of the two tracks produce a new sound world with the alignment of events of the two recordings governed by chance.  According to Wikipedia, “Indeterminate or chance music can be divided into three groups: (1) the use of random procedures to produce a determinate, fixed score, (2) mobile form, and (3) indeterminate notation, including graphic notation and texts.”  In Cage’s career of boundary shattering concepts and compositions, I have always believed these ideas among his most important.

Cage produced compositions in all three of these groups, including many from group 1 which are through-composed with his compositional decision making guided by tosses of the I Ching.  I use group 3 (graphic notation and texts) for my Frame Notation Scores discussed in the next section.  I use group 2 (indeterminate or Aleatoric alignment) in this definition in the studio construction process used for Orchestra of PEKs recordings.

While the alignment of events in Cage’s Indeterminacy is governed by chance, the Sonority is not.  Each of the two distinct recordings occupies a well-defined Timbre Set.  While the actual alignment of events is governed by chance, the sounds Expressible by the combined performances belong to a well-defined Sonority Set.  If you are aware in advance of the different sounds available to each Timbre Set, you can predict the kinds of possible Sonorities available to their combination.  The basic building block of improvisation is not the note, it is instead a complex texture of sound.  Just as conventional harmony training tells me how to predict how two pitches a fifth apart will sound when played together, my theory of Transformation Focused Improvisation tells me how to Predict how two or more complex textures will sound when sounded together.

Applying The Big Idea to the Leap of Faith Orchestra

For the Leap of Faith Orchestra, I compose Frame Notation Scores that give the players instructions comprised of English language descriptions and simple symbols on a timeline (the ensemble tracks the time on a sports clock).  These works address the aesthetic problem of how to have a large improvisation ensemble play a concert length work without becoming total chaos (in the common sense meaning random).  The Orchestra of PEKs solo sessions address this same aesthetic problem from a completely different angle.  There is a page on my website (Leap of Faith Orchestra Performances of Frame Notation Scores by PEK) which discusses the six Frame Notation Scores each in detail and contains links to the scores, the album page on the Evil Clown site, Bandcamp for CD orders and downloads, YouTube and other content.

I give my Frame Notation compositions for the LOFO astronomical/cosmological titles – It seems fitting with the scale of these long complex works and fits well with my usual Leap of Faith/Evil Clown titles which largely draw on Scientific and Mathematical ideas. These very special full orchestra events occur infrequently and are currently on pause due to the Virus and the current lack of an acceptable and affordable venue. For each performance, I compose a Frame Notation Score specifically for that show which is simultaneously a Density and Sonority map prescribing the improvised development of the work. These very special scores intend to solve a very tricky problem of composition for large improvisation ensembles: How do you rehearse complex works for large ensembles when all the participants are extremely busy?

              Answer: Compose works that do not need to be rehearsed.

This system allows me to compose detailed Events without having to notate pitches or rhythms in conventional staff notation which would require significant rehearsal to accurately achieve and not take advantage of the distinct improvisational languages of the musicians.  Skilled improvisers, like the ones I have recruited, can easily follow these instructions to create a highly structured improvisation without the need for rehearsal even when the ensemble is quite large as it is in the orchestra. This allows enormous freedom of decision making for each performer and means that we do not have to rehearse these pieces prior to performance. We rely on all the work of the overall Evil Clown project to tighten the ensembles’ improvisation across its many cross sections while the score provides directions on timing, Sonority and Transformation.

Each of the scores has continued to utilize the compositional symbols and devices of the previous scores while adding something new to my notational system. Some examples of recurrent devices are large texture blocks with auxiliary instrument groupings (like wood or metal texture), pulse tracks with unison attacks at irregular intervals from different sub-groups, using the attack and decay from large gongs as structural divisions of the work to pivot into new Sonority, and Group Action Frames assigned to named sub-groups in the ensemble each with a Group Leader.

All the other contemporaneous Evil Clown performances and recordings by all the ensembles, Leap of Faith, String Theory, Metal Chaos Ensemble, and the Sub-Units, are preparation for these full Leap of Faith Orchestra performances. The performances by these smaller ensembles stand by themselves as improvisation performances as well as getting us ready to improvise in a full orchestra setting.    

The vision of the overall Evil Clown project is to create an extremely broad universe of sound and to realize music which Transforms into widely different Sonorities within a single performance.  The full Leap of Faith Orchestra performing a PEK Frame Notation Score is the most complete implementation of that vision.  The large ensemble size and the details provided in the score directing the improvisation allow us to create a story through a huge number of controlled textures over the 75-minute duration of the works.

I have composed a seventh score (Systems of Celestial Mechanics) which I plan to mount at some point in the future…  There is a lot of advance work to do before I can do that including locating an affordable venue, raising the ensemble, and creating the parts customized for those players.  I’d like to get this project up and running on a regular basis again, but it is a huge amount of work for me, and I think I will focus on smaller and medium sized ensembles for a while.  Ideally, I’d like to use the completed works to get a feature venue with time enough for a rehearsal and several performances across adjacent days.  Although the design allows for a minimum of rehearsal, I know that if we play one of these compositions several times, the results will be very different each time, and probably improve as we go along.  Time will tell.