Physical Counterpoint

Daniel Barbiero
December 2015

Physical Counterpoint: Reflections on Sound & Movement in Duet

The arts aspire, if not to complement each other, at least to lend one another new energies.

– Charles Baudelaire

Ken Manheimer, Sarah K. Schaffer & Erica Hagen
of the Nancy Havlik Dance Company, photograph by  Brian Harris

One of the more fruitful areas of improvisational exploration lies at the intersection of music and dance. These two very different artistic media—the one concerned with physical movement in space, and the other with sonic movement in time—relate to each other in ways that transcend the conventions of each while at the same time conserving and converting them into a language legible by the other. We can trace some of the complexities of this mutually constitutive relationship through the roles played by line and mass in the meeting of sound and movement—in a duet.

Because it reduces the music and dance partnership to its absolute minimum, the duet illustrates most clearly the dynamic within each and between both. When the interaction of music and dance is reduced to one participant from each side, each is thrown back onto its own resources as mediated by the other and by the other alone, in a particularly intimate kind of counterpoint.  Unless the two participants choose the course of running parallel to each other with no points of contact—certainly a legitimate strategy, as Cage’s work with the Cunningham group demonstrated—each will have to shape his or her part in attunement with the other, necessarily reaching across to what is specific to the other’s discipline in the process.

Two Duets

In a performance this past spring I played double bass in a mostly improvised duet with dancer Ken Manheimer. The piece, which Ken composed, was structured as a brief solo for one—to be decided by silent mutual consent ad lib. at the moment of performance–followed by an equally brief solo for the other, followed by an improvisation for both together. Although possibly not planned that way, the solo-solo-duet structure of the piece helped to establish a strong sense of linear counterpoint between us. In its most basic sense counterpoint calls for each part or participant to play a line independent of but related to that of the other; by starting as a solo, each us could lay the foundation for his own independent line, to be continued in relation to the other’s line once the duet got underway. This laid the groundwork for what I believe was an essentially linear relationship between our parts, one expressed in a complementarity of phrasing. Silences—or pauses, more generally–played a significant role in the crafting of individual phrases and in setting up points of intersection and divergence between them. Because the performance took place on an open stage in an essentially empty surrounding space, our individual lines had no point of reference but each other.

An excerpt of a duet by double bassist Adriano Orrù and dancer Enrica Spada, performed in Cagliari in June, exemplifies a variation on the counterpoint of sound and movement. Rather than being rooted in an interlinear relationship, as was my duet with Ken, this one appears to be based on a relationship of field to line. The bass sets out a kind of ground drawing on harmonics, deeply bowed open strings, spiccato bowing and other figures that form a continuo over which Spada’s movement is set. Spada’s line is marked with a clarity partly defined by the act of descending stairs, which she accomplishes with great attention paid to the play of parallels and perpendiculars as delineated by her legs, arms and torso. This play of line and angle occurs over the foundation provided by Orrù’s sound, which serves as a virtual plane across which the movement takes place.

The Hybrid Line

Both of the performances described above turn on an expansive, multi-modal counterpoint. In a musical duet of any kind, counterpoint is a ready to hand, basic formal strategy. Two instruments can be brought into relationship with each other through the weaving of two independent, complementary lines running parallel or counter to each other. But as the above performances show, a musical instrument playing a line in counterpoint to movement is a different thing from counterpointing another instrument. Improvisation now takes place across artistic media or, to put it more generally, modalities of expressive action. The notion of line expands beyond the domain of the melodic or rhythmic line to encompass any sequence of pitches, sounds, gestures, and rests, each with its given duration in time or extension in space. The line in effect is a cross-modal hybrid incorporating sound, silence, physical movement and non-movement. When this happens, the formal components involved in one modality reach out beyond it to make contact with the other.

Consider the role of the rest in phrasing. When improvising counterpoint with another musician, one player will often read the rests marking the other’s phrases—the lacunae opening up in the sequence of notes through which the phrase unfolds—as silences to be filled in order to complete the phrase or to complement it through the development of an independent yet related phrase. As a formal quality, silence is essentially temporal, a gap in the flow of time as the latter is embodied in a sequence of sounds. But when counterpoint takes place between sound and movement, the lacunae opening up in the musical phrase are read not as simply as silences soliciting sound but rather as openings to action. It is precisely by reaching out across modalities—from sound to physical movement—that silences lose their character as exclusively—or even predominantly—concerned with sound and instead take on the more general nature of stillness. Even while remaining quantitatively constant, they undergo a qualitative change.

Texture (from Surface to Mass)

If the horizontal dimension of counterpoint is to be found in the line, the vertical dimension consists in texture, or the overall, qualitative aspect of the piece. As with line, the multimodal meeting of movement and sound has implications for the weaving of texture. In each of these performances the sonic texture—the tissue of pitches, harmonics, strikes and other sounds coming from the double bass—moves both with and against the physical texture, which is to say the density, intensity, velocity and so forth of the dancer’s movements.

With the addition of dance into the formal equation, texture isn’t just a matter of surface changes unfolding in time but instead becomes something comporting itself in a three-dimensional space. When counterpoint includes a dancer’s projections and extensions in space, textural density becomes a matter of thickness of depth as well as density of surface. Similarly, textural saturation—the intensity of the overall sound—opens up to include the intensity of movement and of the dancer’s confrontation with the surrounding space. Under these conditions texture is transformed from a quality of surface to a quality of mass.

Spatialization of Sound

Given the expansion of texture from surface to mass, the musical half of the duet becomes spatialized in an aesthetically significant way. Sound already possesses a spatial dimension—it always comes from a particular place. Varese, in noticing this phenomenon, evocatively described it as a kind of sending forth. In a purely musical work this spatial dimension of sound tends to elude notice unless deliberate attention is called to it as when, for example, a score or performance calls for instruments to be positioned at distances from each other within the performance space. In the context of dance, with its focus on physical forms distributed in space, the spatial location of the sound naturally emerges as an aesthetic element in its own right—as a formal component of the overall performance. In tandem with awareness of the dancer’s movements we become aware of the sound source as being here and not there, of the sound as projecting itself along a certain spatial path analogous to the dancer’s path through the space.
This spatialization of sound can be exploited in ways that have a bearing on the contrapuntal relationship between dancer and musician. Consider Orrù’s choice of playing from a stationary point at the top of the stairs that Spada dances down. His projection of sound from that steady point, combined with his choice of tones and articulations, gives his line a spatially stable, planar quality in relation to the moving body of the dancer, which we can imagine as a now curving, now angular object tracing a path in three dimensions across a plane. In my duet with Ken I made a similar decision to remain stationary—certainly not a difficult choice when one is playing an instrument that size—and to project sound along a linear vector as a ray would project from the center of a circle. In fact as our duet developed it defined the space as a section of a kind of imaginary sphere, with the endpin of the bass at the center, the sound projecting outward from it like a radius, and Ken’s movements tracing arcs along the surface.

Gesture as Movement

The consideration of texture from a three dimensional point of view not only means that sound becomes something spatial as well as temporal, but that the visual element of the music—the sight of the physical gestures producing the sounds–will enter into the overall weave of the performance as well. Playing an instrument becomes, in its own way, a form of movement, a physical counterpoint to the dancer’s movement. This will be true of any instrument, but the double bass is particularly exemplary in this regard. The instrument’s size and scale require large gestures to produce a sound, even a subtle or quiet sound. (That the instrument itself has a human-sized physical presence would seem to make it a quasi-independent participant in the performance.) The motions of Ken’s arms, hands, head, legs and torso imitate, oppose, confront or evade the movements of my hands, arms, and bow as I finger, strike, pluck or draw the bow across the strings. Spada’s movements set up a similarly complex relationship to Orrù’s gestures, developing slowly and in increments while Orrù bows with alternating slow and rapid rhythms, accelerating as the bow rises and falls with greater sweep.

A Dialectic of Within & Without

As I hope the descriptions above demonstrate, the relationship between the two halves of these duets is a multi-faceted one. I want to suggest that its nature is mutually constitutive, that is, that each half shapes the other at a fundamental, formative level. But it does so in a paradoxical manner. This paradox consists in the ability of each to absorb and assimilate the influence of the other without losing its own identity. Thus the performance of each participant molds and indeed creates that of the other in a sense, while each at the same time conserves the qualities peculiar to it as a distinctive medium. Sound and movement interweave and yet at the same time each remains within its own modality, maintaining itself as a semi-independent aesthetic set of events defined by its own inherent qualities and yet whose shape is profoundly influenced—it wouldn’t be too much to say “formed”—by the activity taking place in the other modality. The relationship between sound and movement in these duets, in other words, is both internal and external all at once; it is a kind of ongoing dialectic of within and without.

Actions taking place internal to one modality—the crafting of a pitch sequence on the one hand, or the improvisation of a series of dance phrases on the other—will affect corresponding actions internal to the other modality. To this extent, the relationship is an internal one. From my personal experience, I know that the speed and angle at which a dancer manipulates an arm or pivots at the waist, for example, will have an effect on the factors internal to the shaping of the phrase I create contemporary to that movement, molding its tempo, the duration of individual pitches or rests, and its expressive dynamics. All of these musical variables—tempo, duration, dynamics—are present to me as possibilities, but it is the specific action of the dancer, drawn from his or her own set of possibilities, that triggers the choices that convert these possibilities into the sounds that are actualized in the way that they are in the concrete situation. When Ken’s choices enter into my own sphere of awareness, the phrases, sounds, rests and so on that I play are in effect a way of making heard Ken’s movements and stillnesses as they are for me at that moment, entering into and influencing the logic of my own line. Because the possibility of making a specific musical choice is internal to the development of the performance, any factor that affects that choice is related to the development of the performance internally.

And yet at the same time, the variables or parameters specific to one of the disciplines alone will have a bearing on each other independent of any influence coming from the other discipline. Necessarily, any given phrase or gesture is informed by the conventions or formal constraints specific to the particular modality we’re working within. What I play will be governed by factors specific to my instrument and to the practical knowledge I have of how to play it. For example, the musical phrase’s pitches, dynamics, timbres, and rhythms are mutually affecting, providing it with an internal logic that projects it forward. Through a kind of dialectical turn, the mutual influence of purely musical parameters defines what is internal to the musical phrase and redefines the relationship to the dancer’s actions as an external one. Relative to the purely internal relationships of musical parameters to each other, the dancer’s movements are disclosed as necessarily external—they inhabit a different modality, defined by different parameters and a formal vocabulary of its own. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of the variables at play within the dancer’s unfolding performance. They too define the relationship of the movement to the sound as necessarily an external one.

It’s important to point out that this analysis is something that comes after the fact of participation. As participants, our experience of the duet consists in a more immediate, implicit grasp of the situation. Our awareness of the internal relationship between our actions and those of our partner just is our awareness of our partner’s actions as they impinge our own; our awareness that the relationship to our partner is an external one just is the sense that, e.g., musical phrases “play themselves” according to their own internal logic.

Both/And

The relationship between sound and movement may be an external one, but as their interactions show, the boundary between them is permeable. The existential situation—the concrete reality—is of symbiosis even if its analysis is unavoidably expressed in the apparently conflicting language of interiority and exteriority. But any such conflict is just that—apparent. I want to suggest that to describe the relationship between movement and sound in these duets as external or internal is to name two aspects of a single phenomenon roughly analogous to describing the planet Venus as alternately “the morning star” and “the evening star.” Both descriptions indicate the same object, but under different aspects given different frames of reference. So I would argue is the case with describing the relationship between disciplines in cross-disciplinary work as either external or internal. It is in fact a both/and proposition in which each component is out there in the other, is constituted as much by the other as by its own techniques, conventions and sensibilities.

One final metaphor. Imagine the interaction between dance and sound as taking place across a kind of tension field, with movement and sound pushing and pulling at each other, exchanging energies in precisely the complementary way that Baudelaire describes in the epigraph above.