John RussellLectures-Workshops-Concertsジョン・ラッセルレクチャー・ワークショップ・コンサート

Musashino Art University 武蔵野美術大学2019

John Russell Lecture, Workshops and Concerts at M

usashino Art University, 2019

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01 Index 目次 02 Introduction 企画紹介 04 Lecture 課外講座 22 Concert Presentation コンサート紹介 28 Interview インタビュー

John RussellLecture-Workshop-Concertsジョン・ラッセルレクチャー・ワークショップ・コンサート

Musashino Art University 武蔵野美術大学2019

with

Guest Musicians Akiyama Tetuzi Sabu Toyozumi

LecturersKoyanagi JunjiSuzuki Eriko (Suzueri)

Master Course StudentsLi Wanyu Ling Yidan Lyu Anqi Lyu KeLisa Woite Yu Shida Zhao Zhengrong

4th year StudentsInouye DaichiKikuchi RyotaLi ZihuaSeki KaiZhang Fei

3d year StudentYe Ziyi

2d year StudentsAndô Miyu Hirota Naomi Iwasaki Miyabi Katsunaga Inori Kawashiro Fumi Kudô AmiKusano TsubakiMaeda Mei Oda MichikoRo KadaiRo MeieSawaki AkinoShimizu Ryôsuke Tôbô RioYokoba Yuri

OrganizationChristophe Charles

参加者

ゲストミュージシャン秋山 徹次豊住 芳三郎

講師小柳 淳嗣鈴木 英倫子（すずえり）

大学院生李 宛鈺凌 芸丹 劉 安琪 呂 可ヴォイテ リサ 于 是達 赵 正蓉

4 年生井上 大地菊地 良太李 子婳

関 海張 飛

3 年生叶 子依

2 年生安藤 美由廣田 直己岩崎 雅勝永 伊紀河城 ふみ工藤 あみ草野 椿前田 明小田 理世ロ カダイロ メイエ澤木 秋乃清水 亮輔東房 利緒横場 優里

企画クリストフ・シャルル

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It was a great honour and pleasure to welcome John Rus-sell as a guest professor, for a series of lectures, workshops and concerts at Musashino Art University in June 2019.

From 2000, Christophe Charles' media art seminar has been focusing on live art and music, with a special interest in improvisation, in relation to the environment. Many lectures, workshops and concert have taken place, with Tomas Ankersmit, Michael Bielecki, Japp Blonk, Lawrence English, Mark Fell, Brunhild Ferrari, Boris Hegenbart, Ishikawa Fukurow, Zbignew Karkowski, Tomas Köner, Francisco Lopez, Metamkine, Fatima Miranda, Nakajima Kô, Phil Niblock, Carsten Nicolai, Otomo Yoshihide, Markus Popp, Philip Samartzis, Shimoda Seiji, Carl Stone, Richard Teitelbaum, Terre Thaemlitz, Rafael Toral, among others.

John had invited us in 2008 to participate in a Mopomoso event in London. Eleven Years have passed, and it was possible at last to invite him to Musashino Art University, to teach as a guest professor to undergraduate and Master Course Students. We did two concerts as a final presenta-tion during the 2019 Open Campus.

Any sound can be used as a musical material. John explores all the sounds he can produce with his instrument, which he also considers as an environment, which has its own voice. The instrument must be honored, that is, not (only) mastered, but listened to. In fact, the relationship between the musician and his instrument is constantly changing, as both react to changes in their environment. For John, «any attempt at universality always fails», and it is precisely the errors and mistakes that make it possible to find openings: «the attack of a note carry a wealth of information and the ‘suffocation’, ‘scratched’ or ‘aphasic’ can be the results of exploring this. It can also come from a desire for impreci-sion or ambiguity which is a very useful tool in improvisa-tion and indeed in certain types of composed music.» [from an interview with Andrea Ferraris for Chain DLK (2008)]

With John, we were able to make a journey through sound, exploring the un/intentional and un/controlled elements, trying to listen carefully and to react instantaneously to our inner and outer environment. Here are transcriptions of his lecture of June 10, and of a conversation which took place on June 14. On June 15 we did two concerts. The audio and video recordings of these events and workshops have been edited and included in a SD card attached to this booklet.

(Christophe Charles)

2019 年 6 月に武蔵野美術大学で講義、ワークショップ、コンサートを開催し、ギタリストであり、世界をリードするフリーインプロヴィゼーション（自由即興音楽）の第一人者であるジョン・ラッセル氏を訪問教授として迎えられたことは、大変光栄である。

2000 年以降、クリストフ・シャルルのメディアアートセミナーは、ライブアートと音楽に焦点を当てており、環境との関係と、即興に特別な関心を寄せている。ミヒャエル・ビエリスキ、ヤップ・ブロンク、マーク・フェル、ブリュンヒルド・フェラーリ、ボリス・ヘゲンバルト、ズビグニュー・カーコウスキー、トーマス・ケーナー、フランシスコ・ロペス、ファティマ・ミランダ、中嶋興、フィル・ニブロック、カールステン・ニコライ、大友良英、フィリップ・サマルティス、霜田誠二、カール・ストーン、ラファエル・トラル等による多くの講演、ワークショップ、コンサートが行われた。

2008 年、 ジ ョ ン・ ラ ッ セ ル 氏 は ロ ン ド ン で 行 わ れ た「モポモソ」イベントに私たちのセミナーを招待してくれ

た。 そこから 11 年もの時を経て武蔵野美術大学の訪問教授として、学部生・修士課程の学生を教える運びとなった。 2019 のオープンキャンパスの最終プレゼンテーションとして、2 つのコンサートを行った。

ラッセル氏はどのような音でも音楽素材として用いる。また自分の楽器で生成できるすべての音を探求している。楽器を、独自の声を持つ環境とも見なしている。楽器そのものを尊重すべきであるという考えによって、楽器をマスターするだけではなく、楽器の声を聴くべきであるという考えの下、制作や活動を行なっている。実際、ミュージシャンとその楽器の関係は、環境の変化に反応しているため、常に変化している。 ラッセル氏の場合、「普遍性への挑戦は常に失敗する」、逆にエラーやミスのおかげで開口部を見つけることを可能になる：「音のアタック（発声）は豊富な情報を持っている。そによって＜窒息＞、＜スクラッチ（傷）＞または＜失語症＞も起こりうる。不正確さや曖昧さへの欲求から生じるもので、即興音楽で、または一種の作曲された音楽に於いて、それは非常に有用なツールでにもなる。」[ アンドレア・フェラリスによるインタビューより 、2008]

ラッセル氏と一緒に、私たちは音を通して旅をし、意図的でない、制御されていない要素を探求し、注意深く耳を傾け、内外の環境に瞬時に反応するように努めた。 6 月 10 日の課外講座と 6 月 14 日に行われた会話を文字起こししたものをここで掲載する。6 月 15 日に 2 つのコンサートを行った。それぞれのイベントとワークショップの音声・映像記録を編集したデータはこの冊子に添付された SD カードに収められている。

（クリストフ・シャルル）

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Extra-Curriculum Lecture2019/6/10 (Mon.),16:30~18:00, bldg#1 room 104 John RussellMatsushita Yumi (Translation)

Concert 2019/6/10 (Mon.) 18:00~18:30, bldg#1 room 104John Russell (Guitar) Sabu Toyozumi (Drums, Er-hu)Suzueri (Piano, Toys, Devices)Christophe Charles (Guitar)

WorkshopsJune 11 (Tue.) 14:30~18:00, Room 12-406June 12 (Wed.) to 14 (Fri.) 13:00~16:30, Room 12-404

Open Campus ConcertsJune 15 (Sat.) 14:00~14:45 / 15:00~15:45, Room 12-404

課外講座2019 年 6 月 10 日 ( 月 ) 16:30~18:00、1 号館 104 教室 ジョン・ラッセル松下由美（通訳）

コンサート2019 年 6 月 10 日 ( 月 ) 18:00~18:30、1 号館 104 教室 ジョン・ラッセル （ギター） 豊住芳三郎 （ドラム、胡弓）すずえり （ピアノ、おもちゃ、デバイス）クリストフ・シャルル（ギター）

ワークショップ11 日 ( 火 ) 14:30~18:00、12 号館 406 教室12 日 ( 水 )~14 日 ( 金 ) 13:00~16:30、12 号館 404 教室

オープンキャンパス・コンサート15 日 ( 土 ) 14:00~14:45 / 15:00~15:45、12 号館 404 教室

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Lecture, June 10, 2019(translated in Japanese by Matsushita Yumi)

Good Afternoon, konnichiwa, thank you for coming.Since I can‘t speak Japanese, I‘d like to thank Yumi for translating for me today.

The South African bass player Johnny Dyani once said, that anybody who talks about music is a liar. Well, I am going to lie a bit today I suppose. I think it‘s possible to maybe drop some clues about what music is about.

I think in some ways we never get to actually play music, we get glimpses of what it is. But we never actually get there. Because if we get there, it‘s over.

At the age of eleven I passed something called the eleven plus and went to grammar school. I was brought up by my father‘s grandparents in the countryside; a very rural upbringing (so this was a big change). There was a kid in my class who had a guitar and I asked my grandparents, when they went to the town that month, to buy me a gui-tar, which they did.

I think one of the most important things or one of the nice things about life is when you can find a road where you can have an adventure and you can share that adventure with other people.

And for me the guitar has been a friend and also a key to unlock that world in which to have those adventures.

Now, a colleague of Johnny Dyani, a very good piano pla-yer, called Chris McGregor, was once asked, what his favo-rite instrument was. He said: “The drum….. The eardrum.”

Listening is so important. It‘s almost a miracle how air is elastic: when you hit it and it bounces back. And this mo-vement of air hits the eardrum.

From this movement of air against the eardrum, the brain interprets it as sound, and reads so many things into that message of sound.

It can tell you there‘s a bird flying overhead, your mother is calling you in for tea, a cat is running away from a dog, a motorcycle is going down the street,... all of these things hitting the ear as air movement, and the brain interprets this.

2019 年 6 月 10 日、課外講座通訳：松下由美

今日はお集まりありがとうございます。日本語を話せなくて申し訳ありません。ですので通訳を通してお話しいたします。

南アフリカのミュージシャン、ジョニー・ディアーニが、一度こう言ったことがあります。「音楽について話をする人はみんな嘘つきだ。」だからこれからちょっと嘘をつこうかな、と思っています。みなさんのなにか音楽に関してヒントになることをお話しできたらな、と考えています。

音楽を本当に演奏する、それはある意味不可能なことかもしれません。なんらかの音楽を演奏する感覚をつかむというものは体験できるかもしれない。それを理解した瞬間に消えてしまう、失ってしまうものだからかもしれません。

実は、11 歳の時に遡ります。イギリスの中学校で進級をしたんですね。で、父親の祖父母に育てられました。ギターを持っている友達がいて、自分のおじいさんに買ってほしいと頼んで買ってもらった経緯があります。

人生で大事なこと、素敵なことは何かな、という中で一つあるのは、何らかの自分が世界の中でする冒険を他の人と共有できる、そういったものがあったら幸せじゃないかな、と思います。

私の場合はギターがそれになったわけですね。友人であり、世界の扉を開く鍵、冒険を始めるきっかけになったものです。

先ほどのジョニー・ディアーニと一緒に演奏していたピアニスト、クリス・マクレガーは、好きな楽器は何？と聞かれた時に「ドラム」と言ったんです。ドラムはドラムでも、「イヤードラム」：何だかわかりますか？「鼓膜」と答えたんですね。

本当に聴くということはとても大事な行為です。奇跡のように、その振動がゴムのように空気が伸縮して、音が自分の耳に通じる。空気の動きは鼓膜を振動させる。

その空気の振動によって耳から届いた音を脳が瞬時に解釈して、そこからメッセージを受け取る。それが聴くという行為です。

ですから「頭上で鳥が鳴いているなー」であったり、お母さんが、「お茶ができたよー」という声、猫の音、バイクが車道を走る音、全部それは空気を揺らすことによって耳に届いて脳が理解して自分が把握することですよね。

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There are eight variables to sound. They are (1) pitch: that‘s wether it‘s a high note or a low note; (2) dynamics: how loud is it; (3) duration: how long the sound lasts for; (4) location: where the sound comes from; (5) timbre: wether it‘s a soft sound or a hard sound; (6) speed: tempo; (7)rhythm; and also (8) depth, how far away a sound is.

In conventional music, it tends to work with pitch, rhythm, harmony, these things. And I‘m very interested in all the elements of sound being able to be used as musical material.

This means that the connection between the sounds, when you‘re improvising, can be taken from any of these points, not just from the point of view of tonality, or harmony, or a rhythmic basis, but you can play something with sounds in the same texture area, the timbral area, or you can play something that contrasts with that, and you can use all of these elements with which to create your music. Any sound you can create can be used as valid musical material.

John Cage made many contributions to music, but for me one of his most interesting contributions was the notion of a "portable aesthetic", which means that you can listen to something and hear that as music. You can listen to the sound of nature, and hear that as music. Any sound is valid music material.

But music is so much more than sound. The English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham said that the English don’t understand music, but they like the kind of noise it makes.

And sometimes one finds in the world of free improvisation people who make the right kind of noise. But the music isn’t there.

And I think we find that in all art practice. People wear the right sort of clothes, but actually where is the depth to their work? Well I just want to mention myself: what is depth? Depth comes from engagement. And I think it’s an intellectual engagement, an emotional engagement, and also a physical engagement with the work. And I feel that’s possibly where the depth lies.

音というものには八つの要素があります：まず、ピッチ。そしてダイナミック：これは音の大きさですね。長さ、尺。ロケーション、どこから音が聴こえてくるか、どこにあるか。音色、それがソフトなのかハードなのか。スピード：テンポ。リズム。そして、音の深さというもの。こう言った要素から成り立っていますね。

いわゆる既存の伝統的にある音楽というものはピッチ、リズム、ハーモニーが主体となっています。私の場合はすべての音に関わる要素、そういったものを素材に使いたい、という気持ちがあります。

すべての音に、ある繋がりがある。いわゆる即興のインプルヴィゼーショナルであっても何であっても、どういう視点で捉えるかということですね。それがトーン、リズム、こういったもの、逆に固定したものではなくて音の素材感、テクスチャー、音色、そして音のコントラスト、比較して感じること、そういった要素すべてなんでも音を構築する上で価値ある要素として使えるわけです。

私が色々音楽の発想の中で、ジョン・ケージの大いなる貢献の一つと言えるのが、彼の「Portable Aesthetics」、というのは、ポータブルの、どこにいても感じられる、持ち歩けるというか、そういった美的なもの、美学、つまりそれが自然にある音、なんでも、どこにでも聞こえてきますよね。それを、全てそれが音として有効である、ということです。

音楽と言っても、音だけではないわけですね。イギリス人の指揮者、サー・トーマス・ビーチャムが、「イギリス人は音楽を理解していないが、音楽の作り出すノイズが好きなんだ」ということを彼は言っています。

フリーインプロビゼーションの分野においては、正しい、あるべきノイズというものを作り出す人はいますが、けれども音楽はそこにあるかというと、ないかもしれない。

例えば、それらしく見せる、それをするに即した服装をすれば一見そういったことをやっているかのように感じるかもしれません。ただ、要は「depth」、深み・深さということで、私の言う深さは何を意味するかというと、

「Engagement」、なにかにどれだけ深く関わり参画するかということだと思うんですね。それは私的な部分や感情的な部分、そして肉体・物理的な部分、そういった関わりというのが、「深み」というものに寄与するものだと思うんです。

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Many years ago in Brussels was a group of musicians, who decided to not learn how to play their instruments. So they would get together every week, and each person played different instruments each week. The result was, the music didn’t develop at all. And they always sounded the same, they would did this in order to try things fresh, and do something new. But of course, it is like the old saying: If you don’t know history, then you are forced to relive its mis-takes. And so although they kept swapping instruments, they kept turning out the same sort of music. And after about a year doing this, they decided to give up the experi-ment.

So let’s think a little bit about how music develops. I think one way having coming from the countryside is the rural approach. How for instance a farmer will have some land, and one year he will pour water on the land, and next year some fertilizer, and next year he would build a barn. And so, he starts from a central point, and moves out from that point.

Contrasting with that is something I call the urban ap-proach, which is maybe less analogue, much more digital. When we live in a city, we are one person at home, one per-son on the bus or the tube or the train, going to work with another person in the office, we are another person in the weekend and so on. There is a linear progression, in blocks.

And finally there’s something I like to call the quantum rabbit. Ideas just pop out suddenly, over here “HELLO”! And over here, “HELLO!”. And you don’t know where they come from.

So we have to be aware of these things. And in a way what we do is we have frames. And when we listen to so-mething, we frame it in terms of something we understand. So we like to be listening to a pitch element, or a timbral element, and all these different frames. And when we play with other musicians, our job is to somehow frame their work and make it sound good. Not show how good we are. Because if we do that, somebody will think, well if they are so good, why are they playing with these people? Because you are there to make the group sound good. It’s about not having an ego, that says “look at me I’m the greatest”. It’s about saying we are here to play music together, it’s about sharing.

実は何年も前にベルギーのブリュッセルで、あるグループの特定の人達が楽器の引き方などを学ばずに演奏しようということを試みたんですね。毎週集まって決まった楽器ではなく都度メンバーが違う楽器を弾くわけです。だけれども、結局なにか似たようなものになってしまった。つまり、彼らは古いことを打破して新しいことをしようとしたのだけれども、よく聞く言葉に「歴史の教訓を学ばないと過ちを犯す」と言いますよね。それがまさに起こったのだなと思います。一年ほどして、このグループは解散してしまいました。

音楽をどのように発展していくかというのをですね、ちょっと例えで話したいのですが、いわゆる地方、田舎の人がですねどういうふうにアプローチするか、これを農民と考えてください。ある農民がどういうふうに展開していくか。まず、土地に水をやります、肥料をあげます、そうして牧草を植えたりして、そこからだんだん発展していきますね。

ではアーバン、都会の人はどうか、都会のアプローチと比較してみると、先程の農家よりもよりデジタル化した発展の仕方だと思います。街があって、家に居る人もいればバスや地下鉄、電車で通勤する人もいれば、オフィスに居る人もいる。よりリニアと言うかブロック化された発展の仕方ですね。

次に「クォンタム・ラビット」、量子のうさぎという（量子というのは数学的な方ですけども）、ちょっとあのモグラ叩きのようなですね、予測できない、こういうふうに進むであろうという概念を超えた、ぱっと出てきてあっちこっちに出てくる。そういう感じの発展の仕方。

そして音楽を演奏するということで、あるフレーム、枠組みがあると。聞く方、理解する方はピッチがあって音色があって、それも一つのフレーミングですね。そして他の一緒に演奏するミュージシャンが居る。グループとしていい音、いい音楽を奏でようとする。つまり自分がどれだけすごいか、いわゆるエゴが自分の音を聞いてくれというのではなくて、音楽を共に演奏する、それを共有する、そういった気持で演奏するということです。

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There are no mistakes. If you think you make a mistakes, then play it again. Then somebody will think you did it on purpose.

You have to be aware of everything that’s going on. What you intend, what your colleagues intend to the playing, and what the accidents and the mistakes are.

Music proceeds by imitation. By that I mean, if you hear so-mething you like, you want to be able to repeat it: «Oh I just played that, I like that, I’m going to do it again», whether it is an accident or there is something you just discovered. So you do imitate the sound in order to help you learn. My friend Sabu (Toyozumi Saburô) is absolutely correct in saying: «Be inspired by, but do not imitate.» By that he means: don’t try to play like John Coltrane, because you’re not John Coltrane, and you will never be John Coltrane. John Coltrane is John Coltrane, and I believe that every human being has a unique approach a unique musicality, a unique creativity. This is all our responsibilities to find that uniqueness within ourselves and to share that, because that’s what we’re here for.

So let’s look a little bit at material. Why does free impro-vised music sound like it does? One of the things in order to improvise, is to have some kind of material or language that is ambiguous.

For instance if we play the dominant seventh chord, in conventional music that would lead to the tonic chord, normally speaking (not always). But that limits what’s the next thing is going to be, or the next step is. What we want is something that’s malleable, something that lends itself to change.

The poet Libby Houston describes her poems as being like golf balls. If you take a golf ball, and you unwrap it, it is full of rubber bands that ping off in all sorts of directions. Her poems were like that, it wasn’t a hard fact of a poem, it’s something you can interpret in so many ways.

In a way, it’s playing with controlled ambiguity. We want to develop material that helps us do that.

そして、もう一つは、間違いというものはないということです。もし自分で間違ったと思うならもう一回演奏すればいいわけです。そうしたら、みんな聞いてる人が、あ、わざとやったんだなと思いますよね。

常に耳をそばだてるというか、よく分かっていないといけない、今何が起きているか、それは意図して自分をおこしたのか、そして自分の一緒に演奏する仲間が意図的に起こしたことが、あるいは偶然起きたことなのか。

あとは、真似をするという声もありますよね、特に自分で、例えば楽器を演奏していて、あ、今のいいな、と思うと、それをまたやろうとする。でも、それが、ええ、偶然の産物なのか、あの、そしてそこで何か発見して、そして自分でそれを真似と言うか、再生、再度やろうとすると。ただ、こういうことをすると、学びには役立ちます。私と一緒に演奏している友人のドラマーのサブ（豊住芳三郎）さんがおしゃったんですが、インスパイアされること、触発されるべきであって、人の真似っこをするべきではないというふうに彼がおしゃったわけですね。つまり、どんなのにジョン・コルトレーンの真似をしても、あなたがジョン・コルトレーンになることはありえない。なれないと同時に、人はそれぞれがユニークな、自分だけの個性であって、どういうアプローチをするか、どういうクリエイティビティを持って、音楽を作り出すか、それはつまり人それぞれ自分の表現が違って、それを共有するというのが、音楽であって、そのために私たち一人一人は存在しているんですよね。

じゃあ、マテリアルというもの、素材をみってみましょう。なぜ、フリーインプロヴァイズミュージックは、そのように聞こえるのか？一つ言えることは、それか音楽言語である音であれ、素材が非常に曖昧であるということです。

そしてですね、例えばドミナント・セブンス・コード（属七の和音）を演奏すると、普通に考えれば次にトニックコード（主和音）になります。次のステップは何か、ということに関わっていきます。次の準備どか、大体は次がなにがやろうが予測できるということなんですが。

詩人の、リビー・ヒョストンが言ったことなんですが、詩はゴルフボールのようであると、ゴルフボールの表面を剥がすと、ゴムが色々な方向に飛んでいくわけですね。つまり、色々の角度で、ものを見れる、捉えることができる、つまり、これがひとつの真実ではなく、解釈は多様であるっていうことですね。

ですから、制御された、コントロールされた曖昧さで、音を出すということかと思います。それのための素材、マテリアルを選ぶということですね。

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Now, everybody has their cliches. Everybody has things they come back to. It’s not new every time you play. But what happens over time, is that some things you don’t use anymore, and new things come in. Or you might recycle some of the old stuff. Maybe two or three years later you think: «I was playing that years ago, it has come back, why?»

Just this as an aside the French absurdist and symbolist playwright, the remarkable Alfred Jarry, said that «clichés are the armature of the absolute». And it’s quite true that a cliché represents a lot more than a few notes. It becomes something personal to you. And that’s again part of this uniqueness: you have your own, you develop your own style, which you are constantly trying to subvert, because you wanted to throw away as much of you, and to be as much as possible open to the whole world of music, the whole universe of music that’s out there.

How do we proceed with our clichés? Our own individua-lity, our own feel of this universal music? I think there are probably four ways, four main ways, to play. One is playing solo, one is playing in a new group at a one off event. The third one is coming together for short term projects, and the fourth one is to have a long-term playing relationship in an established group. All four of these things have different things to offer, as a practice for the improviser.

Playing solo is an interesting prospect because I think eve-rybody plays solo but not in public. And I think one thing I found putting on concerts is that sometimes I offer people their first opportunity to play solo. And their playing, we would say in English, goes ahead in ‘leaps and bounds’. it’s quite fantastic because they get over their nerves and dread and all of this. And they are kind of looking at themselves, play, in a different way. And that distance, for what you are doing, learning that distancing, for what you are doing is great. So you are not only in close up. It’s im-portant to somehow have some kind of distance, sit back and understand what you are doing, watching yourself, as you are performing. So I can recommend for everybody, to play some kind of solo. If you are little bit frightened, do it. One of the great things about music I have to say is that nobody dies. You know, it’s not guns and bombs. You can make mistakes, and as I said, repeat them. It doesn’t matter: you tried something, it doesn’t work, you don’t like it, try something else. Samuel Beckett says: fail again, fail better.

誰にでもですね、馴れ合いになる音はありますよね。常に新しいことを毎回やるというのは無理であったりするのですが、例えば何年かぶりに同じことをやる、再利用するのか：

「二、三年前にこれをやった、なんで戻ってきたのか」ということがあります。

フランスの、不条理主義とシンボリストの劇作家である、アルフレット・ジャリーが言ったことですが、「クリシェというのは絶対性の骨組みである」。非常に自分の個人的に関わりがあ李、自分にとって、固有なユニークなものとなっています。常に、何かをオープンで新しいことをやりたい、だから今までやってきた既存なのも投げ捨てたいという気持ちがある。そういったものが、音楽の宇宙感、広がりを受けとめたいということだと思います。

そういったクリシェ（手グセ）を、 どう扱えればいいのか。個人性、それから音楽的宇宙といったもので実現するには、四つの形態があると思います。 一つはソロで演奏する。 二つ目は、グループで一回きりのセッションを行う。 三つ目は、短期間のプロジェクトという形でそのまま活動を行う。 四つ目は、ある枠組みの中で、中・長 期 間 活 動 する。 それぞれが違ったインプロビゼーションの形になると思います。

ソロというものは非常に面白い試みだと思うんですよね。公の場でなければみんなしていることですが。私は自分でコンサートの企画をするときは、そういった機会を与えるようにしています。 つまり、そこに飛び込んでやってみると、ある意味神経が図太くないと、なかなか自分でソロをやるというのは難しいかもしれないけれど、非常にアドレナリンが出て高揚する機会ですよね。 またですね、ソロでパフォーマンスするというのは、自己発見というか、ちょっと距離を置いて自分を見る機会です。 近くない、自分を客観的に見るということ。それによってより自分に対する理解が深まりますし。 あと、怖いかもしれない。一人でやるというのは。 ただそれをすることによって、どんなに自分が怖くても誰も死にはしません。そこが音楽のいいところですね。どんな間違いを犯したとしても、別にいいんです。先ほどもね、間違いというのは、もし間違ったなと思ってもまたやればいいと。 劇作家のサミュエル・ベケットが言っているんですね：失敗するなら、もう一度失敗しなさい。ただ、より良い失敗をしなさい。 という風に彼は言っています。

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As in all our practices, it is good to understand a little bit of the materials. Nobody understands everything about all of them. Nobody really gets to playing the guitar completely. You are always learning something new. Everybody is diffe-rent but it’s good to understand the materials.

It’s also important that we are all taking inspiration from everywhere: from nature, from other art disciplines, from books, from street noise, from wherever. But you recognize the difference between certain practices. For instance, the abstract expressionists used to improvise together. Imagine you have six of them working on one canvas together. And you might think that’s the same as a sextet playing free improvisation together musically. But it’s not, because one thing, you can’t focus on the whole canvas at the same time. But when you are listening, you can hear the whole of the sound on one time, which you can’t do when painting. Also, at the end of the improvisation, you have a painting, but at the end of a free improvisation, as Eric Dolphy said, it’s gone on the air.

I once spoke with a professor of psychology at Kassel uni-versity and I asked him, “Do you guys think of transcenden-tal experience?” And he said that, “Yes, we recognize it, but the only thing we really know is if somebody has a transcendental experience and says, ‘I am having a trans-cendental experience,’ that experience disappears.”

Improvised music is a very difficult thing to pin down, be-cause it goes on the air. One thing we do know is that the audience and the players share this unique experience, I don’t think it happens in any other form, where the musi-cians don’t know what they’re going to play, the audience don’t know what they’re going to play. And we discover the music together. That’s a unique experience.

Some of the things I am hoping to do in the workshops are various exercises to develop aspects of playing and aspects of listening. But it is important to realize that these are exercises. It is very easy to take these things into ‘I’ve written the piece!’ or ‘I’ve constructed a composition’. Some people do that, but I am quite keen not to follow that track, because people are already doing that and I feel as if we can keep the workshops as open as possible. But while recognizing that sometimes to swim against the tide makes your muscles stronger, and that is what exercise is about, that is also what practice is about on the instrument.

そして、やはり素材を理解する、マテリアルを理解するというのが、とても必要な、いいことだと思います。 全てを理解しうるというのは不可能ですね。 ギターにおいても新しい学びというものはあるけれども、全部を理解できなくても、素材をちゃんと見るということだと思います。

インスピレーションということですが、色々なものからインスピレーションを得ることができると思います。自然であったり、他の芸術分野であったり、街のノイズから。 これを絵画に例えること、または比較することもできると思います。 抽象表現主義の画家たちは即興で抽象画を描いていた。例えば 6 人の画家が一つのキャンバスで何か描いたとします。6 人編成（セクステット）が一緒に即興演奏をするということを考えてください。 それはでも違うということですね。つまり絵をみんなで描いた場合、全体を見ることができない、集中することかできない。けれども音の場合は全部聞くことができるということ。そして絵はですね、終わった後にキャンバスか残りますね。 ただ音楽に関しては残らない。ある意味終わったと同時に音は空気で消えるということですね。 エリック・ドルフィーがそういう風に形容しています。

ドイツのカッセル大学の心理学の教授と話をしていた時に、心理学的に「超越体験」に関して何か言えるかというと、

「超越した」ということ、それ以上は結局言えないということですね。言うならば、それはふざけている。

インプロビゼーションの場合、非常に難しい点は、「これだ」というふうに特定できないということですね。演奏はある意味、消えて、なくなってしまう。つまり、演奏する側は何をするか分からない、聞く側も何が出で来るのかわからない、という音楽の非常にユニークな経験となるわけです。

ワークショップでは、今回私がやりたいと思っているのは、演奏するということと、聞くということ、これを鍛えたいと思います。例えば何を作って、ある意味作曲のような、そういったもの、そういった準備、というのは、私はこう言うやり方は好ましくないと思いますね。つまり、できるだけオーペンな形で望みたいと思います。例えば、こちらに流れが来ると、逆らって泳ぐと筋肉が強化されますよね。訓練というのはそう言うものだと思います。

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But again, like analogies between music and painting, you find analogies between music and sport. But football players run on the spot like this in one place when they are exercising. When it comes to a football game, we don’t see them doing that on the football pitch - standing running on the spot during a game. That’s one of the reasons that if we have exercises in workshops, that’s purely for the workshops. But when it comes the playing situation, then it is much more open. So for the concert on Saturday we will be working towards making a concert, not about creating a series of exercises.

The Idea is not about virtuosity. Many years ago, a trumpet player called Mal Dean told me he started by learning to play one note of the trumpet, and he spent all week learning to play this note very well. Then he played with a group, he waited to when he felt it’s his time to play his one note, and he played it. When he felt it was the time to stop, he stopped. The following week he had learned three more notes, and he carried out learning more and more notes. So if you have one note please bring that one note. It’s not about an exercise in virtuosity, it’s about playing together, working together. And that doesn’t necessarily mean conventional musical instruments, any sound is valid musical material. The only thing is to be honest.

I was once interviewed for a local newspaper in Chichester, I think. I was giving a workshop there. And newspaperman said «Oh, you don’t have to be able to play, to play this music»… That’s not what I meant, of course. That’s what he wanted to write on his newspaper. All you have to do is bring whatever you’ve got and your ears. And think «open ears», don’t imagine what is going to happen or what the music will sound like. Let the music come to you. Too many people I find trying to fit a square peg into a round hole as we say. Too many people try to make music do something. Music gets along quite well without you. Just let it come to you and you will be carried away on an adventure, which we can share.

(After having inadvertently hit the microphone) I should have hit the microphone again to make it look like I did it on purpose! So please remember it’s music. I feel it is one of the great achievements of us upper primates. It is something that engages with more of the brain than most activities. It’s about structural thought. It’s one of the last things to go before you die. It’s remarkable stuff. As I said before, speaking of dying, it is music, it’s only music, no-body dies. It’s not war, it’s not malign. It’s a celebration of being human. It’s a celebration of the universe.

ただ、先ほど音楽と絵画の比較という話をしました。ただ、音楽とスポーツ、というのも見ると、スポーツの本番の為にどういった訓練をするかというと、例えばサッカーの選手こう、パタパタと足組をその場でしますよね。あれはエクササイズをするけれとも、あれを実際、試合ではしないわけですよね。そういうことに近いかもしれません。コンサートに向いているけれとも、コンサートをオーペンに出来るように、そう言う為の準備をします。土曜日のコンサートは、訓練したものをパレードで披露するとかそういった形ではない、より自由な形でやりたいと思います。

マル・ディーンというトランペットの演奏者が、一週間をかけて、一つだけの音（音符）を演奏するために、そのトランペットの吹き方を学ぶ。「これを本番にやるんだ」と思って、「今やる時だ」その音をと思って披露する。次に三つぐらいその音を覚えます。音が一つある場合は、その音を一つ持ってきてください。 妙技の練習ではなく、一緒に演奏すること、一緒に制作することです。 それは必ずしも従来の楽器ではなく、どんな音も有効な音楽素材になります。言い換えれば、唯一大事なものは正直であれということですね。

その正直であれ、ということが、必要なことだと思いますが、ある時ですね、チチェスター市の地元の新聞の取材を受けたんですね、私はワークショップをやっていたんですが、その記者のひとが「つまり、技法やテクニックがなくても、演奏できなくでも良いですね」で私に聞いたんですね、いいえ、そういうことではないです、ただその記者がそういう理解で、そういうストーリーを書きたかったと思うですね。私が言いたいのは、ただオーペンマイド、オーペンイア、非常に開かれた意識を持って、耳を持って、取り組むということ。音楽を「こうしよう」と思わないこと。音楽はですね、あなた自身がどうこうしようしなくても、それなりに収まる。自分の居場所が見つかるということは大事で、つまり、四角いもの敢えて丸いの中に押し込めようとする、そういう行為をしないだと思います。音楽が自分に来てもらう。 そして、演奏者と聴衆、全員が共有できる冒険に夢中になるでしょう。

今は、マイクをパッと触って音がしましたよね。もう一度やると、たまたまマイクを触ってしまったのではなくて、意図的にこれをやっているんだな、と見えますよね。やはり、私たち人類は音を聞いて、そして脳の方でプロセスし、音を自分の中で取り込むことができる。そして、なんだかの構造にすることができるということだと思うんですね、やっぱりそこが人類が優れている点だと思います。「たかが音楽、されど音楽」ということだと思うですね。誰も音楽で、死に至る様な事はありません、そんな大袈裟なものではないけれども、音楽というものは人類の賛歌であり、宇宙を讃える、そういった賛歌であると思います。

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Koyanagi Junji and Suzueri

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Lisa Woite and Koyanagi Junji

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Suzueri, John Russell and Akiyama Tetuzi

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Open Campus ConcertJohn Russell

During the course of this week, we’ve been doing a series of exercices and intuitives pieces. I used them to point out various aspects of listening and of sound production. One of the things about improvised music, and I think it is a unique property, is that the audience discovers the music at the same time as the musicians discover it. We don’t know what we are going to play, and you don’t know what we’re going to play, so we find it together. I like to think of the music as kind of having a bath for the ears, and we make our own connections as the music develops.

1- The first piece is called «Search and Reflect» and was devised by a drummer and organizer, John Stevens. That piece is more an exercise in staccato and short sounds, and it reminds me of a rainforest with many things going on in it, popping out.

2- The next piece is more legato, a more laminar type of sound. We use as a model an idea of an intergalactic spaceship, going through vast distances in outer space, and we call this the «Musashino Spaceship».

3- We now approach a piece which had its origin in a jazz exercise. Many of the earlier free improvisers came from jazz music. The piece was called «Telephone». But I think we never managed to play it properly, so I think we will call it «Crosslines».

4- One of the things we’ve been looking at, was the eight variables of sound, that you can use to make music. The next piece, «Conducting», involves two of those. One is pit-ch, and the other is dynamics - how loud or soft the music is. High and low, loud and soft: Pitch and dynamics. So I am going to call our two conductors, please ? In this exercise, the musicians respond to the signals of the two conduc-tors. The group is split into two parts. The left hand signifies volume, and the right hand signifies pitch.

5- Human beings love to play. Creativity is about playing and music has been with us since prehistory. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the first music was vocal, was created by the voice. We are going to make the next impro-visation only using our voices.

オープンキャンパス・コンサートジョン・ラッセル

一週間やってきた練習の成果を見てもらいたいと思います。直感的に音を出すことをやってきました。それと同時に、聴くとはそういうことか、それから音の性質、そういったこともずっと話してきました。即興音楽というのは、非常にユニークな点というのは、まず、聴いてくださる方がその場で初めて音楽を発見し、耳にしますよね。初めて耳にするのはお客さんだけではなく、演奏する側も同じ。お互い、次がどう出るか分からないという点です。私はその即興音楽は、耳が湯に浸かる、というかお風呂に入る、という風に言っているのですね。音を出している間に、何らかの繋がりというか、関連を自分の中で付けていきます。

1- 最初のピースは「サーチ・アンド・リフレクト」、ジョン・スティーヴェンスというドラマーとオーガナイザーによる曲です。意味としては模索（サーチ）と、自分に省みる、内省して、何らんかの反応をする（リフレクト）というピースです。今のピースはスタッカート、比較的に短い音、キレる音で、熱帯雨林で色々な生物が音を出しているような感じを連想させられます。

2- 次のピース「武蔵野スペースシップ」、これはスタッカートに反して、レガート、長い音の流層、流れる層、そういった流体学的な流れ、宇宙船が遥かに彼方に向かって進んでいく、というイメージです。

3- 次は、ジャズの練習のスタイルの曲を試みたいと思います。タイトルは「テレフォン」、ただ、一度も機能したことはないので、「混線状態」というふうに呼びたいと思います。

4- 音が聞こえるために、音を足らしめるための要素というのは、八つあります。その内の二つの要素はピッチとダイナミックス。ピッチというのは音の高・低、ダイナミックスは音量です、大きいか、無声か。では、指揮者二人に登場を願います。指揮者が見えるところでグループは二つに別れます。指揮者の合図で、左手が音量、ボリュームになります。右手がピッチです。

5- 人間は楽器を演奏するなり、音を出すのは好きですね。それはクリエティブな行為であるわけですが、音楽は歴史が始まる前から私たちと共にあるものですね。私が思うに、初めて奏でられた音楽というのは、人間の声によってだと思います。次のピースは声のみを使って音を出していきたいと思います。

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Inouye Daichi

"Conducting"

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6- The next piece is called «Nothing Lasts Forever». I was working with a group that was using graphic scores, and we were rehearsing opposite of Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. It was very moving to see some of the young children going into the hospital with quite serious illnesses. I was interested in the notion of time. One of the aspect of sound is duration, how long things last. I also saw in «The New Scientist» a picture of a chlorine bath, with a neutrino going through, very small particle, allegedly going backwards in time. I had these things going on in my head for some time, and eventually put these pieces together, thinking of children, thinking of time, and breath, and life and death, and all of these things, but I wanted it to be a kind of light piece «Nothing Lasts Forever». I’d like some volunteers to blow some bubbles please? Please keep the bubbles going, and blow them up high so that the musicians can see them. Musicians please start you interior count. Don’t be frightened to count very slowly. If I could ask the bubble blowers to begin blowing bubbles, please? Musicians interiorly count, and in your own time, begin!

7- The final piece in our program was devised by a German artist-musician, cello player, trombonist, label publisher, Günter Christmann. One of the things we talked about over the week is «authenticity» and being true to the work. One of the things we all do very well is to find contexts for things, and it is important to find a context not just for the work but for the history of the work, so I tried to introduce a little bit of that. These are the «Five Short Pieces» from Günter Christmann.

6- 次のピースは「ナッシング・ラストス・フォーエバー」、「永遠に続くものはない」というタイトルです。当時、グラ

フィックスコア（図形楽譜）をリハーサルしていたが、それをリハーサルやっている場所はロンドンの小児病院の向かいだったのです。そこの病院に、病を抱える子供達が居て、ということが当時、気にかかっていた。と同時に、時間というもの：音楽というのは、どれぐらい音を出すか。音が出ている時間の経過というのは、非常に重要ですね。時間という感覚。と同時に、科学雑誌の「ニューサイエンティスト」では、塩素の入った水素の、非常に細かい素粒子、ニュートリノが通る、というものを見て、これは時間に逆行して進むというのを見て、とても興味がいきました。こういったこと、色々、当時気にかかっていたことをこのピースに反映しました。子供のこと、時間のこと、呼吸、人生、死、といったものを軽い、というか重たくならない雰囲気で出したいと思ったのです。どのたか、観客の中も、シャボン玉を吹いてくださる方はいらっしゃったらお願いしたいと思います。シャボン玉は、上に向かって、高く吹いてください。すると皆さんが見えますので。演奏するみなさんは、自分のビートのカウントを、頭の中で始めてください。カウントはゆっくりでも大丈夫です。シャボン玉、スタート！自分のペースで！

7- 次のピースはギュンター・クリスマンによるものです。ドイツのヴィジュアルアーティストであり、トロンボン、チェロなど、そういった楽器を演奏する傍、彫刻家でもあり、楽曲の出版などもする、非常に才能のある方です。同時に、自分に忠実であり、自分の仕事に対して正直である、という点でも非常に優れた方だと、私は思います。今週、学生の皆さんにお話をしたのは、いろいろなミュージシャンがどのように歴史の中で、どういった役割を果たしてきたかといったことです。人間の歴史の中で、何らかの文脈の中で、その歴史の時間軸の中で系統だという話をしたい、そのような気持ちでいろいろな人を紹介してきました。では、ギュンター・クリスマンの「ファイブ・ショート・ピーシス」。

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"Nothing Lasts Forever"

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John Russell with Christophe Charles

C. … We were talking about repetition.

R. I think context is everything, It depends how you repeat something. If you listen to Thelonious Monk, he would play the same notes, but the phrases are slightly different when he plays them again. He is always responding to the moment. Even if you repeat something, you are still in the moment. It is just a question of keeping an open ear going on.

C. There are many materials that you can use, some with minimal variations. If you change your point of view, you have a huge array of possibilities.

R. Exactly.

C. It is perhaps a question of listening ability, and you might need some time to get to the point.

R. I think so. A simple musical way would be to talk about the blues scale. You can play the same notes over the fourth chord and the fifth chord, but the chords are different, and the scale of the blues changes in relation to that, the sound of the chords change in relation to the repeated blues scale. You can still play the same thing, but the rest of the circumstances are moving, and the way it relates to it is different. It depends on how you change your point of view. You get a different thing. And I also think of a larger level: at any bump of time you have material, but it is not fresh each time you pick up the instrument: you have your personal clichés. They disappear sometimes, and news ones come in, and then maybe after three or four years, some of the old ones come back again, and you think “I haven’t played that for ages!”. Constantly responding to the circumstances is the important point. The other thing is that, mathematically you could put in all possible va-riations of strings or frets or harmonics, but of course you can’t play them all, because physically your hand can’t do that. Some things fall into the fingers easier than others, and they become clichés in the sense that it is expedient to use that, it is easier to use that, than constantly sort of breaking your hand every time you want to play the

instrument. So there are certain things that sounds “guita-ristic”. Jazz guitar players like to copy saxophone players, but for me it is interesting to see what is guitaristic: fin-ding the nature of the instrument. Obviously that’s limi-ting in a way because the instrument itself is limited, but I also prefer working in the limitations. Advertising for the Moog synthesizer told us that with the synthesizer you can make “any sound”, so why was everybody sounding the same on it? It is the nature of the instrument, there are certain things you can, or can’t do.

C. And there are many kinds of guitars. Maybe they look the same, but when you take one, you can have many diffe-rent variations. And even with a same Telecaster, you have huge differences according to your way of playing.

R. Yes, everyone is different. And I think that’s why an ins-trument teaches you as well. You pick it up and you find yourself playing something that you have played before, and it seems to fit that instrument better somehow. It is not new every time, it can’t be, except that the circum-stances are different, so you can use the same material, but because of the different circumstances you will have different roles.

C. Cage was talking about intention, and getting rid of the intention. But then he realized that he needs also to go back to intention, in order to have everything: if you want to be open, you also have to be open to intention. So it is good to get rid of it, so you can go back to it - if necessary.

R. Yes, I think it is not a bad thing. It is like when I was get-ting everybody to play inside their own heads. The chief in the back of their head is slightly intransigeant, and in a way it is kind of moving the intention to improvise within the group. It is a way of finding some kind of distance. Everybody needs to switch off sometimes, going for a stroll, and just let things happen in a certain way, or day-dream, or something like that. My image of that is more like sitting on a horse and letting the reins drop, and let-ting the horse find its own way home. You’re playing with no intention, you’re still doing stuff, but not particularly looking for anything, you’re just fidgeting.

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C. I was thinking about how to react when you are playing music in a group of two, three, or four people. Two and three are different, a quartet is also different. With a quartet you can make different groups, like two vs two, or three vs one, there are several possible configurations. Sometimes you might want to keep distance.

R. Yes, as part of the decision, you’re making it every kind of nanosecond in a way. Sometimes you’II have a lens on a particular players in a trio. You’II be that having a lens of one of the other players. Sometimes you just hearing the three of you including your playing, as one collective organism. It is very rare that it comes together, that you get this thing, where every sonic parameter and every players musicality is observed at the same time. That can lead to this sort of transcendental feeling. I had that ha-ppen when I was at The Little Theatre Club, once during the performance of “Search and Reflect”. It was like “Wow! I can see the light!”. But at the time I was very poor, and maybe I hadn’t eaten much… Anyway there was a definite sense of ‘spacedoutedness’ or whatever. It was very stran-ge, because I was listening intensely.

C.A kind of enlightment?

R. Yes it can be that sort of feeling, I think, but I am not ma-king any big claims about it in a religious way at all. Maybe I forgot to breathe and I was hyperventilating, but this can have a distinct effect on consciousness. Music changes your consciousness. All in all, I think it’s a beneficial thing. My friend Libby Houston the poet - I quoted her about the golf ball during my lecture - said that the art sat like a magnifying mirror and it magnifies whatever you put in, so if you put in bad stuff, it will throw bad stuff back at you, ten times as much. If you’ve put in good stuff in, you will get the good stuff back ten times as much. It is nice to be nice, to put in good stuff. That’s one of the reasons l like improvising: it isn’t collective, it is a shared thing, and I love the fact that we share with the audience in that very direct way that the audience and the musicians are disco-vering this music at the same time it is happening. This is different from other musics, where the audience and the group can share a celebration of the music as they see it. You know I think in a slightly different way. We did some some pieces.

C. In a concert situation, are you also doing pieces where you define rules, like in “Search and Reflect”? Is it neces-sary for you to do that?

R. For me personally, I don’t find it necessary, but I think it helps to develop a group. You see football players running on the spot, but you don’t see them do that when there’s a match: that’s just training the muscles in the legs, to a certain extent. I see these workshop pieces as something which helps develop skills. I prefer not to play them as a piece or as part of a performance myself.

C. The main dish is totally free?

R. The main dish for me is totally free, yes. l’ve had that kind of problem before, when people were on a regular group, and we’d rehearse some of the workshop ideas, but they started wanting to do that on stage. As we are an improvi-sing group, we should improvise totally freely. That is just a way of getting a feel for the group. Well that’s actually my taste, but that doesn’t mean to say that other people can’t use those things and develop them, of course. That is just for my taste: I prefer playing totally free. When I was in my school days - teenager, as a rock musician, a school group thing - I spent a long time thinking: am I a compo-ser, or am I an improviser? I’d write a kind of tune to get the rest of the people in the group to play over that, and then play at The Little Theatre Club, with John Stevens, but I felt that I am an improviser. The only real pieces that l’ve written since my teen years was the “Bubble Piece”: “Nothing Lasts Forever”, and a twelve bar blues about Webern; I can’t remember where it is now… But generally speaking, I find that free improvising fits me, it suits me.

C. Were you involved in jazz groups?

R. No l’m not really a jazz player. When I was 11, I got my first guitar and I had a “A Tune a Day” book, and learned “Skip my Lou” - that was the first tune - and Tallis’s Canon, and so on and so forth, and simple chords…

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C. You talked about Eddie Lang.

R. That came later when I was 17 and working on a farm. I was coming into London. I was getting £8 a week as a farm laborer, and was paying Derek Bailey £4 a week for guitar lessons. He worked as a session musician in many ways, so I learnt conventional guitar technique more, as opposed to a blues-rock technique. From Derek I learnt chord voicing and things like that. He was a great teacher for conventional guitar playing, because he’s had that past experience playing in the entertainment industry, with the Russ Conway Trio, or backing Gracie Fields, or for “Opportunity Knocks” on TV, etc. That was great to spend a year learning conventional stuff, because I felt that it was about knowing more of the instrument, of the guitar neck. The earliest free playing actually came before that, with the rock group, because l’d seen “Kevin Ayers and the Whole World”, and I read a review about David Bedford playing the organ with a brick. I thought: “that sounds good”!

C. You mean a brick on the keyboard?

R. Yes on the keys. In school, we would practice with pia-nos, and I used to just hit the piano and make sounds - I couldn’t finger the notes of the chord because I wasn’t a piano player - and the headmaster caught me once doing that, instead of having my school lunch, and he said: “what are you doing, Russell?”, and I said: “I’m doing aleatory music, Sir!”. The first time I heard Sonny Sharrock was qui-te something: it sounded like he’s just letting his fingers fall on the strings. That’s actually how I played some of the solos in the rock group, by just letting my fingers fall on the strings, and making as much noise as possible, rea-lly. When you’re a teenager, that’s a very liberating thing to do! And then a bit later on, l’m not sure if it was Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock, who said that there were a lot of Fender Rhodes electric pianos, and everybody sounded the same. And he said: if you want to develop your own voice, then you should play acoustic piano, so you will develop your own style and not sound like everybody else. So I got rid of my electric guitar - which I swapped for £25 to buy a bicycle for Libby Houston son’s as a pre-sent - and I bought an Epiphone Zenith from a guy called Louis Gallo, who was a big proselytizer for the music of Eddie Lang. He’d use that guitar in pre-war dance bands

in London, and I started looking at some of Eddie Lang’s playing. It was different to the blues boxes and the kind of shapes that you get in, and it just gave you a different kind of approach to the guitar as an instrument. In a way, it was more pianistic, people say. It wasn’t like classical piano in that sense. It was a long move away from blues boxes, bar shapes and stuff. It was about playing a lot more of the instrument.

C. What about Black American free jazz? Ornette Coleman? Maybe that was not what you were aiming at?

R.No. I love Sonny Sharrock, and I liked the sound of it when I heard it, but it wasn’t my inspiration or influence particu-larly. My inspiration came more from the people around me, at the Theatre Club. Free jazz was a kind of enemy - not an enemy in the sense we didn’t like it, we just didn’t want to sound like that. We wanted to find out our own kind of sound, in the same way that the guys of the Afro-American tradition wanted to find their own sound.

C. Was it too lyrical?

R.It sounded a bit like Jazz. And we didn’t want to sound a bit like jazz, because it wasn’t our tradition.

C. You mean the phrasing?

R. The phrasing and the flat seventh, the flat third sort of things, wasn’t our tradition. It seemed kind of stealing somebody’s stuff. I love it, I love the blues, and I love jazz, but it’s not what we wanted to do.

C.Maybe because you have a slightly different DNA?

R.I think so (musically speaking). I remember talking to peo-ple who would say to me: “I’ll get onto free improvisation when l’ve learnt how to play like Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane”. You’re never gonna play like that. Nobody’s going to play like Charlie Parker, because you didn’t have the experience of jamming seven hours a night, seven nights a week in Kansas City, and you’re not

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that person. What people forget, is that people like Char-lie Parker are right at the cutting edge of their techniques. Parker was talking with Edgar Varèse about Stravinsky…He was at the edge…. Now if you learn the solos, you might get all the right notes in the right order, but it lacks the edge because it’s not that creativity of the moment. That creativity of the moment is being in the present. That’s the thing that makes you alive. In a way, I think there’s a kind of duty to do that. The responsibility is that everybody has their own musicality within them. And it’s all different. It’s almost your responsibility to find that, to share with other people. Don’t share a cheap copy.

C. However, you can find many Chinese, Korean or Japanese musicians who play Chopin or Debussy very well!

R. Yes, great players!

C.So that’s another approach I suppose.

R. I think to a certain extent that’s true.

C. Is that an education issue? For instance Indian music: the-re are very few people who play Indian music outside of India… but why don’t they?

R. That could have to do with reincarnation: you have to be reincarnated into a sitar playing family for seven genera-tions to be a true master…

C. We are not all aiming at becoming true masters…

R. Somebody once said to me that copying something is seen in the East as respecting something. So what’s co-pyright? royalties? I copy it because I think it’s the best. If you listen to the difference between Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould playing Goldberg Variations, I think Glenn Gould comes about 57 minutes and Rosalyn Tureck is about an hour and 20 minutes. That’s quite a difference in interpretation. Actually this morning I was thinking about Richard Barrett, and Brian Ferneyhough, and “New Com-plexity”. Even with notating all of those events so precise-

ly, it’s still an approximation of the reality. It’s almost like a score, some kind of mnemonic for remembering some-thing. The other thing is that each generation rediscovers History and see it in a slightly different way. You have the “authentic” baroque music movement, music played on instruments from the time, to get the right sound, or Mu-sic from the Age of Enlightenment, those kind of sounds. People from different generations re-discover things in different ways, for instance Shakespeare. There are peo-ple playing what’s called conventional jazz, but they are playing it in a fresh way. They’re not just turning it out, by the yard. Any music has that kind of spark of creativity about it. My particular position is to freely improvise. I get more of a spark from that, than trying to breathe life into something else.

C. But you are listening to many things, so there are proba-bly little bits from all what you’re listening to, which also come into play?

R.I think l’m a bit like a magpie. A little piece of this, a little piece of that… You are a jack of all trades, but master of none, except your own: what you do. I am a kind of “pic-ker up of considered trifles”, rather than “unconsidered trifles”. It ’s what you do at Grammar School: they told me to read a lot of books, just picking bits all the time. My eyes are not so good now, so my literature reading is not what it was, but I used to read a book a day about all sorts of subjects. The point is that you carry on learning throughout life, and it goes on and on and on. It’s about going forward, and you use your creativity to do that, rather than get nostalgic. Nostalgia can be an enemy for the creative process.

C. Is nostalgia one of your enemies?

R.It’s never like that anyway, it never was. The thing is to learn from the past to go forward, let the past propel you forward. But don’t you let it draw you back! I always look at the next corner. It is one of the reasons I like living in London, because it is such a sprawl of a city. You never know it all. You can walk down the street you’ve walked along a hundred times, but you just turn a corner and you find another street that you haven’t seen before. I like variations.

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C. But ideally, you would walk anywhere and you would find a street that you haven’t seen before.

R.Yes! I also like my creature comfort, shall we say, in the same way I have my own things on the guitar that I return to. l’m all for progress as long as I keep from changing everything! It is an important reference point as well. In that sense, tuning is important. I feel it’s quite nice if people tune for A440 for instance, even if you’re making sounds that aren’t in a temperate scale. My ears are used to that, so somehow you get a taste of that in the group. In the same way - we talked about Indian music - you get a drone, it is having a point where you can have a relationship to that point. What I like about the notion of going from what Derek Bailey calls “pantonal music”, as opposed to atonal music, or intervallic music, is that in the way that l’ve extended it to the idea of Information Theory, in terms of the eight variables (of tone), each one of those things can actually act as the drone or the tonal set, as a place to bounce from, so you can bounce off in all directions from each one of those elements. That makes me think about a Taiwanese artist called Li Yuan Chia, who died in 1994. he moved from China to Taiwan, then to Italy and London and then to Cumberland, near the Scottish border. He talked about “cosmic points”, and had these little points in his sculpture works, magnets actually, which can be seen as reference points. In a way I feel that sound elements with eight variables are a kind of start or beginning, or a reference point. It can come from everywhere really. That’s also one of the reasons I like to tune the guitar conventionally because l’ve got a referen-ce point to work from and to and against. If there wasn’t, things wouldn’t mean anything. I like to know what’s up and what’s down. There are a lot of things to talk about on tuning. Actually there are sounds you can use, ‘inaudible sounds’, to modulate sounds you can hear, so it’s another way of changing the changing nature of the sounds that you’re making in your head. If you listen to Evan Parker playing solo soprano saxophone, you’ve got loads of stuff going on with the instrument, then he’s got things ha-ppen inside your own ears from a different stance, quite extraordinary.

C. The tuning is also in relation to space I guess.

R. Yes, very much. That has also to do with depth. I am quite impressed with my television speaker. Maybe it has stereo speakers, but things can sound in the background and the foreground, and I guess that what they do is that the foreground stuff is a bit louder with less reverb, or less echo. The background stuff is a bit quieter, with a bit more reverb, so it sounds like it’s coming from further away in a room. I think that’s how they get depth, from one speaker. Depth is one of the things that’s difficult to reproduce on acoustic instruments. Obviously pitch, tempo, duration, location… again that depends on the instrument: if you’ve got a saxophone, you can point it in different ways, whereas a guitar is amplified by the speakers which are pointing just straight out. Some of these things are easier to manipulate than others. Another thing is that’s impor-tant to have that ability to turn on a sixpence, to change very fast. One of the problems with machine music is that the machine takes time to cool down, somehow. You play an event on the machine, but it continues, not cutting off straight away. I did think, years ago when I was playing the electric guitar the first time round, of having an “off switch”. So you just cut off the sound immediately, there is no dying away at all. A very simple effect.

C. There are now what they call “kill switch” on some guitars.

R.I thought of that in 1974, having such a “kill switch”, which kills something and put something else back in, totally different.

C. Kosugi Takehisa talked about “dismantling the ego”, and I asked him how he does it. He said he had first an interest in environmental sounds, and thus used “Musique con-crète” techniques, like collage on audio tape. But beyond that, he wanted to find out how to “absorb”, or “swallow” the environment. From there he was able to “get rid of himself”. Kosugi had founded the “Group Ongaku” in 1958, then Tone Yasunao joined, probably in 1960, and they were both interested in jazz, but Tone says he didn’t want to answer to other musicians. He prefers to listen, and then do something else, on purpose, that is, the other way around, and not to try to have a conversation. John Cage was also against that conversation idea in music. Do you have this kind of experience? Like being in the center of a swirl? How does what’s coming from outside go to the brain? And how does the interaction happen?

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R. It is a little like getting to the zone. That doesn’t always ha-ppen. Sometimes it takes a while after you start playing, when you suddenly find you’re there, but ideally of course it’s nice to be open and receptive to things before you sit down. That’s why l like playing to an audience much more than I like playing at home, really. There’s some kind of thing that happens on stage. You’re there for the music, it’s not you in some ways. Actors talk about “Doctor Theatre”, you see an aged frail actor in the wings, and then when they come on they are suddenly alive. There’s a kind of thing that I find in live performances: on the one hand it wakes me up, but on the other hand makes me forget completely about myself, because I am now doing this stuff. That kind of helps. There’s another thing: music can be the most important thing in your life, but it’s only music, nobody’s going to die from it. It’s not like making bombs and guns. You could have that kind of confidence, and just say: I’ll go where the music takes me. What you are doing is that you’re trying to say to the music what do you want, rather than saying: l’m going to make you do this. It’s a common mistake from experienced musicians to think that they have to make the music do something.

C.In Kosugi’s words: “you are being played by the music”.

R. Exactly, yes.

C. Kosugi is talking about the Indian idea of “Manodharma”. He says: “Usually, “my” music is the music that I plays by myself. “Manodharma” implies that the Ego exists as a cos-mic existence beyond oneself, and a musician becomes a receiver that catches that cosmic existence. Improvisation reflects changes in time”… “Music comes out through the connections between the immediate environment and what transcends the ego. It is not “my” music but a recei-ver that catches some presence in the universe, like a ra-dio or a television. In short, it a performance is something that catches the radio waves so that you absorb it.” I guess that you have to try to go over there, “beyond oneself”…

R. Yes, and I think what you do is you use the tools that you have, as an individual, hence everybody has their own musicality which begins to develop in the womb, or may-be it develops before the womb, and that particular piece of musicality chooses fallopian tubes to come down, or

come out? - I don’t know about the larger philosophi-cal-cosmological concepts there. But certainly everybody has their own musicality, and it’s part of a bigger musical whole. For me, it goes beyond sound. For instance I used to think about impossible music, that you could not actually hear. For instance if you scream into a bucket of water, it is a silent scream, then you throw the bucket of water across the road. When the water hits the floor and splashes into thousands of pieces, the scream then comes out, splashing into thousands of pieces. But of course that’s a physical impossibility. The concept is still a viable concept, even though it is an impossible thing. So it ’s quite nice to play with impossible ideas as well. It’s all part and parcel of this strange world that we never really fully grasp, in the same way that we never completely learn to play an instrument. Everybody does it differently.

(June 14, 2019)

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John Russell Guest Professor at Musashino Art University2019 June 10 - 15

Organization: Christophe CharlesDepartment of Imaging Arts and Scienceshttp://eizou.musabi.ac.jp/

Book Design: Christophe Charles, Chiba GakuTranslation: Matsushita Yumi, Christophe Charles

Photography: Christophe CharlesZhang FeiZhao Zhenrong

Filming and Editing: Yu ShidaZhang FeiZhao Zhenrong

English Transcription:Li WanyuLi ZihuaLyu AnqiLyu KeLisa Woite

Data of the video/audio recordings of the lecture, workshops and concerts is included in a 16GB SD card, attached to the booklet.

Supported by: Musashino Art University

Printed by: GRAPHIC Corporation, Tokyo

Publication Date: April 2020

ジョン・ラッセル 武蔵野美術大学訪問教授2019 年 6 月 10 日〜 15 日

企画： クリストフ・シャルル武蔵野美術大学 映像学科 http://eizou.musabi.ac.jp/

編集・ブックデザイン：クリストフ・シャルル、千葉 岳通訳・翻訳：松下 由美、クリストフ・シャルル

写真：クリストフ・シャルル張 飛赵 正蓉

映像撮影・編集：于 是達張 飛赵 正蓉 日本語文字起こし：井上 大地于 是達関 海菊地 良太張 飛

写真・ビデオ・オーディオによる記録データはこのブックレットに付属している16GB の SD カードに収められている。

主催：武蔵野美術大学

印刷所：株式会社グラフィック

発行：2020 年 4 月

John Russell Lecture, Workshops and Concerts at M

usashino Art University, 2019